​​
​Imperfection


What a perfectly gorgeous day here
at the lake cottage we’re renting in Maine,
although the dock could be just a bit longer.

I’m not sure why there’s only one Adirondack chair
down by the lake. And I wish that loon
would come a little closer to shore.

They promised a teakettle and there isn’t one.
We’ll have to buy a bulb to get any light in the fridge.
You’d think every cottage would have a cocktail shaker.

The downstairs is pretty musty, if you want to know the truth,
even though we’re not using any of its four beds.
Is that a faint septic smell from next door?

Oh well.  I guess I might as well swim out to the float 
before we have gin and tonics on the deck 
as the lobsters come to a boil.

Still, those kids in the water two docks down
have no idea how their voices carry,
no idea at all.





Chances Are


And so I celebrate another day
of not being struck by lightning.
My odds for the year are about a million
to one, so there wasn’t much chance,
and I don’t live between Orlando and Tampa.
It probably helped there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
My lifetime odds are only 3,000 to 1,
the National Weather Service tells me,
and the years are passing quickly.

Oh, I’ve seen my share of spider lightning
dancing on the horizon, heard the occasional 
crrrack! just outside the bedroom window in summer.
And there was that time my friend and I
were sailing on Coventry Lake
when the great bulb of the sun
dimmed abruptly as a huge storm
loomed over the trees from the west,
becalming us a hundred yards from shore
as our aluminum mast pointed toward the sky.

The actuaries speak of probability
and risk assessment, and I don’t golf
in thunderstorms, or swim in them.
I’m much more likely to die
from heart disease or cancer or stroke.
Still, if one day a dense cumulonimbus drifts by,
what they call a stepped leader zigging toward me
with its luminous, millionth-of-a-second steps,
narrow conducting core the size of my finger in the air,
and I am struck by a bolt from the blue,
it won’t be an act of God, or Zeus, but me
just doing my part to recharge the Earth.





Viral


Thirty-six hours into this, with a temp of 103.3
and a headache as dense as a planet,
I think of the writer Katherine Anne Porter
lying on a gurney in a Denver hospital
during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918,
which killed nearly five percent of the world’s population,
the equivalent today of every man, woman, and child in America.

Failing triage after nine days at a hundred and five,
she was left in a corridor behind screens to die
until some young interns gave her a shot of strychnine
just to see what it might do.  She lived.

The soldiers brought it back from the War
and trade winds carried it around the globe
to every continent and even remote islands––
as they would today.

The disease is as old as Hippocrates,
which offers me zero comfort as I
slowly spin in the darkness, my mind 
making the same list over and over and over 
that in the daylight I will see I didn’t need to make at all.

But fortunately it is not 1918, or
that future time when the next plague
brings us to our knees, or finishes us off,
and I’m not on a gurney waiting to die,
but simply lying on my back in a spare room
dimly lit by the moon reflecting off deep snow

and our big cat, a long, lean tiger
who rarely sleeps upstairs and usually 
spends his nights sitting vigil near a wall somewhere
listening for signs of a small life

returns from his rounds in the cellar
and walks up my body to peer closely
at my face, smelling my mouth and nose,
then flops his hot body between my thighs
to wait on this island for the duration.