Two Poems

At Twenty

Martha, who could not love me, gave me a black beauty
to fuel writing a term paper into the night. Sleepless
when the April sun flared, I tossed off the tangled bedsheet,

walked around and wandered into slumbering Fenway Park.
Taking the mound, I fired fastballs past Mantle and
sat in the relief pitchers' cart resembling a giant baseball

and yearned for her even there. A year older, she was
as wild and fey as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The night
we swayed each other stoned on the floor at a rock club,

she was tempted to love me, but she was wiser.
The Opel her adoptive parents gave her, she claimed,
was their way of getting rid of her. Right after graduating

she drove it to California and met her true love.
I discovered cheap rosé and writing poems.
Decades later, I remember her best poem,

a mystic saga about ritually burning
an ex-boyfriend's paintings in her bathtub.
In the one blurry snapshot I have, Martha is laughing.

 

Reds Fire Moon into Sky

Evening Bulletin, October 5, 1957

At eight, captivated by that metal ball
speeding around the globe
every 100 minutes in gigantic loops

from Greenland to Antarctica,
I kept parroting Sputnik's plucky cry
from outer space beep…beep…

While we'd gotten soft and lazy,
the Russians snuck right past us. Panic:
kids needed sit-ups and science classes!

On TV weeks later our bald president
unveiled the white nose cone
America had secretly blasted into space

and recovered three months earlier, a feat
the Russians could not match. He glanced
at the bold traveler resting a few feet

from his desk. It has been hundreds of miles
to outer space and back. He doffed his glasses
and turned toward it: Here it is, completely intact.

Ike had to calm us because scary Sputnik 2
orbited above us cradling Laika the astrodog.
When our scrawny satellite missile soon

snapped like a straw into a huge fireball,
leering Khrushchev mocked us.
Long months later, a stouter rocket

spewed vapor on the pad for hours
during the agonizing countdown, then finally:
blastoff! With majestic slowness it cleared

the tower and roared into the night sky
on a pillar of flame to launch America's moon,
Explorer, and restore our national honor.

I would spend endless hours
with my nose in a book of wonders,
All About Satellites and Space Ships,

reading about Wernher von Braun,
Sputniks, Explorers and the X-15,
and mooning over the sketch

of a proposed manned space rocket
with giant red delta wings
sharp as a Chevy's fabulous fins.