A Renga Written by My Lonesome

32 COUNT NATURAL CASING LINKS


Waiting in twilight
for darkness deep enough
to light the yellow lamp.

When I was young, I didn’t
dance, and now I dance like this.

The catechism girls
wobble to first communion
on their new high heels.

Oldest memories are of
earlier recollections.

Dream or misty night.
Can you make out the song heard
only from the bridge?

Faintly violet in flight,
the blue and white butterfly.

One purple flower
betrays the bindweed, curled tight
around scrubby trees.

In its arms, the old maple
holds its leafless, broken limb.

I wake up thinking
Christ, my index finger’s numb:
Still holding your hand.

If it’s her perfume I smell
on you, whose scent is that?

As it propagates
throughout, can you say here
voice ends, record begins?

Choose: forgotten happiness
or false memory of joy.

Only now hearing
of a friend’s old hurt—what use
untimely comfort?

So, how much grief and longing
will this little art assuage?

All the workday long,
dogwood blossoms fall on cars
in the shaded lot.

Among all my employments,
please find some trace of my work.

The unheated house.
Back to back with my black dog,
lying in sunlight.

Boats drift apart, together
tug the stake on the night shore.

Recalls his words of
farewell more clearly than her
to whom they were said.

Now long past, the nights
that were to justify our whole lives.

Out front, my car parked
crooked on moonlit ice. Here
we are, warm and naked.

The trees crackle in the wind,
after hours of freezing rain.

Cold rain becomes snow.
We remember summer, though
it not come again.

Walk again in the same woods,
where we’ve always seen new birds.

Long unvisited,
this narrow space, here
between garages.

Note from an inside pocket.
Forgot what it said again.

Of the old photos,
the one remembered doesn’t
match its memory.

Neither so old and sick, dear,
yet, to have to lie alone.

Silver note. Our son
tings the ancient copper bell.
We age gracefully.

At my most garrulous, still
I am thought strangely silent.

The perfect poet,
for greatest effect, just once
in his life writes "fuck."

Shee-it—winter, spring, summer, fall—
beer stanza time, raht chere y’all.