18 September 2013: This Home, Last Days

Postcard from Here

There’s not much to tell

except that the sweet orange 

cherry tomatoes have continued

to spread their thin skins to transparent

and fill with with fruit,

in defiance of the blight.

Maybe also that the orange slant of light

that enters this room at eight

makes me wish for you.

It’s just that it is so improbable,
that glow like sunrise and sunset
and another planet, all at once.
So that if you could find your way across the miles
to just sit with me here for a while, 
in defiance of the blight, 

our shared witness might coax it to stay.

This room might find its way to taut hopefulness again,
might tremble at its edges
knowing its kinship with the slender thread of fall chill

woven into the late summer breeze.

Because I mean to follow that thread

back to the black dirt

or crystalline cloud it came from,

and ask what it is that compels the earth

to go dormant,

to end the blight not by healing the tomatoes,
but by sinking it all in a flood of frost

that spares only what huddles underground

or builds four walls.

I imagine you here to sanctify this waiting,

unsure how long it will last,

certain that this eight o’clock glow will move on 
in its journey to the earth’s darker side,

unaware of how much it is still needed here.

5 August 2013: Lake Champlain

Search for the Plesiosaur

“It doesn’t take much for a creature

to become a monster,”

he informs me,

tossing stones into shallow water.

“But it takes even less to bring them back.
They just have to know you love them.”

So we walk the sandy parts of the lake’s shore,

the wooded ones,

the bouldered coves,

the train tracks
sprouted with summer wildflowers.
We paddle out by kayak,

take the ferry roundtrip

across the narrow neck of the lake, 

linger at the apex of the arched bridge

between New York and Vermont.

I buy a second ice cream cone.
In case we find him.

In case he likes ice cream.

The time passes with comments on newness--
the peculiar flowers that seem to live just here,

the feel of cold, fresh lake water

under the layer warmed by the summer sun,

vistas with mountains whose names we don’t know, 
the way we can see rain clouds moving in 
from so far away.

I have no way to tell him, eight years old,

that I’ve been here before,

and not once.

This is where all the trouble starts—

searching for a monster

with a tender heart.