February on the 5th Street Footbridge
She stares down at the place I point to.
Low point in the universe, I tell her. 
She stares at me, her face flat as the isolated pool
beneath the footbridge. 

I leap up, onto the long, curved rail.
Balance, like a penny on edge
awaiting a train
to send it zinging of into space
flattened into an oval,
flat, as the look on her face

Wrinkles now, like the pool below
wrinkles, as ice from my boots
slashes its surface. So still, so flat,
so cold, no steam hovers around its edges.
So cold, the ice from my boots shatters
as it strikes, like her scream shatters in her throat.

I jump down hard on the bridge.
Stare into her face.
Low point in the universe I tell her,
pointing at the flat, still pool.

 

Emptying the Compost Bucket                                                                      

We walk out back to the garden,
Beanbag in his stretched out t-shirt,
torn blue jeans, me, barefoot, naked,

To empty the compost bucket of its smells.
(Red cabbage boiled with blood sausage
in cheap white wine, kidneys in mustard sauce.)

We lurch over thistle-topped night crawler bumps
and rocks, fight the five gallon bucket
between us.  Spill smells down our legs.

We squeeze through the gate in the dark,
squash tomatoes, ripe as the moon
overhead, between our toes,                                                                                    

Stumble on ground fallen apples,
half-rotted to pulp and vinegar.
We stagger on, our treasure of smells

aslosh between us, through the onions,
the anise.  Hairy vines lash around our ankles.
Smells spill down our legs,

comingle, us, the earth, the garden
and moon, careening through the dark
to the compost pile where we drunkenly

offer up our half-consumed trove
of slop, completing the cycle.