The rats start racing early where I live.
I awaken every morning to the sound
of the beginning of a stream of cars
that swarm down from the north
like a daily renewal of the Visigoths'
assault on Rome.

They say that you
can never step into the same river
twice, but by the time I leave the house
this torrent of cars will not let me enter
even once, so I pull out against the current,
take the back way to work, down a sideroad

that goes past a little pond so shallow
at its deepest part it never covers up
the shopping cart somebody once threw inó
pond where in summer you might see
a heron wading.

It's when herons wade that they
take on their own unique magnificence,
strange combination of ungainliness and grace.
There's an episode of Kung Fu where
the old priest cites the heron to his student
as example of perfect balance and containment
and the student asks, "How will I know
when I've got it right?
when I can see the heron?"
The teacher answers,
"When you can smell the lake."

My friend Bruce used to love Kung Fu.
Caine was the epitome of the spirituality
that Bruce aspired to.
"First he meditates," Bruce would say,
"then he kicks ass."

Last summer was dry and in September,
as leaves began to clog its surface,
the little pond dried up.
But the heron kept coming, even though
the water that remained got more and more crowded-
sometimes ducks would brush his legs
as they swam past.

He didn't seem to notice them,
and I wondered if maybe this shrinking
worked in his favor, if it served to concentrate
all the minnows and frogs
into the small remaining water
so that the September Song of the heron
sounded a lot like 'Summertime,
and the livin' is easy.'

Sometimes I sit very still in my car
and watch the heron stand
a long time on one foot until
the other foot comes gently down,
enters the water without disturbing it,
the great bird's weight shifts
the head darts swift and smooth on the long neck
the long sharp beak penetrates the pond
then swings up to point briefly at the sky
as if giving thanks to its god,
like Tom Gordon, in the moment
of recording another save,

while frog or minnow, wondering
"Who turned out the lights?"
slides quickly down the long dark
one-way street of gullet

and only then do I smell the lake,
lift my foot gently off the brake
and let the car ease forward, thinking,
"First he meditates,
then he kicks ass."

Now, finally, even I
am ready to enter
the ratrace.

Under a hot white August sky
I was sitting on my new sister-in-law's deck
looking out over a ravine
savoring my first cup of coffee
and three hours time difference
calling what I was doing "meditating"
which meant that nobody would bother me
when a coyote appeared
ambling up a path out of the ravine
in my general direction.

A rabbit popped out of the brush between us
saw the coyote
nothing between them but fast lane
froze into his clump of brown grass imitation.

Coyote stopped too although he gave
no indication he had seen the rabbit.
No it was some rare quality in
the morning air he stayed to savor.

Over the next ten minutes coyote got interested
in creatures and events invisible to me
at every compass point except the rabbit's
took maybe a dozen steps
none of them actually toward his
motionless potential breakfast special
yet each oblique step
narrowing the distance between them
by a margin discernible only
to an old geometry teacher

till suddenly
on no trigger I could see
maybe just some natural version
of a three-second violation--
it ain't that you're too close
but it's been too long
since you been far enough away--
breakfast beat a fast break
back into the brush
and coyote
never a look after him
resumed his stroll
as if knowing all along
it was too much to hope for
but hey

it's a numbers game
and sometimes
after all the indirection
sometimes
just often enough to keep you coming back
you do nail something just right.
I lifted my cup in toast to a poet.

till we were down the Cape last weekend
and there they were again
on the grassy banks that line the highway;
on lawns, resolute among the blowing leaves,
intent on sound beneath the surface;
thronging the branches of small trees
with yellowed leaves and bright red berries
where they arrive singly
but always seem to depart
in furious one-on-one pursuit,
a feeding and mating frenzy like--
well, a lot like summer on the Cape.

The first robin of spring
is like the clicking of a tumbler
in some marvelously complex lock,
a milestone like a birthday,
the longest day of the year,
the first time I told my father
that I loved him.

But about the last robin of fall
is never anything
announces it
as last.

