Lost in the woods

It's 4 a.m.
My friend from college is dead.

A professor and department head
at a large university,
married 45 years,
three children
two grandchildren,
widely published
in financial journals,
it said in the obit
in the Boston Globe.
There was a photo of him
at the helm of his yacht.

My ex and I were godparents
to one of his daugthers,
back when I was normal.
It's been so long,
I can't remember her name.

We started at the same place,
Jon and I,
fishing from a dam
upstream from the campus.
He stayed on the pavement,
I wandered down
to a path obscured
by twigs and leaves.

Special order

A lady calls up.
I’d like a special order
of white fried rice
for my son, she says.
The cook will know what it is.

Pardon me. I have
to put you on hold for a minute,
I tell her, trying to handle
three things at once.

Don’t leave me hanging too long,
she says, I’m on my cell phone
in my car and I’m about to
lose my signal.

She’s a regular customer.
Every week, it’s the same thing,
a five dollar order demanding
twenty dollars worth of service.

I put the phone on the counter.
The man I’m waiting on
picks it up.

This is a customer, he says.
Be patient. This food is so good,
it’s worth waiting for.
He sets it down again.

I’m glad he added that part
about being a fellow customer.
It lends a certain credibility
that I don’t have.

Man in Sandals

In two months
he will explore his options
under Medicare Part B.

For thirty years
he wore a suit and tie
and wing-tipped brogans.

He commuted three hours-a-day
round trip
and wrestled with judges
and DAs for eight hours
in between.

He drank three martinis
and a six pack
every night,
but he never drank before five.

He raised two kids
with one wife
and two more
with another.

He paid income tax,
social security tax,
real estate tax,
school tax,
sales tax,
commercial rent tax,
commuter tax,
medical insurance,
car insurance,
homeowners insurance,
life insurance,
malpractice insurance,
office rent,
two mortgages,
gas, electric and telephone,
car loans,
credit cards,
student loans
and medical bills up to his
…$5,000 annual deductible.

Six figures wasn’t always enough.
And there wasn’t always
the six. Sometimes it was five,
sometimes a low five.

All the while, late at night,
he wrote the kind of hard poetry
that other guys
would understand.
They’d nod
and say, “Amen, brother.”

Amen.

He doesn’t tuck his shirt in anymore.
He rarely wears long pants.
It’s not anything
he thinks about.

On the trip from New York
to Yellow Springs,
“600 miles and a lot of shit,”
he says,
he picked up
an extra thirty pounds,
thinning gray hair,
bad eyes, ears and teeth,
a slouch,
and a shuffle when he walks
down Xenia Avenue
in his knock-off Birkenstocks.

“I’ve paid for these sandals,”
he tells the boys on the bench
in front of Tom’s Market.

Washington Square Park

Independence Day

I saw Lucy today.
I am sure of it.
It wasn’t just
the flash of yellow
as she flew upward
in front of the bay window;
it was the long tail,
and that she looked in
on Baby and Nicky
in their cage.

I went outside and called her,
but she wouldn’t come down
or reveal herself in the tree,
where I knew
she was hiding.

This was a cool day
for a parakeet, after all.
If she wanted to,
she could have lit
on my shoulder
and I would gladly
have brought her inside.

But she chose not
to do so.

Therefore, she must be
alright.

I am sure she is
alright.

Scenes from around here

I was out in the field today.