My photo of the Great Egret, who courteously posed for his picture
in an inlet off Boston Harbor, near Quincy's Wollaston Beach. The poem
responding to the photo appeared in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.org.
Here it is:
Great Egret
The name is no exaggeration
A creature made of formal beauty
A head shaped like a woodcutter's wedge
its plane horizontal, no top to its bottom
The angle down the back more shapely
than the angle down the front
Its stance an unearthly walk upon the water,
its twin, a staged imitation –
almost perfect,
but upon inspection
possibly a little better
Its color either white, all colors merged into one,
or a single offering of light on water,
the color of shimmer
Built for the job, or something grander
Shining like an idea in the eye of god
The June issue also includes a poem about some of my earliest
childhood
memories. We lived with my grandmother (my mother's
mother) in Flushing, Queens, NYC. The poem reports the
little disturbances of childhood just as I recall them.
Growing Pains
I am growing
Ever so small at the beginning of things,
yet I am growing
Kissena Park, Flushing, Queens, walking home
with Dad
who takes me, after work, to the playground
Freed of my daylong presence, Mom takes a pass
After play time, the swings, perhaps monkey bars,
I am enjoying the freedom of the warm evening
on the walk home
when I slip, attempting some show-off gesture
a touch beyond my childish confidence
and fall, cutting my knee on something sharper
than mere earth,
my first wounding, by something harder
than mere flesh,
though at so long a remove I will never recall
what dare I was taking,
what test of my agility
that resulted in a stumble.
“I told you not to do that!” Dad scolds
“Glass,” he reports to Mom. “I told him to watch out
for broken glass on the ground.”
“Not too bad,” she replies, seemingly unworried,
a pattern that repeats in my future stumbles,
which grow in severity as years advance
Glass, I think later: a reason for bleeding
Everybody needs a reason for bleeding
I do not feel the wound, at least not in memory,
but the disappointment
of failing to complete that little playful leap,
that stretching of my childish wings
2.
We live in Grandma’s house, the old brownstone
on a numbered street
where the buses go by at night, every night
in the summer dark, and I am exiled
from the company of humans
to dwell among the shadows
of the darkened bedroom
above the night-clad street.
I hear the muttered exhalations,
the squeeze of brakes, opening of doors
Upstairs in the big old house we left behind,
so memory insists,
when I was only three –
Is this arrow from the past my first memory?
The wound in the park –
Or, from that same-shadowed epoch, a cry
for my mother
in fear of the shadows from the street playing
on the wall opposite my child’s-bed –
“There are men in my room!” I insist, “Big men!”
“No one’s in your room,” Mom concludes,
using my full first name
in token of her authority,
after a skeptical examination
of the flicker-show.
“It’s only shadows.”
Shadows and cutting glass. Does she leave the door
ajar?
Downstairs the adults question, and her replies
betray an air of qualification
replacing the reassurance offered
to the bed-bound child.
Early indications, I take it, that I am on my own.
The big people are at hand. They care for me,
but cannot be relied on for everything.
No Odysseus, but I bear the scar.
