Out of Scale

By a small-town green, a warehouse,
four stories huge, bulks like nightmare.
A railroad siding curves to meet it.
Boxcars crouch at big sliding doors.
Half this structure looks abandoned.
Blank windows, crumbled brick


at the cornice. I park to watch
a pair of skateboarders challenge
traffic on the town’s main street.
They leap the grade crossing and clack
past me without a glance. The rails
look dull, flecked with rust. Weeds


strut between the ties. The boxcars
prove this railroad’s still alive, though.
How can children thrive in towns
so cramped and sullen? What happens
if one of them casually browses
through the poetry of Rimbaud?


Luckily the clatter of skateboards
stifles dissent. Luckily
the curve of the railroad siding
limits perspective. The warehouse,
being so out of scale, suggests
how little aesthetic pleasure


one need take in the larger world.
The trees on the green look shy
and apprehensive. Houses shaded
by the warehouse look small enough
to absorb the residue of dreams.
With the skateboarders safely past,


I drive across the railroad and up
the hill, out of town, avoiding
the cop who has stopped a speeder—
blue lights flashing as a woman
with bold red hair declares herself
innocent of time and space.

A Foam Hat

Twirling like a Mexican Hat Dance,

hat-shaped, big as a sombrero,

a ring of vegetable foam,

decayed and fermented from years

of leaf-fall, whirls in a pool

below a tiny waterfall.

I’d like to shovel it up

in a coherent mass and ship it

to a museum of entropy

where tourists could admire it

and scientists could measure it

to confirm their favorite theories.

But it would collapse like angel

food cake, leaving a yellow scum.

The brook has been heady with rain.

The many little waterfalls

have yellowed with debris skimmed

from the forest floor. This foam hat

formed when no one was looking,

when leaf-matter clumped and clung

to a notion of symmetry

that survives its DNA.

Insects skim the busy current.

Striders brave the whirlpool and cling

to the rotating structure, their flat

paddle-feet pawing for a grip.

They’ll probe the foam for creatures

small enough to eat. A fish

hardly larger than the striders

noses from under the hat, flashes

its rubbery tail and disappears

downstream in a hurry. I skid

across the slippery rocks back

to land. Safely on the trail,

I note how firm the foam-hat looks

from a distance, how reverently

the circling water dandles it

as if a coronation

were about to claim this space.

Monson Two Weeks After the Tornado

Mounted police scout for looters.

The big Sunday light explores

the ruins, exposing wires, plumbing,

and pictures face-down in plaster dust.

The ridge where the tornado came down

looks like a badly shaven chin.

Walking the length of Main Street,

I note blue Condemned tags stuck

to almost every standing structure.

The pizza and coffee shops thrive,

however: the motorcycle crowd

and the state troopers expressing

burly appetites by the slice.

I’m ashamed to photograph a scene

so anticlimactic with angst but

a tattooed young woman struts

along in tiny skirt and halter,

so I follow because behind her

I can travel unnoticed. The high school

lost its roof. Opposite, a house

smashed flat, while next door a big

gray Victorian went untouched.

On a rise, the modern gym built

by the academy a few years

before it moved one town away

retains only a steel skeleton.

The school’s oldest brick building

has lost two of its three stories.

The church at the head of Main

cropped its steeple onto its lawn.

I’ve seen too much. The shudder

that passed through this village

still distempers the atmosphere.

The collapsed supermarket groans

like a vampire’s coffin. I turn

back toward my parked car and let

that decorative young woman proceed

without escort, the rubble

of plaster and downed trees coughing up

centuries of history in her wake.

Timid Bear

Timid bear.

Ghost Tree

All night its ululations rave
through its hollows. I fear
it will uproot and stalk the last
mile to my house and press
its grimace to my bedroom window
and demand I awaken and ease,
somehow, its stale desperation.
I don’t know what killed it or why

it has assumed this countenance,
but its oval gaping troubles me
the way the wind troubles whatever
remains of its pith. Last spring
a few buds exuded, a few leaves
trembled on the tips of branches,
but they fell early, leaving the tree
agape with that terrible grimace.

Now its warped geometry howls
with a grief I haven’t felt since
my oldest friend died of whiskey.
Awoken from a dream of unloved
and unfathered children, I loom
at the window and dare that tree
to present itself. The cry
of winter fills black and white spaces

etched by the glow of a planet
sinking in the west. The moon set
hours ago, and cold dawn plots
to cancel whatever the night owes
people like me. Back to bed
to cuddle with a purring cat,
the shriek of the ghost tree fading
as the wind shrugs out to sea.

Thomas Jefferson Apples

Jefferson’s Variety

Still on the trees, apples tough
as knuckles absorb the gloom.
The light over Fall Mountain
looks like the marbled endpapers
of a nineteenth-century book..

Biting into a wormy apple
called Thomas Jefferson after
its original grower, I taste
something cosmic, a distance
both sweet and bitter and only

faintly sour, a place far away
yet too familiar to fear. People
chat among the trees, swapping
hybrid apple stories, tasting
various non-forbidden fruits.

Pears and peaches, one plum tree
share the orchard plot. Chewing
Jefferson’s hybrid by myself
in the lukewarm atmosphere,
I lean against my shadow and trust

the shaggy grass to cushion me
if the light shifts and I fall.
The voices approach. Two friends
round the path and approach me.
I look as blasé as possible

and toss the core in a weed-pile
to compost for the future.
The orchard-keeper asks if I like
his favorite old variety. Yes,
yes, I like the way it complements

the sullen mountains, the sickly
but apologetic sky, the smell
of approaching rain; and the way
it nourishes a sense of loss
ornate as the laden trees.



The apples came from Morningstar Farm in Rockingham, Vermont. The photo overlooks Morningstar's pastures toward Fall Mountain in the distance.

Mushroom with Tiny Slug

This scene isn't as dramatic as the one Robert Frost described in "Design," but I thought it a pleasing composition.