Two Poems from Hours Till Morning

Natural Law


Skinny, wriggling five-year-old,
you run euphoric off
the dock into the air above the impossible
green water, spring-fed and deep
as tomorrow, and you
drop, arms and legs like a star.
How you can burst back up
wide-mouthed like that
and not choking on the pond,
teeth to the sky
and not taking in a lungful,
makes me wonder about natural law.
But you have learned to swim,
broken your own law against buoyancy,
so who's to say what is nature?
You have learned to swim
and now anything is possible:
tying shoelaces,
riding a two-wheeler,
reading a cereal box.
I expect to find you
walking across your bedroom
ceiling, or speaking intimately
with a chickadee, or maybe
breaching every day the law
forbidding gladness, teeth to the sky,
chest brimful.

British Sterling

British Sterling wafts back thirty years
from your seat in front of mine in Latin class,
Miss Andriani standing at the board
declining love, amo, amas, amat,
my eyes on your sandy blonde head,
your long, patrician neck disappearing
into your starched oxford-cloth shirt,
container of the most magnificent shoulders, arms
that pulled me across the seat
of your father's Ford at Haulover Beach,
British Sterling intoxicating,
your neck, your beautiful face, your shirt
unbuttoned to the chest, the Atlantic
rolling onto the moonlit beach,
your mouth landing on mine
like the Allied forces of Normandy,
certain of victory.