Two Poems

 

Looking Through Old Photographs in March

I live on both sides of it now,
and neither I'd have recognized
from the other. A small girl
in hand-me-downs holds up a gill-
strung sunfish; a bride sips from
a silver goblet. Why don't
they take pictures at funerals? --
not morbid ones of a casketed
corpse, but the light-streaked
movement of those left
behind. If I could see one now,
it's how I'd know you best.

 

Respite

My young neighbor walks down his long driveway,
his figure dim in the April dusk.
At the road he stops and becomes a tree trunk,
gray and still in the April dusk.
What is he thinking, doing, seeing? --
There is only a culvert, a mailbox, a tangle
of last year's ferns across the road.
He is not raking, digging, smoking,
only standing at the road in the April dusk.
His dogs bark after him; the fanlight comes on,
brighter than stars in the April dusk.
Whatever drew him from his house
keeps him standing still and dim
till I rise and reenter the room where my husband
is coughing, coughing in the April dusk.