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Sample Poems by J.D. Scrimgeour

Monarch

I know it was Time itself,
that butterfly I saw, dead,
on the sidewalk yesterday
as I walked home from my forties

to my house on Winthrop Street
down the block from the cemetery.
I stopped—mid-life—and looked at Time.
I couldn’t pass it by—so bright

orange, so deep black, like pupils.
My years had been uneventful:
marriage, sons, a busted knee.
But when I gazed at Time,

and the wind shifted,
fluttering a wing, I saw myself
sobbing at my grandmother’s funeral
twenty-two years ago, hugging my sister

to me. An August day,
the heat unbearable in my suit,
and behind my sister’s head,
shimmering in the humid breeze,

a butterfly, off, alighting
on a nearby gravestone, then
up again—a flash—gone,
out of my blurry vision—


and now, what I thought was dead
flaps its wings twice and rises,
brushing past my left cheek,
swerving behind my head,

then sailing and clutching over
the Canal Street traffic.


My Graveyards

There’s the one in Southbridge,
where my grandparents are buried,

and the one somewhere in Shrewsbury,
where my grandparents are buried.

There’s the one Eileen and I walked through
as the sun set over Bloomington.

Hogie Carmichael is buried there.
There’s the one that looked over the golf course

where Mr. Zaido, who liked golf,
was buried. There’s the one down the block

from my house where the dogs are taken
to shit. And the one near my family’s home

in Connecticut, where I sat in a car
and smoked pot. And the one where my Aunt

Jeanne is buried, where my cousin Demetri
tossed some roses from the arrangements

into the grave. Red roses. Oh, and the one
on that long bike ride on country roads,

the Indiana countryside. No more
than 20 headstones. Every date before 1900.


A road hardly traveled, in a county
hardly traveled. Fields, forest, flowers,

and this small old graveyard that someone
had recently mowed.



Cell

If I could, I’d use
my recently purchased cell phone
to call the pay phone outside
the community swimming pool
in Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois,
that summer when I was eleven,
and the country 200.

And I’d have the phone ring
just as I was passing by on my
aqua-colored bike with 24-inch wheels.
I’d also make myself more brave
than I was at eleven.
I’d hop off the bike,
thwack the kickstand down
and answer, “Hello.”

And at the other end of the line,
I would probably not be so brave.
I’d hear that eleven-year-old voice
squeak its cusp-of-puberty
“Hello”—so like my own son
on the phone earlier tonight
as I spoke to him from a bedroom
in this creaky farmhouse
two states away from my home—
“Hello.” And I would not speak,
listening to my youthful breaths,
imagining me standing there
shirtless, hand on hip,
shouts and splashes behind me
muffled by the humid Illinois air.
No. No words. The keyhole
in the bedroom door lets in
a gem of light from the hall.
“Who—” the boy says, “who is this?”


Housesitting

We were in the famous poet’s house,
on his king-sized bed, and I was on top.
It was summer. We were young.
The window to the alley was open,
gauzy curtains pulled wide,
and the phone rang; it rang and rang,
so I answered. The neighbor we’d never met
said a man was outside the window,
and I looked over, saw something move.
I walked closer, and he rushed away,
his shoes flopping down the alley.

Windows had been just ways to cool down.
The world was for us, it performed
for our pleasure: maples shivering in a storm,
taut apples arrayed in the farmer’s market,
the quarry’s transparent heart.

In the decades since, I’ve imagined that man,
his face always hazy, his pants unzipped,
stroking himself watching us.
I’m bracing my arms, the blankets off,
torso arching, her hair and skin
scented with chlorine from her daily swim…
Some things we never do again.

A breeze sways the curtains.
That window. Its finely netted screen.