Trash-Burning
I.
Out here it’s most weekends
in the summer. Tom’s fire-ring
is masoned from scrap
macadam, rock, leftover rip-rap,
bricks broken in half. He burns
yard-waste, switches, rinds,
paper, vines, and refuse,
bagged green leaves
that grey to ash, ash branches
burned down to Marlboro butts,
the grey faceless ghosts of nothing
important. Daily life, lawn-
trimming, plate-scraping,
weekend bustling, linger as smoke,
a Saturday smell. But now
and then, he stands there with
a bushel basket, crate,
or old dresser drawer, great
as an auction box-lot,
those absentminded time capsules
sold for a few bucks. He drinks
from a jar, squats, and sorts
with one hand as if browsing
for old tools, out-of-date parts
he can’t buy, but can only hope
to find. He tosses frames,
knick-knacks, fabric, glass, wood
and snatches of color—so many
faded snatches of color—
into the fire. I can’t see what
the stuff is, but his eye knows
what it’s doing as if he were culling
blue crabs in molt—the peelers,
the soft shells—from the rest
down on the piers. His efficiency
betrays nothing, so I think
his odd boxes must have weighed
down his attic too long,
must have served but can’t serve
any more, floral arrangements
cried dry and colorless
on headstones, leaving the markers
unchanged, still stark,
pacific, stubborn, and blunt.
II.
I felt bad for old Tom,
more and more unsteady, dancing
away from his bonfire’s
black mixed-media errancy,
until I didn’t, and thought
not about him, but that these things
were sad to burn in and of
themselves, a gilded frame I recalled
only seeing Tom pitch gilt
scraps, hold up what seemed
a portrait, and I was ten years old
again, in the front room
of a wayward aunt, on whose wall
a pink crab rode on a blue Bay
over cove-grass green as turtles
in children’s books. Her bright tasteless
yarn has never frayed, and
that crocheted, comic tide rolling
fast bursts into my present
when I drink and watch Tom
and the day darken on a weekend,
now well after five, and the burn-
pile stubbed out, is like a tonsure
in a field of wild grass.
National Bohemian Pastoral
The idylls of Theocritus,
the loss of Plato’s spark,
comedy syndicated,
quiz questions and porn
on VHS shining in the dark.
Troubles of a Western
mind, and ironies of vocat
aestus in umbra churn
like the too-violent blades
of my washing machine,
an outboard motor
introverted, a muttered
poem hearty, thick
in the slur of the throat,
burning down the Bay,
burping up the brackish
wake, whose tremors rattle
my recyclables all day.
I’ve mock here in fine
the silhouette of a fault line,
twenty-five and alone,
drinking beer in the daytime.
Memory Tree
Who knows what kind of tree it is?
Has no branches save two
hands-up overhead,
its trunk churning under
a full jacket of ivy.
It’s chair-back straight,
like a field bolted up in bed
not knowing what to do
next, and, unable to lie
down, and, scared to rise
further, just stayed there.
I saw the tree half-awake,
half-listening and couldn’t
tell if it was me or it, it or me
unfocused as a toddler’s
wavy green line.
Tower. Snake. Strike and
strike-stunned vision,
asemic calligraphy
naming nothing, yet,
something all the same
like the look of the world
in the middle of the night,
something waving
in a storm, something you can’t
see for itself, surrounded
as it always is by so many other trees.