Whatever Legacy Works

For G.S.

I saw the little girl’s ears flower
after the poet taught her to curse,
“Fuck” and “Prick” pollinating
her six-year-old brain. Maybe blooming only
later at home, when stubbing a toe,
or losing patience with an older brother.
The horrified mother, soap in hand, swearing
off poetry readings, and the smiles
of wizened and wilting old men,
as her daughter’s eyes water
at the taste of Dove and the power
of sound, word, immortality.

Training

Wet black roots crack open orange and soft,
exposed to 6AM air and the cold blade of my shovel.
The first hole of the day, but Gags is sweating from his 10 mile bike ride commute
to the cold and coffee at Begley Landscaping, outskirts of Hartford, cloudy late spring.

All the old men, except Gags, would take their “sweet fucking time,”
pruning at standstill, dragging tools to another cigarette break.
Gags is John Henry, Dean Moriarty, a sweaty Bill Gates.
“This isn’t a job,” he tells me, dirt and root flying from the pit we’re creating,
“this is training.”

I heard he tried to teach his dog to race,
holding him by the leash
out the driver’s side window,
and he got him running
faster than 45 miles per hour.

He ran too, and spoke and drank
and worked with fury,
a blur of tools and sweat
and pint glasses,
impossible
to tell his age.

I worked here with my “college hands”
and guys who smoked Lucky Strikes with no filters.
I spent nights with friends,
explaining goals and plans,
and Mike Gagnon simply trained.

Back on some doctor’s lawn, April morning, amid soil and visible breaths,
Gags rests on his shovel, picks up the root, orange and flaking from its rotted center,
“It just gave up, Matt”
He throws the root and resumes at full clip, grinning.

Evolution

Wading through the sea of cars
Towards Nordstrom’s and Penney’s and Filene’s
Under the gulls of macadam,
I’m frightened.
If Monarch butterflies find daisy and lilac
In Brazil and Boston,
Why can’t these birds find the coast?
Its beaches are not far
In this Ocean State.
Why would they leave
That dark hulk with crushing foam,
The smell of sand and salt,
For black paved fields
And speeding machines?
Perhaps they’re aware of something we’re not,
And maybe they see a future,
Perched and planning on rusty lampposts,
Over a flat lake
Filled with dead cars and commerce.

The Undeniable

I deny the music of the Elms, the Poplar’s
song of hope,
and beg for beauty in the pocked concrete,
the poured macadam. I strain for planks of dead
wood, mathematically arranged, built things.

A fender strikes a pole and leaves chrome
paint and a sustained reverb, a tone.
I smoke pulped wood and shards of fiberglass
and know it kills me, marginally, but can’t
deny the burning of leaves as retribution,
my own forest fire which ashes my body as well.

I stammer of myself, porch bound,
the last cigarette before bed forcing me out
into the night, its wandering skunks,
its Whitman and Thoreau at one with nature,
while I forget the names of trees,
and litter almost pathologically.

Yet I can’t repress the eddies and sandbars of childhood,
the play of sticks as swords,
the noise a blade of grass makes between thumb
and palm when blown on, or even the dunes that cry as they recede,
waving frantically their reedy hair, sandwiched
between progress and origins.