Lunch at the Molly Pitcher Inn

I squint against
the brightness of early-afternoon
beyond the picture window,
because the man at the table to my right
is alone and ordering for two: She’s stuck
at the train tracks. We’ll both
have the chicken, and the man
at the table to my left has
a tributary of dried blood trailing
from his ear. He is laughing,
which makes it worse
because I know he knows
what is sad about this place,
what is sad about a wife who
can’t quite look at you
in focus.

And they know
Autumn is poorer in hope
than winter, because
they know what will come.
The beginning
is so far from the end
that it is an end in itself.

My grandmother’s skin hangs looser on her arms
than I remember. She tugs down fleece sleeves
when she notices I’m looking.
My soup has cooled, my spoon
forgotten and limp
among the onions.

Outside, vacant docks line the Navesink
and cold little houses huddled on a hill
remember the cranberries and cobalts
that painted their faces in
hungrier days.

A Rainy Weekend on Top of Mont-Royal

i.
Some plum trees, near winter:
hard, bald fruit and
six or so yellow leaves
shivering on tips of
twisted Van Gogh branches—
stiff shoulders, arms lifted
in praise: these I know.
And the bare-knuckle, fallen
raw wound plums: purple
pock marks on a dry lawn, rotting
in the churchyard. These
I know.

ii.
On the corner of Sainte-Catherine
and Rue Crescent: a lit match,
quivering ruby smudge in a
fog gray night. (I know, at least,
the smell.) Thirty dollars richer in gin,
I know the swimming through
crowds of chills. I know the
bar doors opening and
closing like coral polyps, and
I know their insides: a hollow sound,
smooth pink underbellies.
Sticky floors.

iii.
Yesterday was years ago, waiting
for the metro at Champ-de-Mars.
I knew the cold
smell, the eclipse of
black coffee in a white cup.
Today I folded words, days-old
into paper cranes and
set them forcedly free,
leaning and aching
in the hotel sink. I don’t know
words any more, I don’t know
a city, a November
weekend with
you in it.

The Day Before Thanksgiving in Red Bank, New Jersey

My father’s dreams were
born and raised on Coney Island.
I see them from an overlook
atop the bluffs of Sandy Hook,
the familiar mix of forest, farmland and
billowing power plant at my back.
Brooklyn is tiny and fogged, delicate
from a distance, but New Jersey
knows everything
through gray-tinted lenses.

Nineteen Rosemary Drive
is a tan clapboard house
with two sets of stairs leading to
two different doors leading to
where my mother ate and slept until
the beckoning of exotic Navesink River Road
became too tempting to ignore any longer.
My grandmother sleeps in the bed
next to me, a little less nostalgic
and probably remembering lightly
how hard it was to leave here
for a sunnier kind of run-down town.

My mother gets lost on a country road
and wonders aloud when
trees began outnumbering street signs
in Monmouth County.
About a mile down, after some railroad tracks
and more blank Autumn,
ten deer stir next to the road,
a sign with an arrow pointing West
and a slight and peeling RED BANK, 2 MILES
just beyond them
in startling green.

cigarette break

the moon, opal
smudge on fog,
just a reminder
of what to miss
once it's gone.