I PROPOSE TO THE CITY

On one knee, near the main intersection

where we’ve met the best and often.

I don’t have much to offer, but she knows

this. And I know she’s absorbed many

blows these many months, her lovely aura

placed in jeopardy by those threatening

to leave or by those deciding to lie low

until she returns in full, her strawberry hair

flowing over the bridges and the boulevards

again with sass, vigor, time, and beauty,

the kind you believed in when you first

arrived, your old world spilling out of your

suitcase, waiting not a moment to start anew.

  VALENTINE’S DAY

I’m down by the canal, rotting planks everywhere

but the chocolate shop there has a reputation

for making the best in the city. In short order

I’ll have my selection and be on my way to meet

my wife who has a “sensational” blouse to show me.

The weather is colder but the sun has been out early,

water reflecting the world down to a tee, robust

as the brushstrokes of a painter lonely and in love.

Oh everything is impossible, but some mysteries

can’t always be solved, no matter how many clues.

I walk up a steep incline, the leafless trees finally

flaunting some buds. Nothing ends even when it does.

Tim Suermondt

  SAILING TO SALEM

My wife points over the railing,

out into the blue distance—

“Honey, that might be a whale.”

She thinks Moby Dick. I think

Melville down on his luck and forgotten.

It isn’t a whale and she’s disappointed—