Henry Hudson
We play a hundred feet beneath his feet: I kick the ball,she chases it. She’ll paw and nose it somebefore she brings it back, though at times she won’t.Then I fetch. So I move across the plaza, behind me Henrylooming in the sun, weathered to a greenish blue,his pantaloons billowed by the wind, or his ego. We’re not supposed to do this—no dogsoff leash from 9 to 9, daytime. Loosely enforced, yetthe drunk who stalks the park with pigeons on her headshot us a dirty look. But it’s spring today, spring,
Another Childhood
He sloughs in his slippers to the dark bathroom and lowers himself to the seat as he has done all his adult life when, bare skin about to meet cold extruded vinyl, his most vulnerable self suspended above the water, dread creeps in. Even so, with not so much as one light lit to constrict his sleeping pupils he sits, and his mind swims back fifty years to the campground in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where he bumbled with a flashlight to that wood maw grinning in the yellow light. He forced himself down, then popped back to his feet probing with the light down there for tarantula, alligator, snak
