Under the shadows of late summer,
posts lean from the weight
of concord grapes hidden in leaves.
Along Whiskey Run,
near Ryerson Steel, Rick's mom
started this orchard with
pap's money
minus funeral costs, of course,
cinched the locust with powerline cable
when she planted the grapes in the 50s.
She died last spring.
On her porcelain table
stained fingers separate rotten grapes, twigs, medwigs escape to the
floor. Booty boils---
a purple haze on the stove:
jam for winter's bread.
Wine?
Shit, it's cheaper to buy a bottle of Dago Red,
Rick spits.
That's what you got for your troubles when you're done, my mom always
said.
KEY WEST: FEBRUARY
Evening fans out against the sky
iridescent as gamecock's feathers,
and you are the white cat dancing
en pointe in Mallory Square.
I, the dog in dark glasses
who waits on the Harley for hand-outs.
Tourists come, laugh, snap shutters,
cast green in up-turned hats.
They're nights are crisp white linen,
amarreto lacquered lips in staterooms
of The Royal Sovereign, but
our night comes on as a black-flak
fighter. We straddle the throb of the V-twin, two-up, cruise back
streets,
lights veining alleys past clapboard
chapels while white-gloved negro women
sing "Lord Make Me Your Vessel,"
and fingers splay above our Tarot
like the mangrove root.
Over these streets, Hemingway catwalked
from Pauline toward wife three, and
the smell of deep-fried blackeyed peas
and rice tumbles from windows
on pillows of bougainvillea.
Above the Southern nun buoy
hibiscus stars explode, dying angels,
while the Isaac Allerton rocks her keel
five fathoms and years beyond
green ripples of the cay.
I can see her tacking west
through the Straits of Florida,
Saint Elmo's fire cracking
from the spars
before she broke on the reef.
My love, what did the wreckers find
diving into the hold,
her ribs blooming rosettes of calcium?
What will they find in a hundred years
of us, our garish nights
on this spit of coral and palm.
Steps
I lay the rafter square across
yellow pine,
and mark with thick carpenter's pencil,
shift down and scribe another triangle
along the stringer's edge.
When carved with rip saw and shriek,
the 2X12s become a pine-toothed,
wooden dragon's jaw.
These steps,
this canted animal of symmetry,
what thought and discipline
set down by unknown genius-
combinations on my steel square.
Given the ratio: seven by eleven inches
steps rise perfect with the beat
of rectangle that framed a Parthenon.
This muffled drum staccato of the run
sweetly apparent, its music
strangled only when I measure wrong
or stumble climbing too fast
toward you.
(for Rose)
THE LAST EVENING
I got impatient for death to come,
the air was studded
with the smell of alanthus.
We sat on the porch of the second floor.
The door was open to the living room,
chrome side rails of the
hospital bed down.
We looked in every few minutes to check
the unsure heavings of your chest.
Veins main-lining morphine--all the gravity needed to keep
you still, silent.
The bed propped you up toward us,
and I don't remember what Jack and I talked about
on the dark porch.
When Kathy and Sue came,
I said good-bye, remember them
standing around the bed pressing close,
the desk lamp behind lighting the four of you.
I stopped on the dark landing for a time
then turned
and walked down the stairs.