I like how Whiteface Mountain shoulders
a raincloud; it makes me happy enough
to forgive you. But then the clapping
of a large Japanese family in the dining
room reminds me dreams have no place
at work, so I open more bottles of wine
as the family tip their heads like sunflowers
for the guest of honor: a 90-year-old who
survived Guadalcanal. He smiles and raises
his hand and his wife cries across the table.
They all sing a song in Japanese and everyone
claps again and I feel more foreign than usual
even though I hear my chef yelling he's sick
of servers who don't punch their tickets
and leave plates to die beneath the heat lamps.
The bartender's drunk again and I smile
as his clumsy olives teeter into fogged
glasses and drink straws sliver the mahogany,
wet and abandoned. The old man stands up
and recites a poem by Basho, the one about
great soldiers and how summer grasses
are all that remain of their dreams, and I
understand and want him to reveal what
that last night was like: the mud and the stench,
the blood a river in search of a name, but know
better than to interrupt, know better than to embrace
a man lost in what it was that saved him. ~~Christopher Locke

Against Despair (a pastoral)

When we dragged ourselves out of doors
for light, for a respite from our telling
cruelties, we went to a great field charred
pink with azalea and small fountains

of jimson weed flung wild before us,
a walking path shaved low and belting
the land as one. Then a spurt of yellow as
two bobolinks carved the sky with animal

heat and voices like a translation of water.
Later, walking home, both of us dulled by
private sorrows, last chances ruined. And
we, we always tried to make sense of it all,

even as the day turned cold and late, even as
dusk called the first stars up out of their graves.~~Christopher Locke