Shelter in Place, 2020
This would have
been mid-March,
just as we realized
we didn’t walk well together,
me striding ahead
for calories burned
while she scanned
puddles for frogs,
and once, I couldn’t believe it,
sat on one of the iron benches
to just, apparently, be.
That’s when she saw them,
shell to shell along a log,
bodies retracted
to look like bark or moss
or round stones
a kid placed there
or a giant his coins.
She called me back
with a glint in her voice
of knowing I’d glance, grunt,
and as if late for something
start to edge away,
but this time I lingered
to see if the shut-ins
would stir. None did.
It was still early days.
Everyone was safe at home.
The Medium
after David Jackson
This poem isn’t mine.
–James Merrill
I met him at a reading Merrill gave alongside
the actor Peter Hooten,
the younger lover
who’d supplanted him
and now voiced spirits
at performances
of Merrill’s Ouija board epic
on which Jackson
had shared séance duty
but neither authorship nor fame,
the latter poison
between writers,
one prolific, then popular, the other unpublished, then blocked.
Merrill introduced him
after being introduced—
“And this is David Jackson,”
as in “The Honorable So-and-So and wife,”
the wife a bored-seeming,
ravaged, Waspy-looking guy, dashing in old photos,
now pure entourage,
unlike Hooten,
fit, loud, confident,
declaiming lines
the dead had spoken
through the teacup-tracing
hand of Jackson
as Merrill transcribed,
begging the question
of whether he faked it
for love or poetry or getting as close
as he could to both.
Wisdom
1.
Parents embody it best, though less in the sense of knowing anything extra than what gets one through.
2.
My father followed his
with a suit yourself sniff
like the saved resort to.
Dad and religion— you gotta love
their conviction.
3.
Sages don’t have answers so much as say them well, which is what cults
come down to, too.
4.
As to whether one accrues it just by living,
it’s more that you’ve run your experiment
longer and with more mice
than the other guy, which doesn’t make ignorant instinct any less profound.
The Arborist
He can tell by looking which limb
will fall or
trunk cleave
more than it
already has,
which trees
a gale like
last month’s
might bend
to the point
of roots rising
up from earth as the mast lies down
in its bed of branches.
He diagnoses
my entire yard
using knowledge
that experience
bores inside us,
acquired by all
who go around
appraising houses,
bodies, weather,
landscape, lives.
Give me a student comp
and I can do it
or when my son fears
that his unborn child
will steal his ambition,
independence, time,
all dangers I dismiss,
disproven by himself, who took
everything but what
I worried he would.
Michael Milburn lives in New Haven, CT., where he teaches English.