PIECE WORK

In busy season the cutters didn't go home.

Food was brought in -- thick slices of bread,

Wheels of cheese, apples, radishes,

Urns of sugary tea with lemon but no milk.

When the men slept for a few hours

They stretched out on the work tables

Sharing dreams, bright-colored but patched

With rags held on by tiny, even stitches.

 (What am I if not one of those dreams?)

JUST SO

If I unroll my fingers just so
The gesture may continue
Into the air, growing freer
Passing from tree to tree
Then carried and elaborated
By half an oak leaf here
A torn paper wrapper there.
Translating itself, it is
A riffed sequence of notes
Or a play of colors
Dancing on the water
Or, looking like a girl,
It pays the ferryman
With a coin and a brief smile.
So tired it will be,
So changed, with beads
Woven in its hair, you
Will scarce know it as mine
When it touches your hand

DRAFT

If you're an emperor you must
Learn to wear your nakedness
Casually, pulling it around you,
Lifting your heels slightly
To avoid tripping on the cuffs.
Loneliness and rags are watching.

WINTER

If once the Winter King had fur-lined robes.

Thick gloves, warm boots, they are long gone.

His clothes are rags and thin to transparency

When I was a boy I would see him sometimes

Joining the used up men who would gather

Around oil drum trash fires, flaring high

They’d shuffle aside and make space for him

As should not courtiers for their king?.

ON ELIA'S TRASH BIN

It has been a while since I read it, I admit;

Still, I’m fairly certain that Charles Lamb,

When he wrote his great essay on retirement,

“”The Superannuated Man,” did not say a word

About standing in the rain scrubbing a trash bin

With chlorine bleach.

                                                He must have had a bin.

Did his sister Mary clean it? Or, perhaps,

When his friends – Keats and Coleridge,

Hazlitt and De Quincy and Jem White –

Grew worn from too much wine and wit

They picked up the rags and soapy water

And set to.