Regina’s Jelly-Jar
She will let you open it,
or open it for you, should your fingers slip.
Gentle is the murmur
of the cap revolving on its threads.
Your choice of flavor: is it currant jam today?
A prior gentleman opted grape.
Regina does her very best to accommodate.
Now, if you visited
the cellar in Regina’s bed-and-breakfast, you
would be humbled, counting all
the jelly-jars she has, lined up against a wall.
Still, this morning draws
a tang of sweetness from the jar.
The spread gleams darkly on a slice of toast.
You’re made to feel
like you’re the man Regina loves the most.
Reading My Back
In the domesticity of nakedness,
knowing each other fore and aft, she rolls
me over to read my back—
its portents.
There is that erstwhile scar
from removal of a sebaceous cyst:
she fears something might be going on
there again.
Does not
neglect shoulder-blades, backbone. Ten
fingers interpret the Braille
of my back, as Daniel did for Belshazzar’s
"Mene, mene tekel upharsin."
Have I been weighed in the balance also,
and found wanting;
my kingdom to be divided? How pleasant
a back finds these attentions.
A Little Rain Goes a Long Way
Down to the roots, then up through the veins—
trees can make do with a pittance.
An empty well is a serious thing.
Faucets puff air; the water pump in the basement
grinds its gears.
And a little love goes a long way.
My brother and I got whatever our parents had
before they both ran dry.
If they’d tried harder, harder,
we might have had less tight-lipped Christmases.
If we had only dug our wells deeper, deeper,
somewhere underground
there might have been a water table, waiting
for shovels to make it a gusher.
The Odds Aren’t the Same
A dead limb of oak
overhangs dirt Philbrook Road, where people
live who like the woods.
Oh, that limb will come down sometime; yes,
it would squash a car flat,
and the driver with it—but what are the odds,
folks say, with that fatalism
that befits a physical world. And they’re right:
the limb is more apt to fall
in the dark watches of the night,
when no headlights pass on Philbrook Road.
The highway department seems to think so too.
Of course, a tree came down
upon one tent in a homeless camp in Concord,
recently.
Killed a man sleeping.
A tent beneath trees: the odds aren’t the same.
Nobody seems to know his name.
Family Unit
The goose family paddle their way
on Winnipesaukee.
You and I can only guess
how many places they go,
among its islands and inlets.
Matriarch and patriarch with their long necks
see far ahead.
Goslings remain
safe between, unaware how fleeting is safety;
how sky is their next recourse,
a vee their final formation. How, from land,
our eyes are watching.
We with our aspirations
realize that, except for machinery we invent,
lake and sky are too vast for us—
how then shall we honk our way to heaven?
Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His own poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications.
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