Exterminator
came this afternoon:
his poison killed the yellow jackets nesting
in our northern soffit. Now I’m on
my second beer, late Dylan’s playing soft,
I’m thinking terminus. The yield from years
of teaching Oedipus, Macbeth, and Lear:
dark ambiguity. My wife is looking
for what feeds her soul. I get it, but
I’m gorged on tragic weird. Fierce mud daubers
plagued our other house. Years younger then,
I sprayed them all, ran manic down the driveway
while they died. Most love’s dried mud, cicadas
thriving underground, the rising terrifying
till we all adjust to so much light and sound
Naive and Sentimental Sonnet #8
It’s Trey and I in dripping woods: he
a sheath of muscle, greyhound two years old;
I a jiggling bag of guts, middle-middle-
aged, not gone to dust like Nineveh
or ash like Percy, first sweet dog we lost,
but crumbling. Scarlet’s past thirteen and smells
of dander and, like King Lear’s hand, mortality.
Financial planner plots my “end of term”
(biz-speak for my year of death) at 92:
I can’t believe I’ll last that long: right shoulder
crackling, left knee swelling, brain more colander
than cauliflower. Yet I’m trotting stride
for stride with Trey, a long green path ahead,
thorned byways dark as night on either side.
About Thomas Zimmerman