Author: David Yezzi

Tweet

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.

Tweet

Tweet

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,