Probably Cars
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A neighbor called me about the neighbors in the blue house between us.
Where are they. Have you seen them. Talked to them. No. No. I think
the side door was open all night. My neighbor wanted me to take a look.
Probably there were birds but I heard dogs. Probably cars. What I saw were
clouds. A talk show was loud-talking. Lights still on. Two bowls of soup.
Crackers, jam, good olives. White napkins on the floor. Ants. The laptop
in the next room. Screen gone dark. No note. No car. Probably it’s nothing.
Late Sonnet in a Small Town
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No one knew the man or recognized his accent, except to guess. One said, Missouri maybe. Kentucky. He spoke slow but not Southern, you know.
Another said No, no, no, out West, or like that.
He had driven into the village slowly, in a dusty F-150, and when he sat at the diner later, alone, at the counter, he didn’t seem like a stranger so much as someone gone a long time and come back now. Quiet shadow. Maybe he was just getting his bearings, having been away all those years—maybe as a kid, maybe they moved, maybe it was military, or marriage.
Ah, the years . . .
Yet in the morning, no one remembered him. No one said a thing about the truck, the man, the quiet hour at the counter, the meal he slowly ate. Now it seems there was no man.
The sun was bright, already burning in the sky, along the block of windows. See how the shadows, one said, are long this time of year. . . .
Winter
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The white season—
white days white nights
but through the pinewoods
bright coppers jangling along the branches of many beech—
. . .
whippy veins and purple vessels crimson arteries
of bramble strung through the brush
and nine buff pods
in the field where milkweed grows,
spilling white seeds—
