July 2009

 
No one who passed
through the ruins
liked it much except
for small moments like
Jean arriving on Friday nights
– boots shrugging back
the snow – to cut
holes in the shadows,
easy laughter, nothing asked,
a candle in the room
and hands that
made the ruins glitter.
Everyone in the ruins was
a fugitive from something
arriving from all directions
and for all reasons
    none of them gentle
cops and cries and alimony
or just no strength to run any farther.
I lived there a year in the
sweat and noise and cracked plaster
dog shit on the walkway
and the Andersons
slapping each other
for hours so they could make
fifteen minutes of exhausted love
in the next apartment,
a year with a pen and notebook,
long streaky nights of
wine bottles, freshly dead,
dope smoke in the stairwells
and motorcyles skidding
across scattered dreams.
I remember
the mechanics in 32,
a pensioner with a scarf
and the silent hooker in 36,
my door forever creaking
and the sun forever sinking
through filmy windows,
Jean the only sprig of spring,
big heart, good eyes,
the two of us
in a sleeping bag
and Dylan, always Dylan,
Forever Young, Idiot Wind.

© 1974-2009

All spring
and half the hazy summer
the old man tried
with every fly and
form of bait he knew
to hook the big trout
from the pool below the bridge,
the slyest trout he’d stalked
in all his years of fishing.
Outwitted
cast after cast
at dawn, at dusk and
in the long afternoon
he was
     unprepared
when the big fish, who’d
never erred before, left
a thousand hooks untouched,
struck and fought with
lunging savagry
on a placid August day.
Startled, the old man,
caught his spinning reel
and yanked, embedding the
already driven barb,
and the big trout
leapt and thrashed
at the end of the line.
It was over in minutes
and in the silence
the old man held his prize,
saw the proud head
and long sleek body, the
magnificent fins and tail,
limp now, blood edging from
the glistening gills,
eyes glazed and dead.
The ripples were gone
and the pool was still
when the old man
put the catch in his basket and
reeled in his line and left.
He gave it to Ned
who liked trout and caught
less than he, and
then went home to
his silent house where
he put his rod in the back closet,
his tackle box on the back shelf
and cleaned his rifle.

© 1971-2009