Poetry

He is in the open laying something softer down.
Leaves as tokens weigh the ground
And twigs as sextants pull the low sun.

Glancing out from our corner table
across the assisted living facility’s
cafeteria, my mother-in-law
Shirley says, “Why, there are no men here!”

So little darkness in the darkness here.
Each leaf a mirror of moonlight, incomparable.
The Japanese maple spooncupped in gold

 A man I know hews space

from trees. Hauls himself up there, days,

Late May, 1754: George Washington watches
as one of his confederates, the Iroquois warrior
Half-King, reaches down to the corpse
of a freshly slain French ensign,

I can imagine you on it. The museum placard
declares it able fit for dozens
with a keel spine longer than these other boats

Brioche. Barouche. And one of them you can still buy, by the dozen,
at the sweets stall in the weekend farmers market; the other
hasn’t been seen in a century (although they tend
to blend, to be conjoined twins, in my mind).

The Analects declare it is best
To withdraw from one’s generation.
Next, to withdraw to another land.

Give us an incisor, and we’ll rationally conjecture
an entire prehistoric head, to the glint
in its eyes and in the light along its scaled skin
—but first, we need that tooth, that seed