This Week's Poem

Farmer’s Almanac

Once again like clockwork gray days
of rain recycled from April.
Maple boughs glassing over.
Children stiffening their limbs
for recycled lessons.
Neighbors predicting thunderclaps
moments after they strike.

Glimpses of what will be lost, again,
tugging at the day’s shortening sleeves.
Already there is talk of rebirth
before a single tree
has shaken free of color.
And talk of gardens,
everything next to plant.

Wet matches.
Lurching furnaces.
It has been written
we must board the night bus to Gloucester.
There is no such bus this time of year.
It seems we have a long wait, again,
in the rainwith wet matches.


-published by Offcourse Literary Journal and in my chapbook, A Pure River