Four Poems

STREET SONNET (GHOST BIKE)

A ghost bike display slows me down for a sec
I think Forgive Me but I can’t bear to learn your name
hardly do I remember all the others
we used to spend all night laughing
on a couch at the end of this street
and in a dream there an alien in the kitchen
spoke to me and handed me a drink
I shake myself, the dream is over, a woman with blue lips
tries to smile walking by, earning a D
bright sunlight in November is a tonic
or something but I choose the side in the shade
and walk for miles and recognize a truck
from hours before, the guy in the cab and I lock eyes
but everything else, the whole world, is in turmoil

THE CLOVER LIKE LITTLE PARASOLS

Thinking strategically, thinking like Machiavelli would think about a family group chat, and then interrupted by the moon obviously in love with some lesser light in the southwest, south-south west actually, about 50 degrees above the horizon. The orbits of the planets are slicing up the sky. Suddenly the green of spring is everywhere. In the dark the clover looks like little parasols dropped by the thousands in a panic, because something horrible was coming, is it me?

LATE WINTER LIGHT

Sometimes I don’t know why I come here
I said, looking at a headstone
on which reposed a bear
made of plastic, and very small.
I put my hand over my heart
to hold something in or something.
And she said Oh but it’s sweet
to see the generations come together.
The winter light was like a blade
leveled at us by a brigand.
I held in front of me a leaf
that was half red and half
green, it was my only defense.
The light came in so low behind the trees
we had to stoop to admire it
the sharp bloody blade
of winter light

THE OSPREY

If you have spent a lot of time with the old books, like I have, then you will know there is no way to truthfully represent the voice of a bird in writing. That is what I am sitting here knowing, in the long late afternoon light on the Long Island Sound. An osprey overhead is whining about something. I lived for 50 years without ever noticing an osprey, now every time I see one my soul claps, like a little kid who’s just been told you have something for them. The wind and the tide are working together to bend some white poles in the water. Birds are landing on rocks and saying “yeah!”