BIKE IN THE GARAGE
mounted on the work-out stand
spindly creature to climb on and sit
legs churning in high gear
into vanishing turns by vast fields
under wan blue sky
where I drift
no careening into fear
stonewalls traffic or ditch
trusting my quads to burn
warn me to cease for the day
heart thudding and breath rapid then easing
easy as leisure to scan the local scene
framed by the automatic door
A leashed lab and military boxer
strain for each other briefly in passing
watched by the Siamese on the kitchen sill across
orange basketball bonking one drive down
where a gangly kid dribbles between his legs
scores setback 3’s in a cranial game
trim young mother in black tights powerwalking
pink dumbbells in hand and infant in a sling
skimmed by two boys on skateboards that screech
lawnmower groaning through spring surge
in its own blue fumes where the street gains shade
of old trees that hurl a murmuration of starlings
into the sky like crazed punctuation
and I stand on the pedals thinking to dismount
in fear of being understood
.
BACK AHEAD
sodium street lights hover, minister sulfrous dusk
and warmed asphalt. Red taillights, yellow caution lights
flash the windshield, the school bus
that ran over the crazed dog half a century ago
as it leapt a snowbank to get to you.
Books slid from your hands. You were just
getting home …come to think …as now,
back ahead, where you grew, as they say, up …
same bus carting the visiting team away, ten years after
the crushed dog, winter air clarifying (did you win or lose?)
as you walk to your house, no shower, or shortcut, game sweat
freezing in your hair, ears frying at the edges,
expecting the porch step creak that father and uncles
said they’d fix, but never could because that crisp pain,
that step’s complaint in their ears said they were absolutely
there, aware of stuff like the cardamom smell of Nana’s “nisu,”
or the glint of the bottle of vodka stuck in the snow
shaded by the garage with its crotchety doors
and oil soaked dirt floor. The dog buried out back.
The bus stutters to a stop, brakes squeal, door whacks open,
hushes shut, gears crash, having delivered children, a dog,
as it ranges into the past, spinning exhaust.
.
WHO HASN’T WANTED TO KNOW
how they dug those wells, those holes in the ground
for plain wood houses, often on the lawn facing the road
where people could see serious living going on.
A boy, cranking, spilling the well’s pail into the wooden chute
to the kitchen pail beneath and carrying it, two handed and bent
to the only kitchen on earth.
The child peered down there once in a while
once dropped a pebble to see if it said anything, like “plick,”
a sound the poet in any kid never gets sick of.
“Plick” in the throat of the fundament.
Gray men in black, wearing fedora, shoveled a grave-deep crater,
then with a horse-hauled steel scoop deepened and widened that
over weeks from the center upslope and out, hauling dirt and
stones and boulders onto the margin, kept at it until the depth
was bomb crater wide and the scoop hit water 30 feet down,
sure seepage around which the men down there set a first
four foot ring of close fit boulders, chinked with rocks and stones,
dirt piled in behind as up the stone rings rose, each tier tipped out
ever so slightly, the stones weighing on each other, binding,
bonding, the well widening toward sky reflected in the water
three four five feet deep every Fall for a century,
and damn near full come Spring.
There is a “lost” pail at the bottom, the first used, buried
in the sandy mud during WW1 when the men were away.
It must remain there. Because a pissed off wife
ceremoniously tossed in her wedding ring, an angry child
her doll, a father his jackknife handled carelessly, and once
a rabbit chased under the deck by the dog. How long did the rabbit
claw the stones before sinking, bloating, rising toward the sky
and our faces when we fished it, the new pail heavier than life,
from a hole we still can’t fathom. But for “plick.”
BIO
Paul Nelson directed creative writing for Ohio University for years. Ten books of poetry. AWP winner. University of Alabama Press Selection. NEA. First book of fiction REFRIGERATOR CHURCH, Tailwinds Press, 2018. New book of poetry coming Spring, ’22. New ms. of fiction, CANARY ON THE KITCHEN, ready, as is a new ms. of poetry: JUST BREATHING. Paul Nelson’s poetry has won the AWP Award for Poetry, the University of Alabama Press Series Award, and an NEA Fellowship. For a decade he was Professor/Director of Creative Writing, Ohio University. His 9th book of poetry, Learning to Miss, Guernica Editions, 2018, and his first book of fiction, Refrigerator Church, Tailwinds Press, NYC, 2019, are on Amazon Books. The title story and the novella, Gloria Artichokes, from this book, have each been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has moved back to Maine, his native land.
