Concert
in the Park
Three swans glide by, giving the
mallard crowd
a wide berth. I turn away
from the river, where I have been
sitting all day.
Tonight there will be music beneath
the willow trees,
an Irish band playing the old
songs.
Bring your own chair, there will be
snacks for sale.
The ferry will come, as it always
does.
Everyone will crowd on board,
offering their coins.
Their hands will smell of copper
and blood.
Into the moonlight they will
go,
vanishing as minor chords fade in
summer air.
Coloured Squares
I look at summer and it’s already
gone.
Somewhere the sun has burned trees
to gold.
Somewhere a woman’s arms are full
of fruit -
melons and apples and pears.
Her portrait hangs in a museum,
where tourists
thrust their fingers into certain
sculptures
as guards whistle and tut. They
take photos
of the princess on her
throne.
All day they line up to eat,
with their appetites and credit
cards.
The woman whose arms are full
of fruit has stepped out of her
frame.
She has let melons ripen by the
door,
feeds apples to her pony, pears to
her striped cat.
My mother hates this museum
because
some of the paintings are not
beautiful.
She hates the spiral stairs, would
rather see
photographs of her native
city,
especially in rain or snow. She
loves
how streetlights bend on wet
cobblestones,
but no one lives there now,
a city of coloured squares, each one
drawn by hand.
A Different Name
Each of us called it by a different
name —
X-ray or Sun Spot or Microwave.
Some of us want back to Latin,
called it
Vir Fortis or Rex. I preferred Dea
or Mater Anima,
but that was when I stood alone in
the wind.
In the end it didn’t matter. It
rose in the sky
like a new star, and though at
first we wondered
and worried over signs, we soon
forgot it was there,
went back to our phones as if it
were nothing at all,
an object without the terrible
weight of names.
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