Next to the iPad,
horn rim readers,
a book of postage stamps,
and a rubber eraser.

Were I to borrow
seven words to build a poem
which ones would you be willing to lend?

white Styrofoam cup
waits for waitress fill up,
out of cigarettes!

If I saw your handwriting
would I know
whether you were taught
cursive by nuns
or a teacher
on the public's payroll?
Does your hand calligraphically flow,
from a favorite Mount Blanc pen,
or do you print
using a ******'s pencil
made by the millions
by Chinamen?

It takes forty sap gall0ns
to 'still one gallon of maple syrup,
boiled down by the sun stored in firewood.
I remember well, my aunt Florence
feeding the boilers in the hill orchard sugar house,
wearing an old going-to-church dress,
that had, some years back, been handed down to workday chores
and on top covered over by uncle Fred's red and black mackinaw.
"Stand back," she said as she opened the boiler door
first the roar, then a bank of fire that painted
her from kerchief to boots flaming red,
her eyeglasses, two pools of glowing magma,
and everything above was steam and rising vapors.
In my mind's eye then and now when I read Dante
I'll think of her, she was and is, the very vision of a devil tender.

I had a terrible dream
that I was Ethan Frome
and you lived in Vermont
and it was cold as hell
but you were hot, hot.
You were married and I was not,
or was it I that was married?
"Knock, knock"
"Open up it's the sheriff,
there's been a terrible accident."
"Knock, Knock"

Now I feel remorse
having besmirched this clean page
with these very words.