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Second Thoughts

I might have named her Susan, yet

my first impulse — Beatrice —

seems cat more than human

Dante’s proof — his imperatrice

was first a boy child’s sexual itch

later a creature of godlike caprice

watching him arrive, the bitch

first scorns him, then demands

he apologize, pathetic wretch

for larking off to distant lands

instead of cleaving to his first

devotion — Beatrice feline

communicates in sudden bursts

of motion, first she’s a missile

next she’s a whirling dervish

I school her — Be not servile

but gentle, I first admonish

then send her down a level

Soft paws, I say, as garnish

I suppose, since first off

she doesn’t capisce the English

besides how do we know if

we’ve chosen, first second or last

the best companion — it’s tough

to guess before the role is cast

Sloth

Beatrice does not know sloth —

jump down, run, climb up

defines her antic path

until she trundles into my lap

or onto my head to groom

a paw, a leg — eyelids droop

& close, open, close, a purr

rumbles — when my grandchild

finally drifts off her snore

gives her away, another wild

day capped by nasal storms —

it’s not yet safe to slide

away, she’ll raise alarms

until her snoring ceases —

silence is her cuneiform

for true sleep, like Beatrice —

once her purring stops

she becomes la señorita

of slumber, her chin drops

Peasant Women

the heron rasps the unsayable

a crow answers, a duck loudly denies

what they know we have forgotten

Milosz has the Spirit of History say

for punishment I took away their reason

because a woman told what a powerful

white boy did twenty five years ago

she & her family have had to flee their home

loud clatter of wings, ducks apart, ducks together

the voters elected this pig so that the understory

could be told, the swinish greed to consume

everything — when it’s over

                                          what would it mean

to be over? the pig slaughtered, spoiled meat

left for maggots, for microscopic life

a new world hypothesized by peasant women

riddles in long dark skirts, glee & wisdom

flicker from their weathered eyes

The Women Hold It Together

body & soul

whatever it is

I knew even as a child

the wisdom

quiet in their sitting

hands busy

or idle, in their walking

from one place to the next

their tidy doing

what had to be done

a child tended

a meal assembled

a floor scrubbed

& all around them

passing in & out

men, inert, useless

Wild Trace

Nearly to the end of Fort Lamar Road

I see the fox tilted downward

nose to the ground, a dark dirty brown.

Might be a stump. I circle & scan

as I pedal slowly back by — nothing.

I circle again, pedal even slower.

It’s not where I saw it first. There —

beside the driveway, a pair of ears

& eyes in tawny fur trained on me.

A large hare? I inch the bike back —

we both stare. Great head, pointy

chin. It turns, ambles, a thick white

flare at the tip of its long wavy tail.

This enclave — unimproved woods

next to the road, vast lawns with grand

houses next to the salt marsh, the sea

beyond — trace of what belongs here.

AC

Dark pink sky by 6:15, sudden noise from the neighbor’s AC.

Once the light stains the water, duck sound joins the AC.

A single songbird trills, a heron rasps, half a dozen fish jump.

Dawn brings fresh cool air in the windows, makes the AC

irrelevant, though if your windows are closed, you blunder

through this sweetest part of the day, you’re cloistered in AC

closure as if the real world didn’t exist. The daily dozen ducks

stream in above the lake, slow, skid to a water stop. AC

silences all this noisy natural life, wraps humans in the hum

of conditioning. I say I’d rather sweat, & because my AC

stopped cooling yesterday, started streaming hot air up

the stairs, Carol will now sweat until someone repairs the AC.

Loss

Our measly complaints — how a hurricane

discommodes us. What if we were Philippine

waiting for Mangkhut in bamboo huts? Or Syrian

bombed & shelled & poisoned, our children

maimed. Or Palestinian, our land & livings

stolen for Jewish cause. Or Hmong displaced,

exploited, massacred in Laos, swimming across

the Mekong to Thailand camps — now tell me

again who & what you might have lost.

