Poems September 2021

I was young, and autumn seemed to last months, from the first days of school, finally gasping out at Thanksgiving, in New England, where it becomes its own holiday, and you could drive north with a girlfriend into deeper, redder places, the dog wearing a t-shirt and leaping from leaf pile to leaf pile

All the things that never happened

When will a leaf land on my shoulder, pause for a moment as we recognize each other, and then continue falling, taking me along?

There are crickets outside
Speaking to the crickets inside my head:
Guys — come out!
We’re mating and stuff!
You’ve not lived until you’ve had insane hopper sex on the lawn and then die!

My crickets conferred:
We’ll stay in this guy’s head
We serenade him; he’d miss us if we left
And he’s a good enough sort of fella
A bit forgetful and prone to melancholia
But he tries

(He tries to get rid of us, actually
He doesn’t like us at all)

We pushed the windows wide open
Let clothes find their way into any old drawer
The fan is jammed and clicks, broken
Whatever
We’ll visit it later at fan hospital

We put tiny blindfolds on our pets
Now they’re experiencing new vistas and adventures

We need more werewolves around here
Stalking around suburbia and occasionally taking a housewife

A good place to hide is the basement bathroom, with a book we never finish
Toileting until legs go numb

A pet bumps in, via the walls and door frames
Sniffing for the scratching hand, sprawled at your feet
Attentive to crickets, werewolves, and the occasional plane

A door bangs shut somewhere

But the windows are open still

A lumpy woman on a bike
Slows and loses balance on a sharp turn
On the sidewalk

The saddle catches her fanny pack
The pedal, her sneaker lace
Her helmet mushes her hair into a gray fallen soufflé

And now she’s late for office hours
To sit at a desk and hold your hand
And forgive you for failing to become a fraction as notably forgotten as Françoise Dorléac

But she perseveres!
The crossbar crushes into her crotch
She levers her leg down and the bike creaks forward a baby step
Hovering on training wheels of hope and habit

(Françoise‘s ghost laughs, and flings her cognac hair)

She whispers in her own ear:
Pedal!! Pedal, you fuck...