BURGOO

Uniontown, 1980

Old Ed dined on Saltines and water
and the waitresses took turns being kind
when he yelled, “Over here, honey,”
because he’d lost his wife and daughter
and, along the way, his mind.
He put a flower behind one ear
and sat down to his cracker stew,
gruff and glowering and without money,
and the girls winked, as they came near,
because winking was the
extra bit that they could do.

~~~~~~~~~~

Doug Logan

"Uniontown, 1980" also appears in Yaakov Murchada.

Evolution

When the curtain rises unsteadily,
or is pulled aside in a grating sweep,
or the whistle blows or music starts...
there they are, each precious to a few:
all corralled, some coerced, some content
or catatonic, some frozen in their tap shoes,
or chin straps loose and helmets askew,
some barely able to wait to start the race,
and one who already has! That one’s yours.
The one who doesn’t bow, but weeps.
The one picking his nose. There but for the grace.
One who wanders. One who freezes.
One who waves!!!! One who fumbles the ball.

The rites are tamer now in the pageant,
the concert, the game, the recital hall:
We will not gather on the solstice to watch Kristi C.
impaled in her tutu, or tossed, twirling, into the volcano.
Still we offer ours up to the common weal,
the common story, hoping for the best.
See which ones come through, though?
The ones who fly above the rest?
The ones who roar among the same?
These we applaud and hold up as our own.
These are security, and the future,
and our validation, and our glory!
But did you see poor... oh, what a shame.

DOL
2023

Offshore Wind, November

This deserves to be alone:
the strong north wind, southeast sun
pushing pink and orange clouds
up above the blue horizon;
the light on the far island
winking in solitude;
the leaves frantic in the streets.
But I am with it, no fault of mine,
fully charged.

If there were a way to touch ground,
to join the wind as a spark,
I would reach out to it,
Adam's finger to the deity.
I am only slightly foreign—
only, this morning,
just barely out of place here,
and close enough, close enough.

The leaves whirl around my feet;
my breath joins the slipstream.
It’s all wind and sun and leaves.
I have such small business here,
but let it be enough, the same as one gust,
one leaf, one spin, any or all.

Blow on, spiral and rise,
rise up in blue, sensate, you glories,
as we all pass through together.

DL

Evening in the Balance

Autumn Equinox 2020 

Watching with my scotch this pink sunset in September, I’m on the little porch above the yard with the fountain in the garden working hard, pushing water upward past a clog of leaves, thinking of my father a year or so before he died, resting clothed on his apartment bed, hands folded on his stomach, not at all surprised by my coming to the room, my quiet approach: “Just contemplating the infinite,” he said in the curtained afternoon.

He turned eighteen the day after Pearl Harbor. By war’s end he was a captain in the Army. He commanded a segregated truck company, but it was an older sergeant who ran things; my father taught the men to read and write, to touch home, and stayed in Germany as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, and became a historian. I think of the letters of those young men now, resting folded in old boxes under beds and in attics, words absorbed in time: “Dearest Mother, I am fine. I hope you are fine too.”

The athlete next door slings her lacrosse ball hard into a net, lunges and slings again and again this evening of the equinox. She smiles, speaks under her breath. The squirrels and chipmunks hurry. The red hummingbird feeder hangs full of sugar water. My wife drags a bag of storm-torn leaves across the yard. The bones grind in my thumb, stealing the pleasure as I write but filling me, as Yamamoto said about the Americans, with a terrible resolve.

Sounds of other neighbors laughing; sound of the fountain, the lightly lofted water falling, the whir of wings. I think now of Harold Nicolson’s letters in the war years, the many letters of a complex man, civilization and sneer crossing in his musing; grace and regrets, cheerful dread. A late-season bee silhouettes itself against the last of the sun, sharply dark, the pink of the sky now diffusing. The clothesline leaps, neither bird nor beast upon it, and the sun sinks red.

DOL

Cargo

She sinks to her knees at the edge of the riverflow,
hidden in the tawny reeds; sees the roots in the still water,
reaches her hand in, cups her palm, watches the silt rise,
wondering, “What is exalted, if not this?”

Upstream a washerwoman, hidden, whispers,
and her daughter, hidden, watches.
The day is blue and lucid and there is no one but
the wary women, neither father nor oppressor.

In each of them a rising, gathering thought:
“It is all I surely know, this river; it is greater than any man,
any land, any fear or care. It is all I need, this river,
I will return here always.”

The sun touches its apex; the washerwoman bows
and lets go her vessel. All the women lift their gaze:
A basket of reeds, black pitch in its warp and weft,
drifting, out of place, squalling, inexorable.

~~

Doug Logan, 2018