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River Road
 Horses shook their chains last night in my dreams. I
woke to the smell of sulfur, cursing the neighbor boys
and their fireworks. They were just digging up worms
in the yard behind their home, at the edge of the
woods. Regretting my harsh judgment, I tried to make
peace by offering a fishing tip. I had been told in my
youth, by Mrs. O'Brien passing on her way to daily
Mass, that the fish remain in the stretch of river
behind the cemetery because people are too spooked to
fish there.
The boys, as ambitious as they appeared, did not want
to hear this. Their fear, it seemed, of being in the
presence of the dead would keep them from a fish. I
tried to rally their courage by assuring them that all
they would find in the cemetery were plastic flowers,
faded miniature flags and stones with willow trees and
egg timers carved into them. Beneath the ground there
is nothing but promises, hinges, and belt buckles.
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She Drives The Clown Car For The Circus
Photographs of Chinese lanterns glow from the far wall
providing light, light to fill the parking lot, light
to grow the morning glories emerging from paper cups
on the windowsill. She was the first to lay her chain
and crucifix on the new bureau. I emptied my pockets:
A keychain crowded with keys to locks I cannot
remember and which no longer prevent me from doing
anything, a grocery list that I found lying beside a
circus tent, a stone from Flannery O'Connor's
driveway, a brick from the chimney attached to the
house that I was born in, a lemon, a red robin's blue
egg, a harmonica wrapped in Easter grass, the bicycle
I thought had been stolen.
She returns to me everything that I thought I had
lost or misplaced. She renews all my books at the
library; all of my fines are somehow waived.
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To a Duck, God Is Strings
The museum piece, a mallard duck forever coming in to
land in the pond. Held two feet above its mate by
strings, they are supposed to be invisible, leading up
to the diorama's ceiling. The brown speckled female is
swimming in Plexiglas, within a marsh scene of moist
banks and reeds painted along the walls. The birds are
dead and don't know it, they believe the painted
walls. The male is about to land, held aloft by
strings. Strings like a father's hands holding a baby
over his head and swirling him in the air so that he
believes that he is flying. The painted walls fool the
ducks, and I laugh at them. I laugh, but I still bump
my head against the glass each and every time.
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