Category: Poetry

– dedicated to Larry Fagan

If I find
your bones, one day,
caressed by time
and cradled
by your children’s
handprints,
I will know
them for the laughter of others
reverberating within.

With words
still unknown,
I will whisper
my admiration,
my worship
and my sorrow
into their hollow.… ...continue reading

We drive this turnpike across the length
of Pennsylvania for the hundredth time, as I
look through the smudged
windshield where my footprints are seen
when the light allows.

The highway is a barrier,
the laundry behind it waves in the sun—
a dimple on the day’s face. 

Things I can’t see: evaporation—the exit—
the floating up; the invisible water christens
itself into cloud, chanting:
I am one of you now
I am one of the heavy places that hold it all together
until I can’t…

There is the welcoming, dry earth; the ill-timed
clothes, pinned up; a summation
of someone’s life, up against the interstate.

We are viewers perched in front of the exhibition,

there are people standing against
large, red trucks—making O’s with their mouths
for cigarettes, before they blink past;

And then more laundry, hard with that sun-tiredness,
but dotted with the dark spots of the moment above.… ...continue reading

Rambling through the brown hills and
rumpled ridges from the observatory

that reminded me every element in
my body (carbon, calcium, nitrogen,

hydrogen, phosphorus, and the like)
came from an ancient star—but

all I can think about are swaths of
star-drenched redwoods, stippled starfish,

all the star-crossed lovers in the world who
shoot past each other, just out of reach.

In these moments after the molten sun
has sunk under the Pacific, a raw wind

whipping through the ribs of the Jeep and
my friend’s bare shoulder leaning into

my own tank-topped chest, I gaze up,
past the slender palms and power lines

to the glimmering specks in the dark
purple ocean of the sky, and consider

how the chemicals were put to better use.

– Ben Groner III… ...continue reading

Linger awhile . . . so fair thou art.
–Goethe, Faust

the little honorary pallbearers
place their boutonnieres
on the casket before it is lowered,
but for once I am not thinking
about death or about the woman
I knew well long ago, nor—
when people I haven’t seen
for decades hug me as if
just last night we were swapping
stories around someone’s back-
yard fire pit—nor am I, in this
moment, obsessing about
the passage of time, caught
up instead, as it comes over
the slight rise, weaving through
the headstones, silk roses, teddy
bears, tiny American flags,
the guy in a straw hat throwing
wilted flowersinto the back
of a pickup truck, struck
by the sound of someone else’s
bagpipe procession, the wind
taking some notes, softening
the edges of others so that
one could almost believe
in some other land there, foreign
but familiar, just over the hill,
but fornow it’s enough to be here
in this moment, the one in which
my granddaughter kisses my wet
cheek, reminding me of nothing else,
carrying with it no dramatic irony,
no conceit, just a moment
like so many, these days,
I might wish to let linger.… ...continue reading

For a week, the rose lived. Nightly, I brushed my nose against petals, preferring you. This is what I know: when a rose begins to die it gives up its color. At the edges, hardness and darkness take shape. Inside, blushing red petals cling to each other. This is a final intimacy, a softness enduring.

*

I know because I pulled at the petals till I got to the core, and I held the petals against my outstretched palm, fascinated by the natural bends, the blends of red—I don’t want our love to take on these darker shades. I want us as the last two petals on the stem. I remember Vermont and Italy and the miles in between; my belly without your hand; your chest without my head.… ...continue reading

It starts like threading yarn in a needle threading the vein
turning red pulling vocal cord blood and muscle

the things that grow in you like algae
blooming on a lake as blue as agate or turquoise—

do you want to be that lake? Maybe the granite beneath
it? The pull of iron the streams turning to rust?

You become flotsam on the shore:
driftwood pine needles blush herb and sunrise gore… ...continue reading

I wrap them like fine china in layers
of old newspapers and bubble wrap
andstill I know that the moving man

will drop the box or hit a pothole
on that bad stretch of road heading
out of town and something will crack.

All spring I have watched song
sparrows readying their nest in the rotting
crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs

and leaves and feathers, lacing it up
withstring pulled from the canvas
deck chairs, only to have the arborist… ...continue reading