Things You Kept in Mind

         for my friends at Elderly Services

Sometimes all you need is to be

asked, to say what you’d store

in a metal box--bury, hide, lock

in a safe. Anywhere what you choose

could be found in a day, a hundred

years from now. By somebody

who still has your name. Who may not

know what they’re seeing,

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Two Weeks in November

I need to teach the deer to read.

To stand behind a row of posted

orange signs. Not that I don’t eat

what’s been penned and killed.

Not that I haven’t learned to shoot

a gun. Or read a report the state sends

saying there’s more than enough

of them to go around. And that they’d

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That’s not hay they’re spreading

    to mulch a garden, to keep the weeds

down. That machine isn’t a hand

    shovel to turn the ground for a bed

of seeds. It’s made for shallow ditch-

    digging, on Exchange Street.

For the other land taken in Vermont.

    It’s today’s day for laying pipe,

to bring the gas here from somewhere

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Rowing the Tulip Boat

What’s more here than now!

    My neighbor’s bed of tulips,

rows crowded into rows.

    Not Elizabeth’s rainbow

bilge, gas and oil between

    her rowboat’s struts.

Not a serrated knife’s leftover

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