old poems

old poems i came across today

Love Song

Will the old bottle be lost in time,

a cool trinket found in the attic

by young fingers—

something to blow in,

something to break,

something to wonder at

and imagine Granny young and in love?

I fill this bottle with flowers

picked only tonight,

and, for a moment, feel myself old,

watching their faces, now bleached

and brittle with sunlight.

In her senior photo

my mother’s skin is freckled, smooth,

her eyes full of train-whistle dreams.

This child is not her.

She was always dead or fifty

and I will always be eighteen.

Somehow, these flowers

already make me sad.

1992 (18 yrs) (edited 1998)

Rain 

There are slow-sleeping nights

when I envy her ability

to sink through these layers

of clay and cold earth

into the quiet underground.

1997 (23 yrs)

We Play Marbles

As children

Watching them spin and collide

and roll across the room.

Often we hit them too hard–

they scatter

with a sound of glass

that rushes through our heads.

We run to stop them

knowing that for each one we capture

twenty are escaping,

and we will need to gather them up

one by one,

from underneath furniture,

from down the stairs.

We never find them all.

1993 (19 yrs)

Ocean City

Seagulls float into harbor 

trailing V's of water.

Johnny and Martha kneel on the dock

and tie a plastic bag to the dock rope. 

They hope to catch jellyfish.

Seagulls sift through the wind

to land at port

on wooden water poles.

Johnny and Martha scrape their knees 

on the board plank

and scare the fish away.

Dark spots on the concrete

mark years of bubblegum.

A woman walks barefoot across it.

Seagulls wobble when they meet the wind

and shy off or burrow into it.

Martha's orange hair stands up 

and runs along the shore.

She doesn't mind tangles.

Sparrows beak at broken shells

and pitter-patter through the people.

Paper bags sweat around a trash bin.

Boys call out of a passing car.

The water raises its neck to look around,

bends gracefully over and slaps itself.

A man sweeps cigarettes into the gutter 

and scrapes slime from the pool floor.

Two herons circle the horizon 

and sit calmly down to sea.

We see them on the upward thrust.

Martha combs her hair.

Johnny throws a ball but cannot catch it.

The orange sun puddles at the edge

and slips off.

We never worry.

There are many suns.

1995 (21 yrs)