Southfacing

for Kim and Pam and Pat and Cathy

---

Midstate Marshlands

Capitol Air is off my back, how sweet this country breathes!

But the rust which mars the longest track has gathered in the eaves.

My Aunt is sick, still sick, on my first visit in a year.

The stem-cell harvest over and more chemo drawing near.

She met me with the faintest smile, a scarf about her head,

another green across her breast; we spoke and we broke bread.

And in her second-story flat which heaters had made dry,

we laid our coats upon a bed, unwrapping with a sigh.

And she, reluctant, shed her scarf, sent slowly sliding down her brow

I saw her head - thin, hard, and pink and, like the rough flanks of a sow,

there was hair, but light sparse hair that showed her head in plain.

And even this would soon be gone before the cool spring rain

which flushes out the Delaware can make South Jersey green again.

The marshlands, as they call them, are a wreckage 'cross midstate;

the juices of old industry lies like gravy on a plate

in greasy reds, cherubic stains of unlatched leaden pipes.

But still, through this hole and through that, long creeping grasses snipe,

and nail-white reeds patch up the land, make virginal the plain,

but each thick stalk, each jaundiced stalk, can't mask its liver-stains.

Aging Cannibals

When the snow stuck to the North side of all the trees

it looked like it was caking to the backs of old men

bent over to pick up firewood.

Breakfast Buffet

Those lightbulbs South of Chinatown, those bellies digesting gasoline

Those unripe organs, jury rigged

Ready stumps nest fat poached eggs

Cubes of cheese, grey persimmons

Heating pads for saline grapes

They gape, in hungry stench of ovens

Clean steel bins of Northern lovin'

Make me fat in trays of vinyl, chewed-out folds hash-browned and gummed

God I hunger for industry, this bridge

is lovely, beyond conserving, there should be nickel binoculars,

even the river slows to watch

its death.

Petroleum Pastoral

On symmetric branches, from the smoothest spires

perch blackhawks and osprey fierce with red,

who gorge themselves on coffee fish,

who swim upstream from airless lakes.

From across the seas in desperate migration

from the fatting lands and the deep rocksprings

come the minnows, squirming to silver glints

where live-bait skim the ocean top.

They know their course from a barreled compass;

separate, pliant, to hydraulic tides,

sometimes rushing forth into the marshes,

schooling and clotting the environs there.

I mourn the petroleum fishes, I breathe their bones

downtown, I see them in brown heaven

hesitating to acknowledge me,

who gave such little recognition this morning

after so much love in the corroborator three nights back.

Sieving the Mind

The pot is coming to a boil.

The pasta is stewing in a thin white froth,

and must be placed in a sieve.

Amazing how the water goes through so unhesitant

while not a single curious noodle slips through.

Thank god for engineers.

It has been a few days since I got back,

three days of seeing you stripped and straight-jacketed,

three days of wondering how much water they would strain from you,

and if any noodles should slip through.

After all, no hospital could be held to the exacting standards of a sieve.

It has been three days since the drive home from Jersey,

with the compass on the car always reading south,

always except when we had to take the beltway around Philadelphia in a slow oval.

It has been three days of wondering.

Three days,

and I am still facing South.