Poetry

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

No one picked in the fields on Election Day. 
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff. 
The children sang songs like it was Sunday. 

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade

Gathered in the yard, shed-side, pokeweed, 
black walnut, pecan tree all leafed and 
umbrellaing. My grandmother, the relatives

When the ache was just too much, I’d skip
down the hill to the slip where you
and a small boat were always waiting.

That day the boys
took us quickly.
They took us calmly.

That summer night, we gathered again around the table,
drinking with all the bugs that lit up and some that didn’t.
When Mike said: I wonder how my ex-wife is doing

Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par 

excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells. 

In the stillness of a windless day,
trees stand full, and proud, and straight.

He was in a poem once, alive 
at the beginning, dead by the middle, 
haunting me at the end.