Author: David Yezzi

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They went to an abandoned home to smoke weed. Inside, they found a tiger.
—CNN

Strong bud. Mind-splitting, hydroponic, pure indica body-high, one-hit weed,
grown from Hawaiian seeds in a closet in a doublewide in Maine, up near Canada.

To say it unleashed the tiger is to say everything and nothing. To say that they had
failed to foresee the consequences of their actions is to be complicitly young.

Eve had the weed and Adam had the papers. And they’d been having sex, in fields
and organ lofts and in abandoned houses. Even so, you never forget your first tiger.

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High water sucked the beach clean of debris.
High winds downed boughs and the high osprey’s nest.
She perches on a driftwood log, half-dead,
eyes on the tide, without her fledglings now.

All June she dropped fish in the crowded aerie,
its crown of twigs topping a patchy pine:
the racket then, like bagpipes on the sea
blown by a piper still drunk in the morning.

We wondered if without her nest she’d go.
She was our bird, her cry our intimate,
a siren-wail each time we crossed the beach.
Rebuild, poor mama bird, we thought. But no.

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Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Patrick Swayze’s seen it all before.
That’s why he’s the best. It’s true, a bouncer
isn’t typically your hero type,
but once he’s oiled and practicing Tai Chi
across the lake from Ben Gazzara’s house
his pietas shines forth like young Aeneas’s.

Another town, another beery dive,
the same drunks making asses of themselves
in front of women who just want to drink
a beer with friends and whisper to each other
about the new “cooler.” He goes by Dalton.
A guy’s ejected through the candy glass,