The Bird of a Boy
He glided into high school like a bird into a house:
flapping about in an expressionless panic, hunting
the blue yonder to the amusement of all onlookers.
The beating went on forever, and full as the school was
of exits, he could never find the way out. Eventually,
he was ushered through the front by a thoughtful principal,
though Out, the boy learned, was not the same as Free.
He flapped about the menagerie of a housing project,
and beat himself against the ceiling of a warehouse job.
No other boy he knew trembled when he spoke. A lurker,
he tried to smile himself into the lunch ring of forklift drivers.
They smelled the smoke of burn-out and snubbed him.
Women were jet turbines that sucked him in and spit him out.
He escaped to the vault of Nevada, the cosmos beaming
down as from holes in a shoebox. He took orderly work
in a nursing home where he changed sheets and practiced
a sincere and simple song of Good Morning and Good Night.
The linen room was, without a glimpse of sky, aromatic as a nest.
Monger
With cod scales jeweling the belly of his smock,
the monger watches the immodest blue trout,
that lately leapt from the live fish tank, curl about
like a tongue cut from a bull’s mouth.
When his children are asleep,
the monger escapes to the alley of his yard
to smoke in silence and wonder
how fishing would change a man
who has spent his life swimming in fish
having never seen one glide or leap
fearlessly out of its sphere of grace.
The tattler flails nearer the monger’s bag-wrapped boots,
applauding wetly with its tail. Three dowdy women
studying haute cuisine under a French chef next door
find the monger toeing a fish nearer a drain in the floor.
