Little Lake Sunapee


The buoy beacon bobs
and repeats its single rhythm,
its base, barnacled and mossy. 

I don't think I'll reach it. 
My pupils widen 
with the crescent moon

casting tints of false silver
on the surface
of this crypt-cold reservoir.

The dainty shoreline cottage
with its rickety dock,
lies unused 

like the travel journal 
you gifted me last summer,
while sparrows bickered 

from the smokeless chimney. 
Our drunken quarrels 
always had an explanation. 

When have I never loved
the pain of jealousy?
But this has gone past jealousy 

to a mania with the clench
of a madman, a leaping
from the cliff of reason. 

You never liked to swim here. 
The water must have been too frigid. 





Maggiacomo
for my grandmother


Your opera career in photographs.
A choir. Which of them was you?
Perhaps it was your cropped pearl hair
that shed its color early. 
You never dyed it. 
And your neck. 
Your taut singer's neck strained 
for the audience, your children, my breastfed self. 

The teapot whistled
from your tacky, jaundiced
hutch of a kitchen. 
You commanded me to bring Earl Grey
and mistook my name,
a sour odor seeping where you sat
with your legs propped on the velvet recliner. 

I could hardly believe how irritated I felt. 

You had been doing so well
with names and faces,
your memories now a half-erased
Etch A Sketch portrait. 

You always said that Grandpa
was "difficult" and "crazy."
Either walking his rottweiler too often
or picking extra hours up as a janitor at Walmart,
so he could "get away from you."

If that was his reason, I can't blame him. 
I'm filled with nothing but shame for writing it,
but I couldn't tell you. You'd just forget. 





The Fourth of July We Met


For hours we swung in the dark,
hearing firecrackers mark the occasion. 

Somewhere, your ride
honked her horn. 
Your feet splashed puddles
when you anchored them to stop the swing. 

If i could have read our future
as some message folded 
in our scattered beer bottles,
I would have parted with a handshake. 





IV


Armani the cat was blind in one eye
and his brain was hemorrhaging. 
I was livid at the nonchalance as the doctor said it. 

Her syringe emptied its contents. 
I put my hand on Jessie's shoulder
as though I understood something of her loss. 

She caressed his stationary paw,
saying more with her company at that moment
than all their years together cuddled up in bed,

while she highlighted textbooks
or read short stories of Shirley Jackson
as if the cat could comprehend "The Lottery."

Euthanasia, Greek for "good death."
Jessie couldn't even pay for it. 
Every month her mailbox housed that death bill,

its flag raised like an arm begging 
to ask a question, just feet 
from where Armani would lie

on the concrete walkway,
poised and tame like a mini sphinx,
waiting for us to come home

just as we waited for the vet
to administer the waxen cobalt
that appeared almost edible in an IV.