Thoughts on the 2004 Yankees/Red Sox final,
while reading Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied pitcher adazzle on the freckled mound
The hurl high there, swift, slow; sweet, sour;
then off, off forth on swing
popped and gliding, stirred for a bird; lovely and dangerous,
heaven-handled, tumbling,
falling gloveward

Brute beauty and oh, air, pride
to not untwist; despair not feast on thee
pitched past pitch of grief
O what black hours we have spent
This night! The fall is steep and has now done
darkness on the immortal diamond.

Dracula dips into The Monthly Railway Guide

Leisure reading as you travel
with your coffin and fifty cases of common earth
sanguine knowing home is eternally transportable
an exile bed of mud waiting
like a lover in the luggage rack
but there’s no rest for the undead, so
when it’s too dark to read
you endure the inky looks
from every blood-stranger
and unsuspecting refugee
on the day train’s skip-stop journey
through the blushing English countryside
and close that obliging guide
before melting into the dark wax of night

Green Rain

When Howard Hughes
camped out on the top floor
of that Vancouver hotel
wearing Kleenex boxes
for slippers
washing his hands
20 times an hour
did he look out through the film of rain
to the mucky lagoon below
where ducks stopped
for stale bread

did he see these refugees from the Pacific flyway:
the iridescence of the mallard drake's head
the brilliant speculum of the green-winged teal
dazzling in the bobbing black cove where
dabbling puddle ducks squonk and burble
splashing noisily for scraps and crusts
while placid mallard hens and nervous widgeons
wait for the day's farinaceous flotsam

did he spy the diving ducks--
skunk-headed surf scoters
skid stopping
out in the deep green
rafts of velvety black scaups and buffleheads
goldeneyes and downy eiders
disappearing in unison
to resurface as synchronized swimmers

did he spot the grounded Canada goose
spitting in her mossy nest of wet leaves

did he long to ditch those
crazy Kleenex boxes in the white hotel lobby
run barefoot over the grimy parking lot
to the slimy banks of the lagoon
and with duck shit and soggy breadcrumbs
oozing up between his toes
his hermit's beard plastered over his heart
stand in the shadow of steel and glass while
long veils of green rain
washed him clean?

NOTES:

Dracula dips into The Monthly Railway Guide I've always been intrigued and amused by the passage in Bram Stoker's Dracula where Jonathan Harker happens upon the Count lying on a sofa reading an English railway timetable. This poem explores one possible explanation of Dracula's interest in the timetable.

Green Rain This poem borrows its title and the line "long veils of green rain" from Canadian Imagist poet Dorothy Livesay. Livesay's Green Rain is a loving invocation of her grandmother and the memory of a youthful romance in the context of a green landscape. In 1972, Howard Hughes was sequestered for six months in a Vancouver hotel adjacent to Stanley Park, where I used to feed the ducks with my grandmother.

Terri Brandmueller is a Canadian writer currently working on a book about family secrets and internet geneaology. She has published poems in Barrow Street, Seems and Alimentum. Her poem 'Backyard' was shortlisted in the Guardian's Poetry Workshop. After 15 years of exile in Brooklyn, NY, she is back in her beloved Vancouver.