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In Memory of Dick Allen

You make me want to talk about the hard times— Not of equations difficult to solve, but times

Hard with physical resistance: scraped elbows
In the schoolyard shooting skelly, or crashing elbows

Into a metal fence. Skinned knees, bruised cheekbones,
Ice balls whipped like fastballs at my cheekbones;

Hot asphalt, granite walls, roadblocks, obstacles
Of fallen trees on the way to town, or obstacles

Of tangled ropes and floats as I crawled my way
To the other side of a lake, to freedom in the way

I walked or talked or spat. Hard, tough, impossible-
to-open pickle jar, or, when I cut my hand, impossible

To snatch the pickle from the brine. Not “difficult,”
Except for when what’s hard is hard to take, difficult

In the sudden breathlessness that stops me
In the woods not far from town, that stops me

And makes me want to sit down on a stone,
And talk with you of times as hard as stone.

(First published in The Hudson Review, Spring 2019)

POEMS