It takes courage to stand 
on a spire, peering down
parachute strapped to your 
back, then jump

It takes courage to run 
into the burning fire
or face an unseen foe
who shoots you

But a slower courage
a brave glacial courage 
is wanted for that bullet
time of age, advancing

years falling past, endless
echoes of your eighteen
year old, thirty-something
fifty-ish birthday selves

advising, revising 
and asking why does the
simple act of waking
and standing seem so hard 

when once it was so easy? 

extended light–

Her parents died in Nashville,

The couple tastes like grass and gasoline.
Party drinks, tea, line the gazebo rails— 

ink black,  
strangest the magazines flip to 

pages containing hats, 
and cords of rope sustaining two who 

make love in pain under the weeping 
black elms, toes torturous bent 

like sacrificial doves, wings rent impossible, 
back to front, folded back.

Then something slow a whimpering 
called out a song, loud like dying. 

A rhapsody. Neither knew from music, 

or a skirt hung around knees 
while roasted pig served with noodles

fed the group of carousers with largesse.
Of all nights, one night’s groaning call of yes.

I always watch.
I feel I have nothing to add so I watch.
The world on its own can go on without me,
Stumble and fall and get back up again.
I have nothing to add so I watch.
But I want to help the one who stumbles and falls.
Sit with them on the ground while they nurse their pain,
offer first aid,
call an ambulance,
notify a loved one,
hold their hand until someone comes and takes them away
and makes them whole.
And though I never see or hear from them again
I hope I add something.
So I always watch.

Battered badgered ruminants, 
Not true, by
The way, like
Water Buffalo, but
(bison bison bison)
None the less.
Punctuate the sentence,
Mostly, with lapses,
Some, made when
I drift my 
Gaze to grass
Green highway signs,
Lake Erie starboard,
Steady, focus, count:
Seven times five,
Four spaces plus
An end mark–
That’s forty rows
of Buffalo! Too
Wordy a herd
To fit a
Page or web, 
So like Charlotte 
Does, Omit some
Rows, give praise,
Believe some universal
Momentum makes me
As swift, shrewd, 
Baffling, outwitting, confused
Here on interstate
 90 as this
Exit’s steely namesake.

Your black and deep eyes
are openings to caves,
the kind where rabbis slept
when Jerusalem fell
as enemies lurked in the hills.

You are so tired now.
Your Great War is finished,
that brush of beard hides
the rush of age, the wife
and daughter you lost.

I have seen you before: 1894,
posed for another shot,
derby, waist coat, watch fob,
legs youthfully crossed at the knees.
Message received: you were free.

The final photo is missing.
Thirteen years in your future,
back of the store in Clairton, Pa.,
my boy of a dad sad as he heard
his half-brother wail, “The tata is dead!”

my therapist wants me to work the fourth step 

but i can’t find compassion for 

the resentment i have built up 

i can’t find what i did wrong 

because i was a kid

a child led astray by someone 

who was supposed to love 

& protect them 

my therapist says maybe we 

aren’t there yet

maybe we are on steps one and two 

i can admit that i am powerless 

against my emotions 

they make my life unmanageable 

but i’m having a hard time 

with believing there is a 

power greater 

no,

maybe not that there is a power

but what that power is 

how can i just turn my life over

to something i can’t grasp 

to something invisable

yet seen by so many 

i have yet to see it with my own 

eyes, thus i have 

yet to beileve 

The child presses nose on train window, breath blooming white; he disappears.