November Birches
--for Lisa
By John Kennedy

Those leaves scattering
like the goldfinches who summered there,
birches feel their age today,
this pre-breakfast weather
riding their backs.
Or let's say they're bowing
low and serious as grandparents
exercising, negotiating
deep knee bends
and overhand arcs.
Watch as they lean in
for company, their soft ankles
you couldn't mistake
for the oaks' and maples',
and all their whiteness scarred
as if with eyes
that bring us close
to understanding
Don't they seem to be giving themselves
to these woods,
undressing for flight?
And over here,
a downy woodpecker has come
at the last minute
to stitch new seams
into the tattered coat
of this last of a group
that's going to moss underfoot.

Originally published in Southern Humanities Review

Transformations
By John Kennedy

Is this any way to live, I ask now,
after years of
office life: two weeks off in June,
an herb garden planned but unseeded,
half the bathroom's wallpaper hanging on
like a visiting in-law?
I find myself doing nothing
and lying at a public pool,
where I watch children's shapes change
when they go under:
two sharks trail the wavering body
of a teen-age girl,
a manatee surfaces
to nudge a mother in the shallow end,
minnows, a boy in clownfish colors:
one great fishbowl I lean into,
looking for something I might have been–-
a sperm whale, maybe, full of myths
and voices, holding my breath again
and going down for years at a clip,
not knowing what I'll be
when I surface.

Originally published in The Midwest Quarterly and reprinted in the 1997 edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry

The Young Widow
By John Kennedy

My mother had a driver's license in hand before
grief like some bachelor whose clothes
smelled of cigarettes could settle in.
Her first car was a '50 Pontiac—
parked expertly at the curb the morning
she passed the road test. Ten years old,
deep as a Checker cab, it was black and white
as the law and the way we pictured truth to be.

Being poor, my mother wasn't up to being teased;
she intended to put all that steel to work
and liked that it had bumpers worth using.
Your father never approved of women drivers,
she said, hurrying us into the backseat.
She gripped the wheel and put her foot to the gas,
looking in the rearview mirror as if to see
if the world was any different in hindsight,
and off we went down The Grand Concourse,
staring out the windows like immigrants.

The radio played scratchy country-western
and we laughed about heading for the Cape,
where those other Kennedys were,
Mother happy to be taking charge,
and every light going from red to green.

Originally published in America