Morning at the Abernathy Waterfront Park
Random

Morning at the Abernathy Waterfront Park

for Larry

Most mornings, though much is going on,
little noticeable happens
in the amber glow of dawn—
maybe a great heron somewhere
seemingly out of sight, maybe
kingfishers skimming the surface,
the water, mottled with grey and amber,
reflecting the clouds, mottled
with amber and grey, maybe
the splash of a beaver's tail.

But this tranquil morning
two men were fishing
off an observation deck
built over the reservoir inlet,
one of the men talking
on his cell, sounding urgent
in what I think was Chinese
about money or love
or troubling family plans.

And this is my poem
about this morning,
written with the hope
that the morning endures
into translations
that renders the man's quick talk
with words more apt than mine,

translations that continue
to say that further along the boardwalk,
on a motionless swinging chair
on another overlook,
slept a grey-whiskered black man,
a laptop hugged to his chest.

Random

Another morning
 of odds and ends:

inside on the news
a story about a couple
who stole a bulldozer,
their need for it unexplained,

just off the deck
a five-foot glint
of swaying filament
linking the lowest leaf
on a dogwood branch
to the gone-to-seed head
of a shoot of grass
growing out of the sage,

a scatter of finch feathers
on the front walk,

near the mailbox,
the empty carton,
of a pregnancy test,
the wand pouch torn open
and dropped atop
the unfolded instructions,

in the shrubs along the back fence
a sluggish bee crawling down
the off-white stamens
of a poppy mallow.

Wiliam Aarnes teaches at Furman University.  He has recent and forthcoming poems in Prime Number, Ascent, Curbside Quotidian, and carte blanche.