By Mark Kraushaar

I’d been going to shovel for days.
Pine Street in Somerville this was and I’d
stepped outside to begin with the stairs
when I heard a door close
and, in a minute, two boys passed,
brothers or friends with their backpacks
and parkas followed by a girl, someone’s
sister I guessed, younger I thought, ten or eleven.
I can’t recall the landlord now, or even
the name of that strange, gentle neighbor
who’d wave from his porch.
I can’t remember the day and I can’t
say why I watched them either anymore,
me with that blue plastic shovel
and my flimsy black shoes.
There’d been the sudden soft
thud of a door and in the moment before
someone’s mother calling goodbye
with a final reminder.
Life was like it is now,
or it mostly was, with the future,
friends and the weather.
We’d rented a place near Boston,
Harvey the artist, Ruth who loved music,
and Jimmy and me and Doris who boosted half
our food from the A&P until she moved back to Queens.
And all this is the past, another country and we were
different in it—
it just seems we always
want to know what’s coming and when.
Or, we do and we don’t.
But one night before she left
Doris took a long breath and leaned
toward me and Ruth.
We’re here, she said.
We’re here, we do stuff
and we’re gone.

         For LC (1946—2024)

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Mark Kraushaar’s work has been included in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and has been a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award. His collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, was published by U of Wisconsin P as winner of the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize. The Uncertainty Principle, published by Wayweiser Press, was the winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.