Poetry

Last day for the Rivera mural; we can see a narrow section from over the near rail. Against a ribbon of hills and low sky one man swings a hammer, another an axe.

He tells me the first dead body 
he ever saw was not 
in a box, but 
hanging from a tree. Seventeen,

On the train to the museum, at the Embarcadero stop with my father, I start to get 
emotional. Tender as ever, having told a woman who loves me I cannot, or can no 
longer, love her.

In the occupied West Bank 
two doctors enter a prison:

one the jailer, one the jailed. 
The jailer walks in. His colleague

Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward...

A friend from one of those Shithole places tells me 
she’s worried. Am I sick? Depressed? I’ve lost 
my mischievous smile. She’s listened to my laments: 

I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch 
by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day 
to pick from the mud that Jack Russell 
with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.

When I was my dad’s magic helper, disappear 
was only a verb: He’d make a penny 
disappear—

Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown—
different than locking a door,
or the shutdown we invented at the start
of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks
swept quickly between us, a sign
designed especially for school.

The specific affliction of her curse? Doomed to be cared for 
only by those she holds in complete and utter contempt.