Summer of Protest
Sometimes a kid
crossing a street
is just a kid
crossing a street,
his fade haircut
just a haircut,
his gait just a gait,
no matter how jaunty,
his head bob,
cords coiling
out of his ears,
just a head bob.
Sometimes
a cowboy hat
is just a cowboy hat
and the driver wearing it
is just waiting,
not seething,
and indifference is neither
arrogance nor control.
Coming Out: A Letter
One learns over time
how an impression of ease
can hide evidence of effort,
giving a dashed-off look
to what is composed,
but next to which
the improvised looks sloppy.
He was going
for dashed off,
loath to frame
what he had to say
as some big declaration,
but the strain betrayed him
like a gymnast’s tight smile
in two words lowered into a sentence
on the hooks of commas
that could as quickly
lift them back out,
the removal of an
independent clause entailing
no loss of sense, just meaning.
There had been a wife to tell,
grown children
before whom one cannot
glance over such information
any more than he could
sit me on a sofa and say it.
Only the breeziest of attitudes
that art is capable of rendering
would do
for what had been worked for
and thought through
and lived for
and through.
At Seventy
I remember when time and experience
were like throat clearers—
the sound check,
the pencil sketch,
the vomit draft,
the piano tuner’s glissando,
serum squirted out of a needle,
the first tentative,
skeptical prayer.
I don’t know if it’s a love thing, a fear thing,
a me or a her thing,
a horror of being without her
or of being alone,
just that everything
is overcome by an air of elegy,
of life running down to its end,
and this greater dread
of her mortality than mine.
Naked
In addition
to the pond
with its strand
and light-filtering conifers,
I can retrieve
her nonchalance
and assertiveness,
my incredulity and
bafflingly little lust.
I think I said
I didn’t have
a bathing suit,
but her shorts
were off, then
her blouse, bra,
and my T-shirt
and corduroys.
If there was
a monument
to this moment
would it depict
her or me? Her—
this wasn’t her
first such sight.
Stillbirth
In his eulogy
he drew upon his faith
and the iconography of his faith
to frame it in words
that rendered it beautiful
in an elegiac way,
dignified in a mournful one,
even hopeful in the sense
of the immortality of souls.
I glazed over a bit,
but who am I
to begrudge this solace,
when in his place
I’d be stifling my sorrow
or processing it solely
through what’s rational and real,
faring no better
and feeling much worse.
Michael Milburn teaches English in New Haven, CT.