August 2015
Michael L. Newell
astrangertotheland@yahoo.com

I was, for over two decades, an expatriate teacher who lived in thirteen countries (on five different continents) outside the United States.  I have been published in Lilliput Review, Bellowing Ark, Current, and Rattle.  My most recent book, Traveling without Compass or Map, is from Bellowing Ark Press.  I have recently retired to the coast of Oregon where I spend considerable time slowly walking past creek, river, and forest.  My poems mostly try to find connections across time and space, and similarities in the midst of differences.
 

The Packrat


No never no never no
never again cried the bent man to the wind— 
never again will I dance to the fiddle
that filled my spring days with leaps, shouts, and laughter;
 
my back crooks, a question mark
shaped like life, my fumbling life
that stumbles through alleys, down piers,
beneath rotting bridges where children's voices
peal out: look at the funny fat graybearded man
tripping over his bellbottoms, his seedy old bellbottoms;
 
I pass lovers, my hungry eyes averted from their shrinking;
I pass lovers, my ears keen for every sound of passion,
scraps to feed on as darkness falls, as I creep under bushes
or trash bins, as my voice fondles swatches of melody
from boyhood, when the wind sang of flight into perpetual sun
and the moon and stars were a gem-studded shawl;
 
I pass lovers and stuff the pockets of my  heart
with others' dreams to be sorted through greedily— 
I know somewhere in these volumes I cart about
is a life I might have lived;
now even fresh fallen snow blackens beneath my swollen feet
wrapped in the rags discarded by the profligate young;
 
to see only others, or the past, is my motto
as I huddle in the undemanding company of broken bottles,
tin cans, and the mind's ashes…
 

-originally published in Poetry/LA in a slightly different form (issue 21, 1991)
©2015 Michael L. Newell