The Old Mule

Beech

If I am slow tonight
blame the leaves piled
around my widow; my view
is off, and the horizon
is solid blue through clouds
and clouds.

We are lifted by the
seasons, but our lives fall
from different coasts, and the
hum of our years, one, then
another, tempt us to recall
what we failed to make.

I went back to the gardens in
Brooklyn to see the beech, and stood
beneath a century of branches --
these are the photographs that ache.
We were there. We almost
made it through.

If you are out in your
remembrances, think of me,
of our travels to the city, and
all those stretches of gardens,
and this new path apart, our
leaving, our sad leaving.

November

"In November" by Lisa Mueller, from Together: New and Selected Poems.

--

In November

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Robillard

"Jet Lag" by Eve Robillard, from when gertrude married alice.


Jet Lag

He flies over the ocean to see his girl, his Sorbonne
girl, his ginger-skinned girl waiting for him in the City

of Light. Everywhere river and almost-spring gardens,
everywhere bridges and rainy statues. Streets going

nowhere, streets going on all night. I love you my mona
my lisa, my cabbage, my gargoyle, Degas' little dancer

in dawn's ragged gown. But on the third day she
picks up her books, tells him she needs to study:

she adores this town, she's not coming home in May, she's
going to stay all summer. Lowers her morning-calm eyes.

He's all right in the cab, all right on the plane droning
him home in only three hours American-key in his lock now

his tick-tock apartment, shiver his shadow, his need
to sleep. Then with a tiredness washing over and

over him and through his raveling bones
he begins to know.