1. LAST SPRING
I stuck my nose into a hornets’ nest
of blossoming wisteria, & the scent
presented me with Fleer’s
sugar-coated baseball-card gum my mother
bought me in quest
of my heroes each time she stopped
at Noble Drug for L&M’s
some thirty years ago. Late in the day
I called her up
in Florida & heard she’d had more trouble
breathing. When I lied the sun-blackened lilacs
here were still holding on, she turned
the clock back sixty years & smelled the white
lilacs at home one last time in my words.
2. EARTHBOUND
My father used an alias
while still in high school to play semi-pro
baseball on Sunday so that his God-fearing
parents, who didn’t smoke
or drink or even read the funny papers
on the Sabbath, wouldn’t see his name Monday
morning in the box score & know he’d broken
one more commandment carved in stone.
In the future, when he mowed the grass, say,
in lieu of church, he always swore
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