Poems for Persons of Interest

Ballistics The safety is always off. You don’t see the barrel shine until light flashes on your teeth, ivory levers, set for the smallest slip.   We don’t speak; we fire. The tongue snaps a silver slide, chambering a syllable before thought clears its throat.   A hello can graze. A goodbye goes through drywall, lodges where the house keeps breathing, long after the argument has aired itself out.   All night we field-strip our mouths, oil the hinges of vowels, pretend we don’t know that recoil bruises the hand, and what’s spent stays spent.

Prime Minister Walpole Leaves Office, 1742 The republican expected that the power of the Crown would be reduced to a mere shadow, the high Tory that the Stuarts would be restored, the moderate Tory that the golden days which the Church and the landed interest had enjoyed during the last years of Queen Anne, would immediately return.                                                                                           Thomas Macaulay, “Horace Walpole,” (1833) shadow; golden; church; landed; last shadow; golden; church; landed; last   So he returned to Houghton, tried to read, found he'd no taste for it, strung those who followed. The kingdom had had twenty years of him.   shadow; golden; church; landed; last   The kingdom had had twenty years of hi...

  Winter Wakened in My Heart On being diagnosed with heart failure. After the 14 th century lyric, “Wynter Wakeneth Al My Care.” Winter wakened in my heart, and its rhythm fell apart. How much longer can I chart the years I've left to live and breathe as leaves turn green, then brown? All seasons end in grief, and yet they still must branch and flow, Whether I'm here or gone below, the sun will burn, the wind will blow another hundred years or more, though winter grows much colder, and spring contains no cure. All my dreams at once seem thwarted, and my faith is long departed; I see the end of all I’ve started— my too-small measure on this earth. I pray the seasons’ passage my life may yet preserve.

  Mid-Life Reckoning If I hear one more woman moan how she’s become “invisible” in middle age— as though it’s only through that narrow gauge that she identifies herself—oh, please! I’d like to share with her a simple fact: not all of us experience life that way; we’ve passed though rooms unnoticed every day. Looking back, we’re glad for what we lacked; it left us free to find a different prize for something more than just our figures, faces. It’s no surprise that we don’t sympathize, or spend the hours longing to trade places. And yet it might conceivably be nice to be admired more than once or twice.