Aubade with Spider and Flag

How do the spiders know it’s safe

to spin their webs? That the parched

winds funneling through the canyons

will not rip them from their moorings,

a late spring rain illuminate their work

for all to see? After a spattering too slight

to call a shower, I fetch the papers. Since

yesterday, a gossamer scrim has straddled

the driveway, as high as the parapet
 

of the house, so low I can barely duck

under it. And there, smack in the middle,

a black spider big as my thumb waits
 

for something edible to be caught, unable

to escape. Lately I’ve regretted not burying

Dad with the other veterans as he wished.

Why did I insist on sticking him with

his parents, sister, and grandparents

in the family plot above Cemetery Curve

in the town he fought a war to leave?

Later today, I’ll look for the little flag

with forty-eight stars he used to carry
 

in parades, hoping the moths haven’t

eaten holes in it, to hang outside

the front gate come this Memorial Day.

—First published in Askew Poetry Journal

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 Salade niçoise, In Memoriam

                                                                         Whitmanesque

 I celebrate the dark tuna, packed in olive oil.

The pommes de terre, apples of the earth, sliced,

 
barely cooked, then gently tossed with stock,

vinegar, more olive oil, scallions, chopped
 

parsley to finish. I sing of July’s tomatoes,

bursting with flavor, vivid red; crunchy green
 

peppers just arrived at the farmers market,

ringed; blanched string beans, chilled. I thank

our neighbor’s chickens, whose blue eggs,

hard-boiled, peel easily and quarter neatly.
 

Liberally strew the tiny local black olives,

capers (my invention). Arrange artfully
 

on a bed of Little Gems; lay on anchovies

like the spokes of a wheel. All morning
 

the day after Bastille Day, I make this

from scratch for you, city never visited,

sun-drenched Nice, in grief, with love,

because I do not know what else to do. 

—First published in Birmingham Poetry Review

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 Looking for the Jewish Museum in Dublin

Wandering down a blind alley. Scratched

into a Civic’s crimson hood, two vowels
 

separated by the consonant over which

so much blood has been spilled: IRA.

On the left side window a spider’s web

of cracks radiates from a bullet hole

opposite the driver’s head. The synagogue

is not where the guidebook says it should be.
 

On its laminated map: St. Stephen the Martyr,

now converted into condominiums. Through

staggered stained glass lancets, a triptych:
 

a woman making tea; an unmade double

bed; a pot-bound asparagus fern trailing

its emerald tracery to the floor, tough,
 

sticky, sharp as knives, bearing the red

berries it produces only when confined. 

—First published in the National Poetry Competition Winners

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The Old Neighborhood

Where is the man who sold the best jelly donuts and coffee

you sipped raising a blue Acropolis to your lips? The twin
 

brothers who arrived in time for lunch hour with hot and cold

heros where Liberty dead ends at the Hudson? The courteous
 

small-boned Egyptian in white robe and crocheted skullcap

in the parking lot behind the Greek Orthodox shrine whose
 

bananas and dates you could always count on? How about

the tall, slim, dark brown man with dread locks cascading

to his waist who grilled Hebrew National franks to perfection

and knew just the right amount of mustard each knish wanted?
 

The cinnamon-skinned woman for whose roti people lined up

halfway down Church, the falafel cousins who remembered
 

how much hot pepper you preferred? Don’t forget the farmers

who schlepped up from Cape May twice each week at dawn
 

to bring us whatever was in season at its peak: last August,

blueberries and white peaches. What about the lanky fellow
 

who sold green and red and yellow bears and fish and snakes

in plastic sandwich bags with twist ties; his friend, a block
 

away, who scooped still warm nuts from a copper cauldron

into palm-sized wax paper sacks he twisted at the corners

to close? The couple outside the post office with their neatly

laid out Golden books, the shy Senegalese with briefcases

of watches except in December when they sold Christmas

trees? The Mr. Softee who parked every evening rush hour

by the cemetery to revive the homeward hurrying crowd?

I know none of their names, but I can see their faces clear
 

as I still see everything from that day as I ride away from

the place we once shared. Where are they now? And how? 

—First published in Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets

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In the Desert

You didn’t get to see the scrub jay’s sky

blue pinstriped bib, the deep purple

flash of the black-chinned hummingbird.

You’ll never see a black-throated sparrow’s

nest woven into the yucca’s slender spines

like a ball of tumbleweed come to rest.
 

You won’t ever hear, then see, the ladder-

backed woodpecker perched at the very top

of a Joshua Tree drill last spring’s seed pods
 

with his beak. You didn’t live to write

your desert poem telling me why someone

named that cactus after a hero in the Bible.
 

For you, who peppered your poems with

the language of your faith, I’ll use yarmulke

to describe the woodpecker’s crimson cap.
 

—First published in Five Points

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To an Unknown Goddess

She of the missing digits, who cradles a handful

            of sheaves, their tassels lost so

long ago, the broken stems flower with mildew
 

and algae; she whose helmet of neat banana curls

            is netted by spider webs, whose two

still intact ears are stopped by fall’s drift, and left
 

nostril drips a dust strand with which the breeze

            toys; she, whose voluminous dolomitic

folds, tender inside of bent elbow, and flexed toes
 

are dirty for eternity, or at least until they crumble

            to grit, whose one bared breast is polished

by the elements, her arched neck lovely, her palms,
 

despite lacking fingers, relaxed; you, who cannot

            see or hear, touch or feel, are more

beautiful for being broken. Once children like us,
           

imperfect, flawed, were left on mountain tops to die.

            Tell me, goddess, how we came to be

stranded here together on this Adirondack porch.

—First published in Deaf Poets Society