In 1986, the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series in particularly excruciating fashion, even for the Red Sox. The most memorable play of that Series was a ground ball that went through the legs of a Red Sox first baseman named Bill Buckner.

You weren't here that long
near the end of a career
that wasn't quite Hall of Fame.
We knew you through the box scores
and the car radio.

And I remember as that fateful season neared its end
almost hearing tears in the announcer's voice
as he tried to describe the sight of you
careering around second on your two
terribly damaged legs
stretching a double into a triple.
"Gallant" was the word he used
and gallant is how I remember you.

But we live in a time
when Nike erects a billboard
in sight of the Olympic athletes:
"You Don't Win Silver,
You Lose Gold,"
and so it is that some remember only
the nightmare tenth inning of Game Six
the big bouncing grounder
that found its way
between those gallant legs, condemning you
to the underworld of those who made it to
within a whisker of the top,
who beat all the competition

except one.
The inmost circle of that underworld's reserved
for the Fred Merkles, and Roy Reigelses
Denny Galehouses, and Mike Dukakises
for those second-place finishers
destined to be remembered particularly
for their hammartia
that one error in judgment
the base untouched
the photo-op in the tank

Oh, Billy Buck,
why did it have to happen to you?

I once saw a music video
that began with a long string of clips
of athletes looking foolish-
stone-fingered tight end
juggles ball five times
before linebacker demolishes him
and ball drops harmless out of bounds;
runner trips over second base as though
surprised that it was there;
tall Caucasian butchers slam dunk,
comes away bleeding.
Then suddenly it changes-
wide receiver soars in the end zone
gets one hand on the ball
but it sticks
and he cradles it to his belly
surrendering his body to the furious crash
of the cornerback he just burned
in a moment of such violent airborne beauty
such conspicuous gallantry
that you thank God videotape exists
and you pray that long after we've destroyed ourselves
aliens will land and find this tape
and wonder at the mad grace
of such a race.
And the soundtrack sings
"You do the walk,
you do the walk of li-hi-hife..."

I was surrounded by children
when I saw that video
my daughters and their cousins
and like someone suddenly filled with the spirit
I stood up and began to preach
the brilliance of what they were watching:
that if you want to achieve
anything spectacular in life
you have to risk humiliation
and this one time they all listened to me
fascinated like...
pigeons in Assisi.

And I can still see you
standing stiff and tall,
the ball bouncing toward you big and slow
and I know you're thinking,
"Thank God, at least we're out of the inning,"
but then it's a little too slow
and the batter is tearassing down the line toward you
faster than anyone named Mookie has a right to move

so you reach deep into
the gallant center of your soul
and you will the ball to get there
a little quicker
because now it has to
and there is one tired instant in there
when you believe that you can do this,
that you can will the ball there-
it's believing in yourself too much...

[long sigh]

I guess what bothers me most is our dishonesty.
We know this happens to a thousand people
one way or another every hour of every day.
But we can't live with that knowledge.
So we joke, we say,
"Like Bill Buckner, ho ho ho"
fostering the pretense we're too good
for this too happen to us
when what is spectacularly obvious
is we're not even close to being good enough
ever to be exposed to anything this bad
our errors go unnoticed
because we go unnoticed
and we like it that way....

If we were honest, your name would be spoken
only after the lights were out
and then only between two persons
who had achieved the deepest intimacy
who knew that they could turn to one another
in the darkness
when the fear was on them
one of them might gently brush
the shoulder of the other
and the other one might
swim up from the depths of sleep and whisper
"What is it, my darling?"
and the one might sigh,
"Bill Buckner,"
and the other might
caress the one and whisper

"Shhh. It's all right.
Sleep will come,
when you're not looking.
Morning will come, and breakfast,
and things that should be easy
will be easy once more.
It's the Walk of Life.
You've walked it before
and you will walk it again.
Shhh now beloved."

