On My 11-Year-Old Daughter Spotting the Family Dog Who Was Given Away During a Divorce

Old dog,

We gave you away.

And there you were 
One late August afternoon,

When I was 11 and playing goalie

On a club soccer team,

Your traipsed along the field alone,

Near your new private-school home.

On the grassy rise,

I saw you sniff your way,

Looking a little bigger

And milling about.

I remember you

When you were a pup.

How I loved you.

Now great distances

Separate us —
And the narrow passage

Of time in a dog's mind

And the vastness 
Of my little girl's mind

Cracks my heart a little,

Places a fissure in it,

That will scar over,

But never fully heal.

Taking Down the Crib

Everything that came together comes apart.
The screws, the bolts, the springs,
So carefully placed just a few years ago.

There's a faint scent of baby pee and vomit,
Mercifully offset by something sweet that speaks
Of powder and bubble baths.

The Unrecycled Life

On the day I realized my marriage of 16 years was over, I stopped recycling. The plastic Diet Coke bottles, yesterday’s Boston Globe, GQ magazines, the Campbell’s tomato soup cans — they all were tossed into a single large opaque-green plastic bag. I felt a twinge of guilt when I threw it into the dumpster at my town’s landfill under the suspicious eye of the Public Works Department employee, but it was so freeing to put it all in a bag and let it go — plunk — in with all the other trash. Of course, I was at risk of incurring fines, because recycling is mandatory in my hometown. I was able to get away with it, though. Living suddenly alone, I generated less trash and ate in my car, buying chicken wraps at McDonald’s and Diet Cokes. That trash I could toss when I topped off my tank at the gas station in those dark receptacles with the removable top with the small holes that attempt to limit the volume of your refuse. I would jam it through the hole or quickly take off the top and drop the bag in. More frequently, on my way home from Boston, I would pull into the McDonald’s on Route 1 in Saugus and order another divorcingman’s meal of two chicken wraps ("with chipotle sauce, please") and a Diet Coke. After I had paid at the first window and picked up my food at the second, I would gather up the wrappers and cup from the night before and throw the trash into the mouth of the reptilian-like red plastic receptacle conveniently placed now along the driver’s side of your car as you exit McDonald’s. Fast food meets fast trash.

Months into my divorce, which rapidly grew messy and ugly with lawyers and child custody and financial issues, I started using those opaque tan or white plastic bags from the grocery store to collect my trash from the evening meal (paper plates, plastic cups, a couple of paper towels, leftover rice, chicken bones). I’d hang it on the pantry door in my empty, child-less house and fill it up. If I chewed a piece of gum, it would go in there. If I blew my nose in Kleenex, I’d toss it there. A pen lacking ink, boom, in the bag. I was careful not to discard any letters or mail in there, because household trash disposal at gas stations and elsewhere is frowned upon and some unlucky schmuck will pick through what looks to be illegally tossed trash in a search for clues, like an old cable TV bill bearing the perpetrator's telltale address. I have heard you typically get a letter of warning, but I never got one because I was careful. All the mail and envelopes that I didn’t need would go into my Vermont Castings Resolute woodstove. I would use a wooden match to light the paper  — watching with an uneasy delight as the flame licked and crawled across the pyre, my name and address burning from orange to blue to brown to black, destroying and consuming everything in its path. It gave me the feeling of finality and obliteration that blazed all around me.

January 1, 2012

Begin again
In this interminable gray,
The only color left
On the palette.

The color of my mind defeats it,
Dabbing and swirling
Blues and greens and reds.
And so on.

I will never relinquish the fire crackling at my core.
My 47-year-old self seeks out
The boy within — bright-eyed, yearning,
Brimming with hope.

He has endured the years,
Breathing here in the present.
The clock keeps ticking, but my time
Moves to the measure of my heart.

After the Harvest

In spring, buried seeds sprout

in time to grow and bear

fruit and flower.

Arc of light widens horizons as

earth weaves its tapestry of days

and nights around our star.

Light rises ever higher

till all is crescendo, abundant, wild,

and somehow overgrown.

In time, sun and light

fade to seek another angle.

Decay sets in with surety.

Seed husks and weed-clotted soil

dry to be gathered.

It will rise in time

but it must die 

to silt in,
adding to life.

Darkness and cold come, and

the days lack the warming promise 

of spring’s sun-kissed cool.

Back then we knew it 

illuminated the path ahead.

We may return in time again

but not before we discard and

welcome the decay to cultivate

renewed soil from the harvest.

The Seeds of Grievance

Bitter seeds appear in the spring soil:

The askew look, the late arrival,

Or the icy response to a question.

You allow them to germinate.

Ignored, they yield more seeds
That scatter in the the wind.

Days, weeks, years pile up.

Kids, dogs, bills, jobs, car repairs,

Bathroom renovations silt in.

The weeds keep taking root,

Birds come, eat the seeds, fly away,

Shit them out around the yard.

Soon, weeds poke up everywhere,

Choking the flower beds,

Denying their inherent elegance.

No need to pull and cultivate.

You have too much pride and hurt

To do that — until one day everywhere

Flourish weeds, weeds, weeds!

And the flower beds vanish, memories

Lost under Time’s soil, forever.

This Poem Sucks

I know, I know,

The title gives it away,

But I felt like writing it anyway.

It is just that I like to type sometimes

And forget about the internal rhymes,

Or the meaning of the words,

Or the futile stabs at the ineffable.

Forget about all that,

And just let me write

A poem that sucks.

Let me simply add adverbs

And adjectives willy-nilly,

And abandon the grounded nouns

And verbs with verve that vivify.

It's hot outside. It's summertime.

Let it suck, and suck badly, and let me

Cop out and see what happens.

Let me lower my standards,

Not that I had any to begin with.

Blah, blah, blah.

This poem really, really sucks.

And here’s the three-line kicker 

(which in and of itself also sucks):

I enjoyed writing this poem.