WINTER AT THE WORCESTER LIBRARY
In my black three-piece suit,
my overcoat and Persian wool hat
I open a book of poems to take the pulse
of every line with my fingertips.
Alive and breathing, milk cows and luminous bees
leave sinuous rills as they fly in rural air
through July with the ghost of the poet’s brother.
Strong as the barn’s stone foundation
the poet anchors his uncle’s farm
to the gravestone hayfields as he sings for his friend
with a paper-thin heart that bursts
while playing catch and leaves the poet nothing
but ripples on the pond they used to romp in
as his eyes say a shocked goodbye
and stop shining.
I am alone in a library carrel
changed as if walking in a dream
where my heart has grown a pair of eyes
that see the brother’s ghost as a fog
lingering in the apple orchard.
How many years it takes, how many reams of paper,
to learn it’s not a matter of counting accents
but of what tone tolls in the throat.
It is the love, the loss, the choking back of sobs
that makes caesuras, not the other way around.
I place the thin book back on its shelf
so I will know where I can find again
the bright and fatal day when brindled cows
come loose from gravity.