The places 
that call most to me
I imagine as oceanographic treasures:

Moscow, undersea mountain,
pressed by the weight and cold
of the dim abyss;

Venice,  tangled in kelp
at the surface, its pieces joined
with sodden ribbons;

London, barnacled anchor,
its crust hiding
secrets, history, and good lies;

New York, that great sponge,
porous, soaking in the flowthrough
from all the world’s currents; 

Tikal, Angkor Wat,
Tiahuanaco, Rapa Nui; out there
in the misunderstood margins,

waiting for the time to be ripe
so they can rise and erase 
“Here Be Monsters” from the old charts.

Worcester, at first, didn’t seem like much to this old salt.
Arid, stoic, sticking up in the inland air.
At first glance, not even a bit of interesting flotsam.

It’s instead like visiting
a landlubber older brother
who pushes me roughly into the big chair

when I come through the door from a journey,
teaches me rudely but not without care
how quickly I can lose my sea-legs

once I sit for a while. “This is what it feels like
to be home,” he says. And it is that.  
A good place from which to watch the sea. Home.

For the remainder
of this well-lit day 
the night-light in a little girl’s room
will be whispering:
soon will come our time.

Black tire marks on the streets
will settle in, bake to gray,
resting assured that come the night
they’ll be invisible — no evidence
of near-disaster to be seen.

The child who was almost taken
by the Crazy will be safe inside her head
from moment to moment. She’ll almost forget
what happened, how the Crazy skidded up
to the sidewalk and then left as swiftly

when she began to scream.
Tonight in her pastel room
the nightlight will do its ambiguous work
of dispelling some shadow and amplifying
the rest, and she will not sleep.

As for the Crazy, dark and light
are of no matter to one who sees
the rainbow in his drink,
the wet red sickle beside his plate,
her hair in his knotted hand.

Light and dark are at play
for him, and he goes through the dark
to find sick light which leads him back again
to insomnia and the thought of the child
and her fair hair and face

just before she screamed,
just before he turned away
and did not do what he’d planned.
No matter; day follows night follows day.
It will happen — another girl, another way.