Poetry

What’s a song without measure,
Or a verse without meter,
Company without pleasure,

Picasso the matelot, his Colt cocked,
Amiably inert in the photo
From Houston’s museum studio,

A woman
downwind from Nagasaki now dying
is forced to decide

The last time you were beside me
it was April.
I knew it was over

In flight: bird, arrow, grief.
Static: a red chair
waiting for someone in a patch of sun

Tonight I walk out into winter’s fingers
stepping from one stone

Waiting in a lofty hotel lobby
honeycombed with entrances and exits,
feeling weak, I find a corner, lean

One of the first times I saw
My cousin’s son he was a kid wearing
A baggy Canadian hockey jersey

Yes, there were “close-ups.” In a marriage like theirs,
there were many, and each was easy to find
(her lovely face, her smiles, her pensive stares)