Work at fifty

I lie in bed. The house shakes just a bit;
a logging truck speeds north to Canada.
A load of spruce goes forth. When it’s sawn true,
in time, as two-by fours, it will return.
Just down the road, a grader sucks a tit
of land and wears it down. A penumbra
of roads and houses soon will shade the view
and take a lengthy chance with nature’s stern
embrace. The race to leave a cellar hole
is one my eighteen-fifty farmhouse will win.
Despite my level best to skirt the rules,
the plumb will always skew, just like my goal
to leave a measured mark – to say I’ve been.
I rise; I put on clothes; I find my tools.

Clarity

To you, I have nothing at all to say.
Contempt’s implied, of course, and mordant wit
that’s laced with schadenfreude, that toxic brew.
It’s not so bad that we need speak of hate --
the fact that we’ve not spoken should convey
so much; and yet it only should admit
our honest thoughts, perhaps tempered with rue
or sadness, at our stubborn non-debate.
I cannot think that you should be surprised.
You’ve left some things unsaid behind your smile;
the breach that we don’t speak of still leaves signs
that by my studied silence you’ve surmised --
still, likely, in the end, we’d reconcile.
It’s best left unexpressed, in fourteen lines.

Athlone, County Meath

The garrison is vacant now, the change
from conqueror to nationhood complete.
We loll along the river walk and gape
at misfit architecture, totting up
duplicities and massacres that range
from side to side, and tossing the conceit
that we can understand; it’s like the shape
of tea, turbulent in its paper cup.

And then the van arrives, in shimmered slate.
These salmon hesitate to run the weirs;
although the netting’s gone, the sight still scares,
so, milt and roe released, they congregate,
suspended between transitory heres,
and mere histories, neither ours nor theirs.