2 Poems

It is a cluster in the constellation Cancer

and a crab shack near the Shell station on Telegraph Road.

The polysemy and the lump crab sandwiches are delicious.

The trains in these parts can hobble your commute, and if your inclination

is not to trust lump crab from a shot-and-beer roadhouse,

even a well-reviewed one, I don’t blame you.

I recommend the sandwich though. It’s flavorful and fresh,

and the area won’t suffer for having hosted you.

They’ll never buy into your epiphanies, so don’t pretend to have them.

The moon is not a skiff with your inky spleen in its paren,

and the nearby park is not a closed paren within which

you might make a notation about Tycho Brahe’s bare-eyed observations.

There is a sadness to bisque and beer, which is why I’m suggesting

the crab sandwich, the Zeta Cancri signature sandwich.

They’ll never ask you to Yelp the place either. An old trucker friend

of mine lived upstairs after a bad break-up with his ex.

It’s not much of a story: scotography, x-ray radiography,

a couple of boys were whooping it up, writing out the darkness.

The false ceiling, the dim lights, the wickerwork like bones.

It’s a new year. It’s the ecliptic of oil tankers

in the eyeline of that long glacial plain.

You must keep the big rigs’ occultation in mind and search

your blind spot for what you’ve been

avoiding all this time as you write the Yelp review.

The afternoon’s less dull for the thoughts of stars.

You don’t have to sit here while you eat.

You can take the sandwich to the park and hiss back at the geese,

or do the geese honk? I believe it’s both, and they also shit like dogs,

so maybe it’s best to dine in and ask for a boilermaker.

Listen for whatever beered-up nonsense echoes down the pine

and know there’s a pleasant way of disappearing

in such a place without feeling quite alone.

If you sit upright in the stool, you can watch the bubbles

decamp for foam. It’s a bird’s-eye, not a god’s-eye view

from above the ecliptic line the room can get on you.

The crab is not endemic to this place; it isn’t what you’d call

“To die for,” but as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s very good.

When I take my liver down to the rotten dam,

I mix it up

with Rotterdam and sling misery

like spray along the Zuider Zee.

I blinked a time or two

at the ho-hum ship replica assembled to scale

and loaded in an empty fifth of Cutty Sark.

Spike, Butch, Stretch, John John, Cal

are a few of the names

I’ve lived with.

Whereas the captain of Blinkenship went nod

like belly-up or cod playing possum

on a hook, accordioned and drunk,

pseudonyms aren’t nearly as exculpatory

as one would hope.

An unrequited wave along the docks

isn’t worth this brief

communion with the gulls or should it be

this brief communion with the gulls

(I feed them lint from fustian pockets)

isn’t worth the unrequited wave

along the docks? Whether she believes me

or believes in me, if the body is both

shadow and penumbra, horologe

and geodetic hull, the evening light spills

like paint in turgid water?