Patient Zero - Tomas Q. Morin

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      THE SHORE PARTY

      The grill sits with its mouth open

      like a child begging for more.

      I’ve lost count of the franks we’ve eaten

      and the beer we’ve downed. My wife floats

      in the water with her friends, their white skin

      striped red. When a boat speeds by,

      a false tide bobs them like buoys,

      and for a while the old conversations

      about love lost/found, the fickle

      needs of lovers, are replaced with laughter.

      Listening to them I’m given a second life

      in which I forget the friends I no longer have,

      those lost to time, the ones given up to distance.

      Not wanting to lose what I now have,

      I plot a wooden frame

      around our square of lake,

      its legs sunk deep in the sandy bottom,

      the far end open to the water,

      east and west a window

      (maybe curtains, too); a dock

      stretches from the lip of the bank

      into the boathouse where hunger will knock,

      where winter will sleep.

      When I come to my senses, the sad

      box where I would have kept them

      like singing mermaids gives way

      to the aimless mind of the wind

      teasing the junipers, skimming

      the brown surface of the green water,

      nudging the black tubes of the tight circle

      of sisters who are not sisters

      whose hearts I cannot save. I slip out

      of my shirt and shoes. As I wade in

      I raise my hand in a sort of wave

      as the cold water teaches me humility,

      as I deepen the melody of their laughter.

      CIRCUS PONY

      What joy to say our short winter days

      are behind us now. Gone the old life we filled

      with empty laughter, the times we’d pack

      the backseat with every hitchhiking clown

      we happened upon — our record was eight

      — until the year our fathers died. Gone

      the red-nosed hours, our grotesque smiles

      drawn large and wide, when we rehearsed

      our cold routines of “Hey, are you okay?” and “Fine.

      I’ll be fine.” Remember the long seconds — three

      slow ones in all — before your face

      that took an hour to apply turned grave

      or the look you wore, sadder than any clown’s

      in the rain, that was my cue to knit my brow

      and continue fumbling with the three-sizes-too-small

      hammer you handed me so I could once more fix

      the swaybacked rocking horse we purchased

      to ward off an unspoken future in which we

      are continents apart, surrounded by our hungry

      new families as we slice and dismantle

      the same braised roast and lament how

      we could have let hope stray, how the story

      of our lives might have been different

      if it had contained, however lame, something

      we could have ridden into the sunset on.

      PATIENT ZERO

       Love is a worried, old heart

      disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff

      blues are made of, real blues

      that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk

      like the “Okra Blues” or “Payday Blues,”

      though I think House would agree

      two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,

      if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog

      bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which

      makes me wonder about the source of our disease

      and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam

      and Eve left the garden. Some have argued

      that the first case of infection

      could be traced to a carp or a stork, or maybe

      even the hare, because God made them first, after all,

      but the love lives of birds and fish,

      even rough rabbit love, are more perfect

      in their simplicity than we can ever hope to know

      such do they dispense with the rituals

      of courtship in short order

      so much so we don’t really want to admit

      the beasts and fowl and all manner of slithery thing

      can truly love like us

      so we label the heat of their hearts

      and loins “affection” or “instinct”

      or some trick of the lower brain and I think

      if we are to be good scientists we must investigate

      the moment when the sons of God made themselves

      known to the daughters of men

      before we turn up a singer strumming

      a lute shaped like the goose egg

      the singer’s mouth makes

      every time she bends the long, mournful note

      about how her angel traded his feathers

      so he could walk in the skin of God’s prize creation

      and in so doing became the first man she ever knew

      who wasn’t full of shit

      and yet was, because even though angels never eat,

      her holy birdman always hemmed and hawed

      when she asked point-blank

      why it always took him so long to fetch a gallon

      of moonlight or why he kept his wings

      folded and why is it he wouldn’t crow

      her name to the dawn unless the night

      before she had said, Enough is enough, we’re done,

      and her face had flooded and his

      chest had burned cold

      until

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