Change by Vern Rutsala from The Moment's Equation

In agate type the sports page lists

Transactions—so and so traded,

someone put on injured reserve,

another waived out of the league.

Such lists uncover the sadness

of change and separation—our
own lives dwindling into fine print

with the aging bonus baby

sent down to double A, his great

hopes and ours a faint blur

on page four. We think of such players

gone to a kind of limbo, bat

and ball denied them, carrying

only their scuffed shoes down some road

of sore arms and bad knees. We eke

out our days among the injured

reserves—like us they may be fit

some day—but feel ourselves sliding

toward the saddest of all,

that invisible leavening of all
trades during the hot stove league,
players who don't even have names,
the players to be named later.

from the book, "The Moment's Equation" by Vern Rutsala

http://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/snyder-series/the-moments-equation

DON'T ASK ME ABOUT THAT FALL

Fuck it. Cold October

nights rocked the Columbia

as details hazed. Lights

shattered on the river. What

they call reflections. Sex

no longer Mystery but what

dripped from our cigarettes inside

the teeth of the colossal wind.

The stars sprayed out like tic-tacs

on the reckless river. My coat

held open just across your beating back

as if I wasn't stopped by everything, the wind

straight through us like screen doors

banged by wind. Lights shattered

on the river, and who wasn't reckless.

Steeped in the force of fall, nobody

ever questioned. As for myself,

I shoved against you, rough as tides

at every push. And as for you, it's best

your daily blackouts wash away

the way we gambled everything

with holes in both our pockets,

shooting the indifferent moon. As if

we could change anything, as if we had

-from the chapbook "Smithereens" by portland poet Starlite Motel
http://www.nightbombpress.com/

Day Labor by Jim Shugrue

Day Labor

At an age when friends desert you

going over to the dead, what is there to do?

Sit in your house surrounded by old books

while the senile republic reminds you

there are worse things than death.

Wood smoke drifts over the winter landscape,

picnic tables covered in blue plastic tarps, who knows

what the neighbors are thinking? Who knows who's harmless,

who armed to the teeth plotting revenge? I watch the birds

at the feeder for hours at a time. Their appetites,


their rivalries. How they survive the winter here.
Nervous, contemplative, a little, it seems, confused,
but eating, living, being the one thought they have.
And I'm somewhat less than them, though I too serve
to fill the cylinder with seeds.



-from the chapbook, "Floating Verses," published by barebone books

http://www.poetry.us.com/jimshugrue.html