The Stretch, and: Writer's Lament

The Stretch

Like a boy with a stick
the one-eyed deer rattles his antlers
along the chain link fence, catches
the horns in the holes then
leans back for a long neck pull.
The maimed turkey sharing his pen
preens, being clucked at by the crowd.
The deer blinks his rheumy eye, lifts his tail,
lets loose a rope of brown beads.
His head crowned in a misery of gnats.

Children shout through the fence, poke
their fingers: Jack, Jack, One-Eyed Jack
as if he were a favorite sleeping toy
ratty from too many washings. Who knows
what he remembers before the BB
and the burning, or blind-sided by this
half-life of decrepit glamor, he's forgotten
the bit of wildness he was. As far as I can see

he knows getting up and lying down.
He knows feeding from the trough.
But when the sun goes down, I like to think
the darkness knows, spreading out to look for him,
tapping with the moon's white stick over half the earth.

Writer's Lament

The trouble is, I'm distracted.
So many trees pressing their October
to my window, waggling for attention,
demanding fitting adjectives for each leaf
before Hail Mary and the letting go.
Each red emergency, each shimmy
and sail insisting on a proper obituary
while the longleaf pine
sporting their short-lived immortality
want documents to that effect.
I've tried turning away
only to face four walls filled with
boredom and abandoned poems
not to mention reruns of old movies
starring me as Mother Teresa
or Emma Bovary. But when I finally
get around to forgive my excesses
and sharpen my sixty pencils, I hear
this desperate rustling outside, and the
suicidal thunk of falling nuts and cones
and realize how much I'm needed – shrink
and lexicographer of woody plants –
my job, my job.
          No, there's no way out
but through, as Frost said. Coming from
New England where all that chopping,
chipping's going on, don't tell me
that old woods watcher wasn't talking
about trees. After apple picking
one has a yen to put the ladders away,
take a drive, see the colors.
                              I suppose
I could write at night when there is
no color – the pen feeling its way –
but the world outside my window
simmers in silvertone, and the trees
rattle like shivering ghosts
holding on to their rags of moonlight,
terrified all bark and branch
will disappear. For it is light, prism-
bent and ironed into spectrum
then bounced off the body
that makes us seen, and how desperate
the world's things are to be seen –
absorbing light like a saint
then flashing it out again imitating a sequin
panting on a pasty. Even the boulder
flicks out its little mica tongues to catch it.

And so I spend my days
pasting words on the dying, waiting
for winter to kick in and the forest to clear out
so the sun can blast through and I can stand
once again at my allotted window, absorbing,
absorbed.