Letter to Susan

Well, Susan, look what you’re missing —

a full up hurricane scare with most poets

deciding to stay home. The nerviest

left Monday. Tuesday another drove her ill

husband to Savannah. Everyone else here

is practicing battening & hunkering as best

they can. Studies seem to show that the poor,

the old, & those who’ve lived here longest

stay put in a hurricane. I’ve identified three

parking lots with elevations of twenty feet

above sea level — Gold’s Gym, Walmart,

& JI Presbyterian Church — where I’ll park

my car if I’m worried about a storm surge.

So far the spaghetti models don’t converge.

Hurricane Florence

Linda’s packing her car to drive west & north, Debbie’s not

willing to fly to Baltimore, I can’t wait to ride out the storm.

Fourteen & working as an au pair on Cape Cod when Donna hit

I ran outside, arms wide, flew down the street ahead of the storm

& that’s it, no more hurricanes that I remember. Georgia was hot,

Argentina windy, Caly burned, Hawaii was good for tropical storms.

Think of all the ways I could buy the farm — actually, don’t —

simply realize I’m too old, I’ve had my best fun. If a big storm

wants to take me off, I’ll be eyes wide, hugging a fresh bottle

of icy gin, sucking ripe watermelon — Come & get me, storm.

My Lake

Today’s armada of eight or nine ducks

sways back & forth on the trembling glass lake.

Pale pink suffusion, pale yellow leaks

inlay clouds — angel, white skimmers, kayak.

Three ducks land, silhouettes on silvery back

drop mingle, six wings rise from the lake.

Their meld is liminal — turning away, wanting to mix —

muted rasp of males, sussurating lake.

A female quacks — nudged, goosed — night black

water brimming with life, smack of fish on lake.

Spot-tailed bass, minnows streaking from docks

white bellies skip like stones across the lake.

Great blue heron launches, glides, squawks —

its mate follows, climbs, levels, circles the lake.

Sun reddens the rim of towering clouds, breaks

above trees, summons kingfisher to the lake.

Orange collar, ragged crest, her chirr tricks

me to hear cicada, no, kingfisher — my lake.

Weather

Morning thunderheads — three

squaring off against each other

against blue sky & time — Brendel

& Gould, their slight bodies,

thundering & delicately fingering

hands, time takes them too, bar

by bar — below cumulus

sun’s gold burns outward, forces

human eyes (all but Newton’s)

to turn aside, clouds to feather

& froth, from lizard to city arch,

sonogram of liabilities none

can parse — another day’s weather

working through its serendipity.

Sting

A wasp grazes my hand, buzzes

my face. I duck my head

& wave my arm, let go

the nozzle, turn off the hose

& walk away, annoyed & feeling

an itch, a mild pain — the sting

grows to a hard white pimple.

My hand throbs & swells.

I've seen a nest seething below

a porch stair. Today I’ll buy

wasp killer. Tomorrow at dawn

I’ll cover my head, spray the poison

& run.

         Why do this? Who am I?
Where do wasps belong?

Fraction's Head

Fraction’s head an architect

foot an engineer — together

marvel & rigor inflect

structure & shape, flutter

of Sydney’s wings, slope

of pyramids bricked on sand

rising from fathoms deep

where slaves & pharaohs end.

What survives defies intent

relies on ever changing tides

a swallow’s path, extent

of maps ells & cubits wider

than Mercator’s fringe, dark

swell buffets of optimism

bartered against stark

ignorance — cataclysm.

Microcoder

The microcode word is 60 bits long, the microcode blasted into a ROM chip that plugs into a graphic controller circuit board for a 1980s computer workstation. Each word of microcode tells six or eight functional components on the board what to do, & each time a microcode word is read, those six or eight components do what they’re told — move data, increment or add or shift, change the state of one bit or another — the effect is visual, either the expected pattern appears on a computer monitor or it doesn’t. Sometimes nothing appears, sometimes the pattern is the wrong one, occasionally the screen jitters or flashes in a way that promises an epileptic fit for the sensitive viewer. Any mistake I make in coding means the newly blasted ROM is trash, means I return to the code & find the problem. I become a parallel processing machine — six or eight things happening at once, one word after another — I simulate microcode in my dreams.