MFA POEMS 2006     Bob Lowes

 

 

TRAMPING BY MYSELF THROUGH QUEENY PARK

 

I saw a crazy spray

of bird tracks in the snow,

pointed every which way,

 

and whether I recall

them dancing or wandering

is a minute-by-minute thing.

 

There were prints like broken hearts

of mule deer who escaped

the rifle cracks of fall,

 

a coyote’s dotted line

across a frozen lake

that the snow had powdered over.

 

His thirst had taken him

to an open wound of water.

(I still give thanks for that.)

 

When I met the marks again

on a wide and civil path,

I forgave his steaming scat,

 

thick with rodent fur

and ribbed with a pale bone.

 

Good hunting, brother cur.

WHEAT PENNY

 

Lincoln’s young again on my oldest coin,

a 1919 penny, his profile smoothed

by decades of fingering. Oil and dirt

 

have tanned him like the farmhand

who raised the twin sprigs of grain

on the flip side. It’s fitting to touch Lincoln

 

and those born that year, like my father-in-law,

another country boy, a big laugher

and a straight plower in the delta

 

wheat fields of Missouri, later, a pipefitter

in St. Louis, hands always pressing metal

or else hiding peppermints deep in their grip

 

for grandkids. On a newer, brighter penny,

Lincoln is so war-wrinkled and sober

when I peer through a magnifying glass.

 

A coin that can’t buy candy any more

is its own lustrous world, saying all the right things,

like liberty, citified now, the back forty

 

amber waves succeeded by the Lincoln Memorial.

I spy him enthroned at the top of the steps,

waiting for tourists. I want to walk up

 

and pat his log-splitting, emancipating hand.

Abe was never meant for a temple,
but rather, a pant’s pocket, jingling

 

a loose-change tune for my wife’s father.

At eighty-four he still gives us talks

on when to scatter grass seed,

 

and sharpens our mower blade with long

sparking strokes of a hand file, knuckles bulging,

so the stalks fall quick and clean.

 

MR. DUGGAN

 

Burdened with running a brickyard,

nursing a diabetic, manic-depressive wife,

evening the odds for a retarded daughter,

 

what man wouldn't drink a little too much

for his own good? And yet he thought about

my good when my missing father didn’t,

 

driving me to St. Louis to see Gibson's fastball

and finding me a summer job at the brickyard

where I sweated next to Raymond Jennings,

 

the teacher-turned-bank robber who got his parole

on the weight of Duggan's word. I saw his old

widowed face years later in a church directory,

 

a battered ship that seemed to wonder when

it'd stop hauling the world's sad cargo.

 

 

BOBBY

 

Nothing from my birth remains.

I shed my hair, slough off skin.

My heart cells aren’t originals.

The only constant through the years

are firings of nerve synapses

that stretch my words into a drawl

or chemical imprints on the brain

 

storing wisps of memory:

My mother’s voice at suppertime

calling Bobby, a two-note song

that rose and fell like a day of play

in Goose Creek, or my aunt’s garage,

a dim museum of spades and hoes

she wielded in her rose garden

 

until she lost the duel with age

and the bushes surrendered to rattail.

My mother called, the sun went down,

but the stars that swarmed above our house

held traces of the day’s sweet light

and a coded plan for reassembling

tomorrow, as if a two-note song 

 

would never die. And so I clutch

my childhood name like a refugee’s

wrinkled birth certificate,

or a tarnished coin of passage to

this morning, when a mother’s son

lays a yellow rose on her plot,

the stars still glittering in his head.

           

 

 

 

PACKING THE SWIMSUITS

 

                                                For Kay Drey

 

She summered in the Great North Woods.

Her children listened for the loons.

She swam Rush Lake to prove she could.

 

She didn’t want to spoil her brood

with cable TV in hotel rooms.

She summered in the Great North Woods

 

where the cabin chairs were scratched and chewed.

They ate their soup with thrift-shop spoons                                      

and swam Rush Lake to prove they could.

 

They honored where the birches stood.

Their pocketknives brought none to ruin

those summers in the Great North Woods.

 

Her children outgrew that latitude.

She and her husband sailed alone

on the Whitefish Chain as best they could.

 

The living waters understood

why she listened for the laughing loon.

She summered in the Great North Woods

and swam Rush Lake to prove she could.