Shoes

A diary no one reads. They remember everywhere you go: the apple orchard, pine forest, hay loft - and what you do. Silent liaise between you and the changing surface of your life: broken glass, blue carpet, wet grass, terracotta tile, mud. While unsure if they're coming or going, they humbly execute the foot's will. Waiting on floors, under beds, on shoe racks. Stitched sidekick, puppy-eager, they pad along almost everywhere you go. You'll find them left behind at lake's edge. Mute, socks stuffed inside and longing to walk just once down the beach,  to feel the shore's warm squish beneath their soles.

Merchant Marine

                                        for my father

The world became too much water, crushed you into longing for the deer that drift from the woods  at dusk. Orange cats in windows, still as clocks, watching you mow. Dark birds clinging to suet nets. Tomato plants to water. The intimate geography of your backyard. In all those twenty years on the ocean, nothing had ever made you feel its great expanse until they radioed to say your father was dying back home. You'd never get back in time. Like the sparrows. Docked, the ships were rich in food and shelter. They’d stay too long, you said, and when the ships returned to sea, hundreds of miles from shore, the sparrows flew out in search of land  but returned after weeks, exhausted. Fell dead onto the deck.  Like the words you said to the sky, now lost at sea, with no possible way of reaching him.