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Promenade
Bowne Park, Queens. Labor Day morning. A man stumbles across a wedding.
This is the brief departure from the norm
that celebrates the norm. The wind is warm
and constant through the field set at the heart
of the impervious borough, yet apart.
This day and this place, born from other days
and places as a parenthetic phrase,
and this sky, where a businessman may write
the purposeless, brief beauty of a kite,
are like the possibilities of love.
The kite leaps up, rasps fifty feet above
until it is almost unusual,
and fastens there. The windâs predictable
but private method with it sets it free
to dive toward greater plausibility
and finish its digression in the wide
municipal burlesque of countryside.
What distantly appear to be festoons
of white, white bunting, trefoils of balloons
in white, improve the black affectless trees
where three girls stand like caryatides
patiently holding crepe bells to a bough.
Something exceptional will happen now.
But first the fat, black, windswept frock will swerve
past the buffet to steal one more hors dâoeuvre.
He floats like an umbrella back to where
his book is, smoothes his robe, and smoothes his hair.
Yellow grass undulates beneath the breeze.
Couples file through the corridor of trees
toward rows of folding seats. Bridesmaids unhook
from groomsmenâs arms. Every face turns to look;
and when the brideâs tall orange bunâs unpinned
by ordinary, inconvenient wind,
all, in the breath it takes a yard of hair
to blaze like lighted aerosol, would swear
there was no greater miracle in Queens.
Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means.
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Two New Fish
Inside the knotted plastic bag he tossed
and caught in front of him the whole way home
were two new fish. They seemed to him to bear
a trademark not quite rare, as though the two
were penknife souvenirs from the next county.
The fish were alien and mediocre.
He felt his strength as if it were a bomb
that detonates with no complexity
of wires or clocks, fuse or even impact.
His tosses changed without much thought to heaves.
They arced, slowed, hung like miniature flames
trapped in a bubble, glanced the power lines . . .
The fish sped back an inch and forth an inch
in the bag cupped in the boyâs hands, and then
not in his hands at all, then on the grass.
He rolled the bag experimentally
over the gravel drive to demonstrate
again how well he kept from breaking it.
He hung it on a stick and jabbed the air
fitfully, like a hobo shooing bees.
He did his undecided best to burst
and also not to burst the bag. And when
within these limits neither fish had died,
the boy put down the bag and went inside.
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A Questionable Mother
The camera crews were gone home for the evening,
an infant dead, but then again, as always,
the white globes fading on above the entrance.
The estranged boyfriend stayed with family, resting.
The suspectâs parents clasped hands in the foyer.
Their daughter was once more a daughter only,
yet, blood or no, unsound or no, no daughter.
Not calm but quiet settled in the station,
in all whoâd heard her cry they must believe her.
The suspectâs father petted a police dog,
and felt, without remarking, it was pregnant.
The cracked, hard leather chairs were now familiar.
Lifeâs fell astonishments were now familiar.
Here thoughts of murder werenât all that uncommon.
Nakedness was uncovered by the hour.
Within, the suspect cried they must believe her.
The female officer behind a window
of thick green glass typed slowly without stopping.
Beneath the squat cap holding in her hairdo,
her face suggested she withheld her judgment.
The unleashed shepherd lay beside her, licking.
She didnât look at it, but typed on, thinking
animals always know when they are dirty.
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The House Swap
That night the town was far behind somewhere,
and now the city lay there in the road,
a ve...
