Geoffrey Himes (2 poems)
MARRIED UNDER THE MOON
In the world of my first marriage,
the eclipsed moon rose each evening,
a black coin floating in the purple sky,
an empty hole in the blanket of stars
Every once in a while, however, the moon
above our marriage burned harvest orange.
The neighbors would come out on the lawn,
point to the sky and say, “Look, it's a lunar shining.”
Those rare events convinced me to stay
in the marriage far longer than I should have.
From the roof, I’d watch the disc's flickering edges
and murmur, “Maybe it’s about to catch fire.”
MIGRATION
One snow goose is impressive enough:
the long, curved lines of its large white body
stalking the shore in search of seeds,
its pink-orange legs disappearing when it swims,
the black fingers of its white wings
visible only when it leaps into flight.
But one hundred and five thousand of them,
according to the rangers’ count, is chastening,
a reminder of what a small part of this planet
we primates in clothes actually inhabit.
We cluster behind a fence, our binoculars and
cameras pointed at a mystery we can’t quite grasp.
Like gently bobbing boats, the snow geese
cover the lake hull to hull, gliding to the right.
Without apparent cause, the far edge of the fleet
rises in the air, pulling the rest of the flock with them,
as if peeling the plastic wrap off a casserole,
curving over themselves, over humbled, hushed us.
Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by Gianthology, December, the Delaware Poetry Review, Salt Lick, the Baltimore City Paper, the Loch Raven Review, the Bhubaneswar Review and other publications. He has co-written songs with Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Pete Kennedy, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller and others. He has written about popular music and theater for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Paste, Downbeat and others since 1977. His book on Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the U.S.A.,” was published in 2005.