The cars I drive
don't look like much I will admit,
but mostly they've got engines that won't quit
this side of a nuclear explosion.

The Shitbox Mystique: when new friends
point at dents, concerned, and ask,
"What happened to your car?" I answer,
"It was like that
when I bought it."

When I met Carol she was driving
a pretty good car,
except for the air-conditioner,
which used to make the engine overheat.
Carol also brought into my life
her son Seth and her mechanic, Peter-
that's another feature
of the Mystique, your mechanic
becomes part of your family,
we see more of Peter than we do of Seth,
we invited him to our wedding--
though I'll admit, Peter wasn't actually
in the wedding, and Seth was.

Now Carol likes nice things,
but what with college bills and all,
a couple years with me
and her blue Subaru
went downhill fast
and I got to see a new
side of her, that her idea of a good day
is breaking down outside a gas
station.

Eventually the engine started
overheating even without
the air-conditioner; in fact
the only way to keep the temperature
out of the red zone on a hot day
was to turn the heat on.
I don't think Carol's mother
ever really bought
the unlikely physics of that;
I think she thought we were
trying to make her and Ed
go home to California.

When you've got
two people driving shitboxes
you get to make some interesting decisions
like which one to take to Connecticut.
One has no windshield fluid
because the plastic thing leaks
and Peter hasn't been able to find
a used one that fits;
the other has something really scary
going on with steeringÖ
but we take it anyway,
because on the map
the road to Connecticut
looks pretty straight.

Sometimes I get home from work
and Carol's ecstatic.
"Jack, I met the most wonderful
towtruck driver today. We towed
the car to Peter's,
and he brought me back
all the way to the door.
We had the most incredible conversation!
He's a very unusual person."

Right, Carol; like you're not.
A couple years with me she's on
a firstname basis with every
towtruck driver in Middlesex County.
Triple-A has us on speed-dial.

One time we were driving
somewhere together and she reflected,
"You know, if your first marriage
had worked out better, you
wouldn't have been available
for me. And vice versa."

I thought what a classic she is,
the miles look good on her;
but both of us came as is,
with dented fenders, and random
detritus in the trunk, and I said,
"It's as if we both broke down
outside the same gas station
at the same time."

And she smiled
and then she laughed,
and then we both laughed,
a long soft asynchronous laugh
like the ticking of an engine it will take
a nuclear blast
to stop.

for Thomas Lux

Among the geese and ducks
on Nutting Lake this spring,
a single swan appeared,
southwest of where
the Middlesex Turnpike
bisects the lake.
I look for him each day
as I roll through on my way
to work, from work...

He frequents the little island
in the southmost corner,
but sometimes my eye's betrayed
by a white plastic K-Mart lawn chair
that sits on a dock on the western shore
not far away from the liquor store.

I keep hoping to see a second swan,
and I bet our singleton is thinking
the same thing, scanning the sky
for some foxy female
happening to overfly
look down, spot him and think,
hey, that stud's got
a lake of his own;
and her biological clock will sound
a shrieking Mayday alarm
and all her nesting hormones
will sieze control
bringing her around and down
in a long slow gliding arc

but it hasn't happened yet.
And more and more often lately
our Singleton is turning up
in the area of that
windswept lawn chair,
so that I begin to wonder if his eye might
betray him the same way mine does me,
if that peripheral flash of white
says Swan to him too
but he likes that white lie,
the way that solitary men
find comfort sometimes
in airbrushed images of women.

And why am I so sure
it's a male waiting for a female anyway?
Why not female? or gay? or bi?
I guess because I
populate its head
with foolish masculine fantasies.
Thomas Lux has a poem about a guy
who hung upside down
from a bridge over a highway
to paint a message of love
for his sweetheart
only to perpetrate a particularly
gruesome misspelling
of a critical word.
After a reading someone asked why
he was so sure
the painter was male
and it's not often words fail
Lux, but on this occasion
all he could say was,

"You've got to be kidding."
Point being that the right to make
a public and spectacular fool of oneself
over a potential mate
is a deeply cherished
masculine prerogative.

