Sunday, September 27, 2015

Belle Isle and After

I showed how I put whiskey
into water to drink it without chasing.
Then they got it, to them the
Amber evening water took like moose to a bog.

The lichen was a pillow just as
the first winded fawn took to laying,
and so this is how I become a man--
once I'm needed, I'm made so.

. . .

Last night we finished off our whiskey
and pan-seared two lakers and a coho.
A hearty fish meal, so wisely all of
the whiskey drank on empty stomachs first.

We stood on the rock and moss outcropping
with arching down and away to the Lake
on all our sides but forward where we took
pictures and heavy fog settled among the other islands.

. . .

Came into the docks of Rock Harbor on a long
raining and chilled August day to set
across the channel to the big Island, rain
and whitecaps coming across steady as oak root.

For dress that rain-soaked, hard-paddling day:
polypropylene sock liners, costco woolies,
standard briefs and gray disintegrating jeans,
chaco belt, white long-sleeve top, rain jacket,

plastic bags and garbage bags and my keen water shoes
and I stayed driest and settled just for that.

Fortune/Fortuna I

Fortune/Fortuna

The peddler holds his eyes over the handle
bars and focuses on the street's cracks as far
down the way he can possibly manage

Tricks are the snap in his ear--
the very tricky leaves breaking beneath him
and his two smooth tires as the road
leads him far away from his home

Firepits he smelled last night still
pour out the odor of burned wood,
charred tree's flesh and charcoal and ash
like the mind of an alchemist unbent

Categories rip by his ears like street signs
and parked cars: admissible evidence;
Americanized cuisines; variations in
maple teeth; disrupted comedy routines.

Poultry; Vices; amateur athletics;
the list could go on as long as his
legs churn the pedals. The road has
begun to pitch down, quite slightly,
quietly and with a slightness all its own.



About Me

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life. -Goethe