A Rotary Phone
It’s strange to buy machinery
that will last longer than you live,
discomfiting. Your mother
has a chairlift that takes her from
the living room to her upstairs bedroom.
You have a Lennox Whisper Heat
forced air furnace and air conditioning
system that does its job efficiently
and carries a lifetime warranty.
Your father’s old desk copies
have found their way to you.
Do they qualify as machinery,
their pages glued to chipboard
spines? They have an avian ability
to riffle and turn. (313) 862-6770
is chicken-scratched into his copy
of Hamlet. You picture a black
rotary phone in west Detroit.
It’s near midnight. Every phone
number is an elegy, or soon
will be. Every verb is
an anachronistic metaphor, you think
as you weigh dialing the number.
A Blue Heron
I owe a constant debt to suddenness,
pale aster in the exurbs of the mind
to punctuate the pause after a line
about a heron choking down a fish.
There is no twitch before the heron’s lift
over the couple watching with their wine,
no point in this as harbinger or sign,
no way to cut a moment to its pith.
A walk around a chain of kettle lakes,
a ballgame on the radio at dusk,
the desiccated figure of an elm.
A terrier chases a ribbon snake.
I want to say we all do what we must.
I want to pray the well-wishers are well.
