Cawl (Traditional Welsh Soup)

I am a big cast-iron pot
Empty with the need of you.
Fill me with animal
and vegetable yearnings,
parings and cut pieces,
the inner heart and parts of you,
leaves and essence, milk and spuds.
Fill me with slow broth simmering
on the iron ring of heat
of the old range
in a far enormous kitchen.
Later, hours later
in the hunger of evening,
ladle these rich mergings
into the bowl of your desires.

Father

Your obit made the Times.
There's even
a picture of your face,
sagacious but averted.
I never knew you
but I recall the nuisance
you knew me as,
the haphazard of a life
you never came back to.
Those last years, coddled
by paid help, you shuttled
in and out of home
and mind. No closed doors
reopened at the end.
I clipped the page but
(what could I have been
thinking) used it
to wrap your mother's dishes
when I packed up both
our houses. So you finally
enfold family after all,
stored in some box
in a neighbor's garage.

First Chemo

A new kind of morning sickness
overtakes her. Nausea, cravings.
Fighting to keep down
dry toast and weak tea,
she imagines French fries
at a favorite roadhouse,
hot dogs mustard sauerkraut,
taunts herself with
seafood sampler and margaritas
under umbrellas and sea breeze.
She desires
the not so much what as where,
willing herself calm
while her mouth sours,
anywhere but here
pushing down the green waves,
her gut knitting the same bland diet
she used to give the kids for cramps.
Wait a few days,
she'll regain equilibrium;
for now lies on the couch
awash with pale soda,
holding things inside.

Close

I was only inches
from a stranger's baby,
hearing him suckle,
watching the mother
trace her fingertip
over his plump legs,
his apricot-soft skin,
seeing the spiral of new hair
at the soft top of his head.
I was only inches
from who we were,
from you and your
infant, infinite love.

Interlude

The dog elongates into a run
disappearing in the edge of woods.
Now he's back, on his tongue
something dead he bolted down
in his few lucky moments.
Here he is,
abject and grinning,
before the leash
clicks back in place.

Airport

He touches down
soon.
I delay leaving
for the airport.

The peck on the cheek
like a long-lost
relation, which
he is.

He swings his carry-on
to my shoulder,
transferring
weights and claims.

We will again
strain towards complicity
and find it
wanting.

So many times
arrival, departure
at this same
terminal.

Tide at Dusk

The marsh fills in like a puzzle,
separate pieces recombine
under the inflow tide.

Night pours its cream through the dunes,
they slip into liquid
like bread into milk.

This time dissolves opposites
into each other, things that were clear
are no longer visible.

The last of day, a time
imminent as tide, birds
calling as shape fades.