Four Poems

April Song

...........after James Schuyler

I was about to go shopping
and a thunderstorm warning
blared from my phone.
Simon screamed all day, even after
we played with the catnip
fishing lure. I tied the rubber
tree plant to a bamboo stick I bought to straighten it.
It’s worse now, on the verge
of toppling over. Southern exposure.
I’m ignoring my inbox
except for the email to Diana
I started last summer.
God willing, the Honeycrisp
apples are as big as softballs.

First Recess

September 1971, an early-fall morning,
the sun hanging low, forcing me to squint
as I looked up and saw a passenger jet
approaching—too close—making its final
descent toward Erie International Airport
(named so because it operated a few
flights to Toronto every day). Its low-
altitude trajectory, piercing rumble
mesmerized me, the plane so close I felt
I’d be speared in the chest by its nose cone
if I dared stand up from my swing, which I
needn’t have worried about, since I was
frozen to the spot, shocked into paralysis,
convinced the unbearable noise would
burst my eardrums, leave me deaf as my
mother the rest of my life. I was about to be
swallowed up into that flying behemoth,
sucked right into the fuselage underbelly
(gorgeous, horrifying, its sunshine-silver glint
shrieking overhead). The jet flying so close
to my swing I was doomed to be vaporized
by the roar, disappear into pure sound,
vanish from this world so cleanly I’d leave
no evidence of myself behind on that crisp,
bright morning alone on the Tracy Elementary
playground. My first kindergarten recess,
my first experience with what I’d later learn
to call “the sublime”—a groundless,
almost dissociative feeling of awe, terror
in the presence of something so vast that,
as Shelley describes it, you’re dwarfed by
nature’s “harmonious madness,” by a sensory
overload of “unremitting interchange /
With the clear universe of things around”—
but that, on this first playground recess of my
childhood, also felt like cosmic punishment
for having turned my back on the soothing,
mundane routines of day-to-day life,
abandoning the rituals and habits that infused
my days with ongoing ordinariness in order to,
as if I had a say, start going to school every day.






In the Dark

First crush, Tracy Elementary School, 1973. Linda sat in front of me, second grade. I pulled her hair every day so she’d turn around and I could watch her laugh. Linda, who, on an autumn school night that same year, saw me walking past her home and called out my name from her bedroom window. I’d been lost in K-Mart, separated from my mother and Aunt Helen, the two of them absently drifting away from Kitchen Appliances, leaving me behind, transfixed by the blenders—all those rectangular buttons. After looking everywhere in the store, I realized I was hopelessly lost and decided to leave K-Mart, walk home alone. For the first mile, a busy four-lane thoroughfare, I stuck out my thumb, imitating the bedraggled hippies I’d seen at the side of the road with their tattered knapsacks. I was six and had no idea I was “hitchhiking.” That one car could’ve changed my life forever or even ended it. I didn’t know what it was, assumed the longhairs with thumbs in the air were pointing out for passing cars the correct direction they should be heading. What a thrill to hear my name in the dark, coming from Linda’s mouth, as I made my way home.

A Roll of the Metaphor Dice

I woke this morning
to stubborn scratches in
the walls, a family
of robins building a
nest in my dryer
duct. High-speed bird-
hearts chipping away, making
themselves a home inside
the bricks of my
home. I worried they 
might peck their way
into my apartment—right
through the washer/dryer
—or maybe the next
time I did laundry,
I’d fry them with
the fast-dry cycle.
What comes from keeping
my bird-heart under
wraps, a collectible admired
from afar and protected
by molded plastic and
tacked to the wall.
My heart was once
a reluctant brand-new
toy, a retro lunchbox
on a bookshelf surrounded
by Pez dispensers and
anime figures. A tin
suitcase museum packed with
sarcastic words I can’t
defend anymore. I know
the heart has no
use for talk. It
forgets, until I make 
too much dinner, that
I’m no longer cooking
for two. My first
household alone in a
decade, I trip over 
half-empty U-Haul
boxes and flick light
switches that aren’t there.
Twilight makes me nervous.
I wake surprised by
cool, undisturbed space next
to me in bed.
My heart is a
nest of bricks that
birds fly away from.