DAVID DODD LEE
publishes Half Moon Chapbooks in Michigan. He is the author of Downsides
of Fish Culture
(New Issues, 1997) and the forthcoming Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 
2002). Recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Quarterly West 
and Many Mountains Moving.






The Beauty of the Present Tense

(Whitefish Bay Cemetery)



The dead would like a word with you

They've been waiting years
cubicles of green grass
Surrounded by a white picket fence

Richard R. Sutton would like to talk to you:

It's nice
What you've done with the place,
Plastic flowers, the headstones lined
In symmetrical rows . . .

And the espalier!

I wish you could hear the mockingbirds the way I do,

The music they make when they gather,
the long watery strains like a chorus of cellos.
Or how a single bird might separate
And make a bridge that sounds like a dulcimer
Weeping in the middle of the night.

*

The nearby stink of cows in the air
A long time reading between sun and cold willows
Buckets and buckets of bright milk








Burning Leaves

(Brandywine Lake)



And I think, after I open my eyes to the morning's pale
Shadows, I understand the labyrinthine
Blood laughing
At the room standing upside down
One millisecond
Before consciousness blots out the indescribable beyond

Then the countless leaves. A windbreaker (white with a blue
lining)
A melody, the words of which have disappeared

You know, don't you
You even thought to say so once, and turned it around in your mind
Then kept it








Summer

I still remember them.
How their hair drifts toward the top of the water, eyes half-open.
Shining like paint, like the wedge of an apple.

Like a gestural splash of light,
A chinook salmon
Emerging not ten feet from the boat.

Sometimes I imagine spring poking lime-green shoots
Through those dead boy's ribs . . .

Spiders turning to dust inside their webs. A woman
Begins to move
Beneath me, groaning like a swingset made of wood.








The Wedge

In a wide, white room, I've been refusing to cooperate.
It's true.

But yesterday, Monday, I spent the morning logging in deer-kill data
at the fish hatchery.

A single orange leaf floating over the blue pond . . .

A little fur the color of rust
Coming away bright on my fingers – the animals’ lips pried
Making them look as if they may begin screaming.