Chickadee Waxes on Marriage
Let me out let me be.
Here is no snow, no light.
Have you also foraged for affection
and found, in the wet leaves,
only mold and moss,
nothing of substance?
Have you been spat upon
for being small?
We scuffle over not enough,
never enough. Shards
of crescent moon and cold.
Cold. Cold.
O Child
Where have you gone with your tears
of abandonment, your yellow trucks
and hand slaps, and why am I lonelier
than the moon we watched rise over
and over until they took you away
as they always do, in a car or a plane,
your tantrums on the stairs, your trail
a blanket with the head of ghost.
Do you remember
How from a drain pipe
centaurs came
in driftwood necks
and burn-mark saddles?
Years later, still telling
the story of a jetty
in a storm,
you feel you’ve grown
the devil’s corduroy tail.
Seagulls brush your ears
with fallen feathers.
The sun circles.
It almost seems
you will be saved.
Abandonment
Slumped at the study door
I see a child.
I see her and I am her.
Stung and singing
the reprise and coda
of Oedipal love spurned.
In my little toe a black
stinger lodges. The wasp
goes on to other flowers
and alfalfa grown up
to the top of a hill
sixty years ago, in Syracuse,
where learned men
pride themselves on degrees,
study suns,
nuclear thermoses, badass thugs.