My two poems in the June 2023 issue of Verse-Virtual are both about unusual visits, going to places where I've never been or tend to avoid.
"Other People’s Lives" tells of traveling to parts
of the city in which my wife and I live in, Quincy Mass., to deliver notices of
an upcoming community meeting, and discovering that some houses are built with
front doors that are never meant to open. Here's the poem.
All the doors closed, locked, shut up tight.
No way in, no welcome mat.
The mailbox up and mailed itself somewhere else.
The front door an utter rampart:
No entry. No welcome. Nobody home to the likes of you.
Privacy protected.
Living in the hills.
I’m a mere stranger. Worse, afoot,
no doubt out to seek thrills.
Hence those locks:
The feverish encounter always pre-empted.
Walk your city’s hidden neighborhoods,
those unseen lanes and cul-de-sacs,
divorced from the city’s busy streets,
its commercial thoroughfares, numbered highways.
Quiet nooks, the street may not be, legally, ‘private’
but a taxpayer’s home is surely his, her, or their castle…
What is it like to put three-quarters of a million (probably more)
into a modest lot plus extra-large dwelling,
outpost of well-protected privacy
smack up against a vast and wooded preserve,
people-free at the busiest seasons,
on a narrow street most of us commoners will never find.
What is it like to hide away?
This house is “Protected," so saith the conspicuous advisory
on the never-used front door.
Protected in turn by all-weather storm door with its own tight lock
from the interloper with the handbill declaring the invitation
to “community meeting” –
Offstage laughter indulged in silence: Community? Meeting?
… preventing said interloper, or any other physical entity that
can walk and chew gum
from approaching the double-locked barrier behind it.
The beast within howls his rage, his furious abandonment
when the interloper touches the impenetrable outer barrier,
that second skin of inviolability,
the offense wired directly into his self-devouring imprisonment
of canine sadness.
Bark all you want, Wolfie,
No one is coming to reduce the terrible gnawing anxiety
of your endless hours of incarceration.
No toys out-of-doors, no sign any creature of flesh ever steps
through this parody of ingress,
the mocking shell of the conventional ‘Welcome’ baked into the
unyielding mat spread upon the doorstep,
the empty remembrance of that which we no longer mean to offer.
Unpurposed now, its meaning fouled,
it braves the elements, impersonal, dysfunctional till the very
crack of doom.
Speak not to us of common purpose, public space,
those challenges and opportunities that onetime fell to all,
… the town meeting, the charity drive.
After all, who can you trust?
The state is me, moi, and mine own
And if he, or she – or (conceivably) some trace element of younger lives –
does not come home soon,
I’m surely changing the locks.
The second poem, "Visiting Eternity" follow a rare visit to a place where nobody is worried about who may come to the door. Here's the poem.
Visiting Eternity
The parents are well. We know where to find them.
Back to back on a stone we ran to ground (a year later)
in a busy corner of forever.
It is, admittedly, a crowded neighborhood,
though well-tended.
The next search however proved a bear.
Don’t get excited to find a Goldberg,
their neighborhood is everywhere.
The wind passes the time among them,
the low boxwood, the hedges elbowing into remaining space
between one placement and the next,
row on row, eternity grew up around them.
No social classes, mind you, in this subterranean finality.
Room to move, though under.
If being head partner in the firm, you object to neighboring
the treasurer of the local Communist club,
union chapter, or simple laborer, self-employed accountant
or various women who got things done,
well, it’s a busy neighborhood,
something going every night.
The street signs hard to follow,
difficult sometimes to tell the people apart.
All that may be left is a long stoney fez,
an elemental billboard for a few prosaic data points,
eternity’s stovepipe,
an ear to the wind –
Hard to imagine they are not overhearing our jokes
and errant philosophies,
observing our frustrations:
Reading us as we struggle to find that final
hiding place
in the hide-and-seek of time.
Who, we wonder, will come looking for us…?
You are not in the ground, dear ones,
You are in our hearts and minds
This is our house of remembrance.To find poems by the 48 poets represented in the June issue
of Verse-Virtual, go to
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