Three New Poems

I want to thank everyone who order The Only One in the Room with White Socks and I especially appreciate those who have actually read it and sent me feedback. Since the book was published, I've continue to write off and on. Here are three relatively new poems.

8th and Market

At 8th and Market the train doors open
and a woman steps out.
Walking across my line of vision
a boy follows her
skips to the door and leaps joyfully down
in a blur of white.
It’s as though I see the future,
sitting here, a Dickensian ghost
spying on my grandson, Pasquale,
though, of course, he can’t see me.
Here in his future
I watch him spring to the platform
from the seat where he’s been waiting.
Does he sense I’m here
atomized particles that have
slipped through the net of time,
my hand on his shoulder
to steady him against a fall?

* * *

Galena Lodge

Because old age and injury make actual hiking impossible
my brother pulls into the Galena Lodge
a limbo at the base of a trail leading up into the mountains
for those who can go no further.
Unloading his passengers, he relates tales
of hiking into the hills for ski patrol
of snow shoe outings, rescues and places beyond the peaks
the rest of us will never see.
Inside we grab coffee at a counter, buy souvenir sweatshirts.
Resting within the safety of log cabin walls
(hung with objects of the county’s mining town past).
The air is still with quiet discovery
as when you accept what life has been telling you:
that you were only ever ordinary
like the dandelions trampled by golfers each spring
waiting for the wind to blow what remains
to Elysian fields.

***

Lethe

We are headed down the Lethe
me still rowing, but you guiding the way
and reminding me of the landscapes
we have passed through together,
landscapes that have already dissolved
in the mists behind me.
I had not realized that our pedestrian adventure
had been so full of mythic characters and monsters
but your re-telling is the only history I have.

It’s not that I’m afraid of the future
I know this washing of the mind
is a purification, a way of bleaching ego,
preparation for the ground to which we all return.
The water is calm.
Nothing I’ve learned on this journey
Can prepare me for what is ahead.
Is this faith then, the willingness to accept
what can never be disproved?

Notes for The Only One in the Room with White Socks

These end notes were included in the original chapbook from which the published book The Only on in the Room with White Socks was created. I am making them available partly for clarification but mainly to provide background about how some of these poems came into being or were adjusted for the anthology, and to give some hint about what the writing process is like for me.

p. 9. “Second Drowning” and several other poems in this chapbook including “Letter from Dubai” and “Deciduous” were poems found in old notebooks or journals but that I reread with new interest and thought belonged in this book.

p. 20. “Maggie in the pool” was originally the third section in a poem sequence about Puerto Rico that was extracted and expanded upon to a full poem.

p. 29. “At a Café in Montreal” was originally the middle section of a longer poem “Canada Triptych,” but that I think it works better as a stand alone poem.

p. 33. “City” was written in response to a poem by Bob Herz in his book The City. Bob the editor of Nine Mile, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, died in July of 2023. He thought the poem had potential.

p. 35. An abecedarian poem is one in which the first word of each line begins with a new letter in alphabetic sequence. This poem also introduces a sequence of the chapbook’s poems that are more experimental than I usually write.

p. 45. “Cento for David Simpson.” A cento is a poem that is composed of lines from other poems. In this case, the lines are all lines from poems in Simpson’s collection The Way Love Comes to Me. Simpson, who wrote about being blind, died in 2018.

p. 47. “Schrödinger’s Cat Again.” Denise March. a member of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop and one of the original editors of Wordgathering died in October of last year. (See note below.) Schrödinger’s cat is a theme in quantum physics that I seem to keep returning to in my many of my poems.

p. 48. “To Larry Eigner.”I was writing a review of Sustaining Air, a biography of poet Larry Eigner, for Wordgathering when I got the news of Denise March’s death. (See note above.)

p. 49. “Bar Routine” was originally written as an assignment on prose poems for a creative non-fiction workshop led by Minter Krotzer in Philadelphia in 2012, but seems appropriate to this sequence on experiment with form here.

p. 50. “mycelium” is an attempt to imagine the pathways that a poem following a mycelium movement might take. The idea came when reading Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life about fungi.

p. 54. “Ice Storm.” I have been using prompts from Diane Lockwood’s The Crafty Poet as a poetic seed bank. “Ice Storm” resulted from one of them as did “The Day Before I Died.”

p. 58. “Laurel Hill.” It is obvious from the subject and language that “Laurel Hill” and the second stanza of “Crocuses” cover the same territory, but I have included both because I think they result in very different poems.