Poetry

His face coming briefly into view

As the crowd pushes

Toward the subway entrance.

In its frame of light it faintly glows,
like a projection screen […]

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spirit
with a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,
and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.

The shadows creep across the lawn

In the silence of the afternoon.

A tiny wood raft was afloat
on the cold gray sea
of the cellar floor […]

The trick was breathing in, you claimed, as if that was all they gathered to watch as you milked the crowd in your matador sash, rum-slurring some speech no one could hear above the river’s thunder.

I can barely remember your face

After more than sixty years.

When we reached Genoa, and the sea did not
open, and we were offered homes or exile,
there was little choice.

Crossing the Iowa prairies, Dvorak found in the waving grasses, in the sway & whorl of foxtail that let loose a rasping he loved, sorrow he never explained.