So if our swan isn't a young male,
must be he's an old one.
They say swans mate for lifeó
though as for that I was watching
PBS about coyotes
and they said they mate for life
but later on they showed
this renegade young male
attempting to scale
the hindquarters of the alpha female
and I couldn't help noticing she
wasn't exactly desperate to escape....
Maybe animals mating for life
isn't a rule, exactly,
it's more like aÖa guideline,
they're not fanatics about it.

(Actually, I wasn't really
watching that show,
my wife was and I
just happened to be going by.
That would be my
second wife, Alpha Carol.)

But getting back to our swan,
(now that we've established it's a he)
maybe he hasn't come
to Nutting Lake
to await a mate at all,
maybe he's come to die--

much the way that I felt after my
first marriage broke up when I
said to Grandmother Read,
"My life is very exciting
I'm doing lots of interesting things
there are terrific women at meetings
but part of me can't help feeling
that my life is over."
And she answered,
"A chapter of your life
is over.
The next chapter
hasn't started yet."

And I guess that's what
I'd like to say to our swan.
Bide your time, shining brother.
Keep putting one webbed foot
in front of the other.
Find solace in your solitude.
And mark the day
when you hear yourself say,
"Hey, this ain't bad.
I eat when I'm hungry
I drink when I'm dry
and if moonshine don't kill me
I'll live till I die"

Because then
you'll know you're ready
for some female swan
foxy and real to overfly
Nutting Lake and wheel
into a sudden long
descending curve
when she spots you.

No swan is an island;
don't drive her away.
Guidelines are okay,
but there's no percentage
in fanaticism.
You've lake to share;
don't settle for the company
of geese and ducks,
a plastic K-Mart lawn chair.
Remember Thomas Lux;
remember the immortal words
of Dustin Hoffman: "K-Mart sucks."

for my wife Carol,
the woman who drives me to Poetry

The Quincy AA Group
liked to let Charlie drive
on their commitments.
He was a careful driver
who stayed a mile or two under the speed limit,
and he liked to leave a little earlier than other people would.
But he never missed a turn or had to ask for directions,
and he always got the group to the meeting
on time.

Sometimes a newcomer would ask
why they had gone from Quincy to Brockton
by way of Neponset Circle--
there are back roads into Brockton, short cuts.
An old-timer would whisper, "Shhhh.
We know that there are quicker ways.
But Charlie likes to drive.
And he can get us anywhere in the world--
as long as he starts from Neponset Circle."

Most of us see the world as spiderweb,
all sorts of intricate connections,
alternate routes. A good sense of direction
and a roadmap and we'll always find our way.
Charlie saw the world as a bicycle tire,
spokes crossing each other here and there,
but all of them running straight to and from
one heart.

Over the years a lot of people got
too impatient to put up with Charlie's ways--
he wouldn't even take the Squantum Street cutoff,
they'd complain, and you could almost
see Neponset Circle from both ends.
Sometimes they'd maneuver themselves
into the front seat to make suggestions:
"Charlie, this right goes straight to Hancock Street."
"Yup, I know," he'd reply, and cruise right by,
while the oldtimers puffed serenely in the back.

"Insane," the dissidents called Charlie, or "anal,"
if they'd had Psych 101;
"compulsive." As though we all weren't.
But he drove them crazy. Eventually
they'd take their own cars, thank you,
trust their own internal compasses.

And for awhile, they would look good.
They'd leave a little later and be
sipping coffee smugly when Charlie's cadre
of newcomers and oldtimers sauntered in.
But sooner or later they'd miss a turn and get lost
and a commitment would go by the boards, unmet,
and if it was a prison or a hospital,
there'd be no meeting there at all that night
and that was serious.

The oldtimers knew that it would happen
because all the alternate routers had to go on
was their own sense of direction.
Charlie had Neponset Circle.
Carol, my love,
you're my Neponset Circle.