From 7/3/10

It feels almost effeminate to return to the house, to stay in one’s room during the summer weather when it’s roaring, with everyone headed to the coast or to the lakeside, crowding into boats, hurling themselves into the water, the water crowded with bodies, bodies agitating water into spray in almost helical formations, boats racing from the shore, the skipper subjecting his crew to the mercy of the elements, the wind at the stern, all sight of the coast abandoned, the whole crew silent and aghast among the churning waves.

To avoid heatstroke fifteen minutes have passed.
At summer’s peak, the bodies hurling into water
Broadcast to cloudless air a nearly helical spray—

Remember never qualify. Be absolute. Send the boats
Into the sky then, quit your pen, nothing easier.

Easy to quit the pen, harder to find a substitute,
The rest of your life being many rooms to fill,

The future unoccupied, the present overcrowded.
This skipper who approaches the world
With utter confidence.

**

Adult films, cartoons, popcorn, binge-drinking, kleptomania, beer-kegs, bottled bludgeons.

A red-winged blackbird perched at the very top of the bare branch of a dying maple.

A young black cat played with a blackbird

The size of a robin, flapping its wings,

While the cat stared at me with golden eyes,

Wondering I’d guess if I’d advance on him,

But I turned my back on him instead

And let him take the bird away, the wings still flapping,

Into a tangle of bushes where unwitnessed

It must have gouged out the beating heart

And viscera from the ribcage. When finished,

The cat nodded back at me as if in gratitude—

Far too late in the day to save the blackbird’s life,

Pry its mangled wings from the claws.

At the very top of the bare branch of the dead maple perched another red-winged blackbird.