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?