by Richard Tillinghast

Sendoff

An old man
gets with deliberation into a pair of waders—
This, it seems, is me.
Strings a nine-foot rod with floating line
and wades out into the stream

that cuts its way with a will
through soil and embedded rocks,
never still. What is the water talking about?
The stream-rubbed coinlike
pebbles it will place on my eyelids?

Or the sendoff
if they bundled me Beowulf-style onto the sea,
my treasures heaped around me amidships,
or swaddled me in wicker like Moses and
pushed out through bullrushes into the current
where my body becomes flotsam and jetsam, food for fishes,

gone forever
like the men I fished with—
the drinkers and tellers of tales
and the rest of our brotherhood,
the madmen who cast into
moon-shadowed pools
at three in the morning—

all of us
lost in the mist,
barking in the dark,
keeping ourselves company.

Took my diamond to the pawnshop

Neuron pathways overgrown
with forgetting and remembering—
brambles and vegetative junk,
meanderings and dead ends.

I’m wading through muck,
scraping silt off antiquities
that bob to the surface.

•

Let’s hose this down and
see what sparkles.

•

A map of the Pacific
walks by on a man’s t-shirt.
A pear falls.
The wind blows away my pages.

How much would you pay me
for these pawnshop diamonds?
That’s what I thought.

I followed my dream
and ended up sleeping on the floor,
thousands of pesos in debt.
Three in the morning and I’ve never been so cold.

How many times can you land on your feet
before your feet get sore?

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Richard Tillinghast is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Wayfaring Stranger, 2012. As a PhD student at Harvard in the 1960’s, his poetry teacher was Robert Lowell, and he went on to publish a critical memoir, Damaged Grandeur: Robert Lowell’s Life and Work. He divides his time between Hawaii and Tennessee.