The city laughs

by Jeremy Marks

The city laughs because
you laugh
and I have laughed
in the downtown park.

It is distinguished by an old gnarled oak
of patrimony unknown and it was probably grown
under the hand of some steward long passed
who would sing while she worked.

Now it succumbs to one buckling groan of frost
before being sprung up like a laugh, again.

Charon's Obal

by Jeremy Marks

The beds are white
with falling snow

and very still in their
ankling salt pools

a mariner, his ship comes
into the cove

and the ripples grow
over a silent gathering

of hungry fish. They are
plucked and netted

speared and baited
like a bear in dark chambers.

Many beds white with
light and linen

crisp and wintry
and hidden

from the wind, there is
no longer rain

and still no fruit when the
Moon shines full through

the glass. The nurse draws
the curtains back and a

doctor enters:
what have we here

jotting, reading
lie back, shimmy for me

there, that is better.

The next day the water
is still and I surprise you

with pearls.

Charon’s obal, you say-

Stalking Horses

by Jeremy Marks

I send out at night
my stalking horses

They report to me
            at dawn
behind the firewood shed.

My children feel that I turn
into a four-legged, centaur-like man
while they are sleeping

That my eyes are seated behind
a pair of large globes
catching the sinuous, roving robe
of equine landscapes

But they do not-

The horses are their own;
they stalk for themselves
through many a darkness
I know not

And they are not mine-
we merely share this patch of Earth

I bought off a man
-as I bought them

And all of us were then turned loose
upon ourselves.

A Day Later

by Jeremy Marks                            

Bones glistening with fat are lying flat and carelessly stacked in a smoldering pit on the beach. Scampering beyond this bowl of ash and sand are the last smoldering cinders of pine; they dance among the scattered thorax of Blue Crabs; the cracked and crevassed.

The fire feasters were too full and now the gulls will have their way; they loop, descend, hover and spear on raised feet. There is meadow hay encircling this small place; it snares ribbons of smoke along its stalks.

The bay is water barely blue -the fog vapor is gray. Morning is a mixing of water and mist in a dim overlay of weak sunlight. First there is no shore, and then there is no beach. There is just so much bay.

On a strange loblolly branch, held high and newly dead, a pair of bald eagles chitters. They grind their beaks to bark in blench dawn; the sun front-lighting their milk white domes. When they stop, they wait; both pairs of eyes catch the silent gray light drawn like a shade up their yellow bills. The night is shed like old skin.

The eagles spy the offshore with its shallows; like osprey, they know how the fish go. A salt breeze moves through the trees; anchored skiffs knock together and there are buoys.

Grey September

by Jeremy Marks

Leaves and shovels

leave them where they fall.

Where we have dug a whole
peripatetic little feet
will fill it.

This pit won’t swell, tumbling
the gardens, house and street
when it rains, as it settles.

The noise of children
is floating above
the careless bludgeon
of their parents

all of it resting on a handle
beneath the leaves
by a tree
tossed across a stump.

Towhead

by Jeremy Marks

I push off from the dock quietly and its brown
end slides away into the morning fog. This coolness
is misleading, shouldn’t the water’s breath be warm?

A heron emerges becoming a stick; I cannot
figure how it got here, what with shore so
far off.

My oars touch the bottom.

Somewhere I heard that you cannot trust your eyes;
that is until I read that the eyes must guide the mind.

Most of the time my fondest wish is embodied
by a small boat crossing something flat and wide
with the mind a towhead.