by Peter Money

The animals greeted him as if he were one of them.
Maybe they can smell the special carbon on his breath,
the distaste, refuse, the dying.

They offer a last run with the pack,
nudge him, lick his acrid lips and eyes, playfully nip
his wrists to bring him on his way.

Enough! finally he says, sitting on the stoop;
I am long for, I am long for —
I will be long in my own good time.

The game withers and the dogs return
to what dogs do: slumber in the lulls
from play.  The man, though, what will the man do

as if after saying what he has said he will be on his way —
but no, he is there with this own remaining breath
barking like a dog, biting at the bone, consolable.

by Peter Money

In Ancient Times
          — for Chris Busa

You were standing over the raft
(it was low tide and the raft was
idle),

the one you named once you’d moored it:
“Blind Date” — optimistically a ship to sail
but this one with a stagnant destination.

On an island of sand still
where water was around
a glass & bottle on white bird scat,

you and all of it
emblems against usurpation
— the summer people’s super powered craft display;

there you stared away
to sea — & back
toward a home one row from the view.

Inside shoreline cottages, each lit
for evening, stairways & tables
had filled with yearly strangers.

A seagull sang
ragtime’s song of the rusty wheel,
warped & carrying a heavy load

in a great solitarian novel,
one with the traveling corpse
bellowing against silence

. . . and it was you,
in another life,
hauling stones down and unbuilt road.

by Steve Luttrell

the man
on the bridge
(alone)
standing.

neither here
nor there.

by Steve Luttrell

Mind’s
necessary
movement

memory’s
dislodged
fragments

what
comes up
comes up