Eight Presidents
October five. Seven years older in dog years and then your November
the day record snowfalls hit Randolph New Hampshire in forty-three
and I am thinking of something intimate and impossible to waste:
Brazil’s undiscovered caverns of amethyst endless smooth oval stones
along Washington’s moody Pacific chewing a continent. But I am wrong.
We pass St. Michael’s the cemetery that asks the public to mow and weed it
and perhaps draw larger conclusions about the already wasted and tidy up names
frayed at the edges by the ions that bind by age the chemical salt of time
that jostles stones over at their bases to remind us or alter their sentiments.
We read and read and each time nothing new has come up on their markers.
At home we hear the fishermen bring up their nets smack water to scare them.
By now the flounder’s secret pocket where its heart and everything separate
from meat and bone is cleaned and empty as a silk purse not a nickel left
down in the freezer. Nothing really shines but this: I have loved you
eight presidents. Forty years. Five point seven in dog.
Copyright Credit: Allan Peterson, "Eight Presidents" from Fragile Acts. Copyright © 2012 by Allan Peterson. Reprinted by permission of McSweeney’s Publishing.
Source: Fragile Acts (McSweeney's Publishing, 2012)