On a cool March night
I follow the railroad
reciting what Keats I’ve retained
A plane crosses low parts
a quiet that laps back in
Darkness rises from underbrush
falls from slate clouds The faint
warmth of day slinks away
Something about bees
about ripeness “more
and still more” Traffic drones—
rises ebbs Another plane
descends toward lights They must
be stacked up burning fuel
waiting their turn I pause
on the viaduct as a stout man
pushes a cart underneath He’s reaped
his share of empties and walked
ten miles in a day’s slow circuit
but cops pass too often for him
to rest here tonight Bats wheel above beeping through the chill.
Interval
A bloom, after all—the algae
shimmers with green midday
luminescence. A man and a boy
and a girl sit at a dock’s end
ensconced in rarest silence,
fishing for whatever will nibble.
Though it’s fall, they wear shorts
and flip-flops. The still air
feels like a breath wafting west
from a steel mill in Detroit.
I rest my bike against a tree
and stroll past geese who sneer
and hiss. Today, no heron waits
in shallows opposite, his storm-
blue neck slowly turning.
No breeze stirs the lake’s bright
surface as a whiff of something
fetid rises in the heat and three
figures quicken a quiet dock
and a dad helps a small girl
slip a worm onto a hook.
Michael Lauchlan’s most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from Wayne State University Press (2015). His poems appear in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Innisfree, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Harpur Palate, and Southern Poetry Review. Poems are forthcoming in Radar and Rhino.
