I saw a Muskellunge
Snap a tiny Loon
Out of its mother's wake
Leaving her to circle
The floating down
And cry
That primal cry
That echoes
Through the north woods.

The ghosts of the dead give no shade
In this cemetery of stumps.
Elsewhere, the seeds left behind
Sprouted, and the forest lived again.
Not so on Kingston plain,
Where the life of the very soil failed,
Now a field of Bracken fern and lichen.
But, here and there,
An Aspen lifts it's quaking leaves.
In the shade, the lichens yield,
And grass grows again.
"Perhaps in another hundred years",
The ghosts whisper.

Are you still alive?
Or did your mother’s mistake
Give birth to a child
With her own death already within?
I remember your head on my shoulder
When you told me
“I’ll probably be okay.
But I might need a hysterectomy.”
You never gave me the chance
To face that future with you.
“Maybe we both needed it,”
As you closed the door
I looked you up on Facebook
You’d be sixty-eight now,
If you lived.

The teacher traced the golden lines
Across his Mercator projection,
(Now considered imperialist.)
The Frigid zone:
Where people live only to survive
The Torrid zone:
Where life is too easy
We should be grateful
To live in the Temperate zone:
Where the challenge of the seasons
Makes men prepare and plan
And make their alabaster cities gleam
How cruel of us
To deny them
Our metaphor.

Why must I die?
I asked the man in the black robe
As he sharpened his bone-white knife
My time here has been so short
He stepped closer
And smiled
(Why does death smile)?
You should be grateful
Everyone must face me
Naked and alone
Unable to flee or cajole or bargain
Or bully
He lifted his blade
Or would you prefer
An immortal ******?

I remember sitting at the top of the stairs
At night
To hear adult secrets from below.
They talked about Polio
And Selma.
“We’ll have to keep his bedroom window closed.”
“Did you hear that sheriff with the sunglasses?”
I remember the iron lung wards,
Like graveyards for the living.
I asked my father if the protestors were crazy.
He said “no.”
I remember they called Sabin a hero,
The March of Dimes moved on.
We moved to an integrated school.
“I’m not colored,” Olonzo told me.  “I’m black.”
I remember mounting tapes on the night shift
With Don.
We played chess when it got quiet.
We joked about playing black and white
Until he got killed.
Now Black Lives Matter
And my mask hangs next to the car keys.

I couldn’t find the car
So, I walked that night
Past tall stone churches,
And trees too big,
And gardens with wizards hiding in the corners.
I shouted in the courtyard of echoes
Was dazzled in the hall of illusions
I walked in bare feet
Through fields of herbs
By secret ponds of golden fish
And looked through the window
At the iron towers
Silhouetted by the blue dawn.
Until they told me
It was time to go.