Mitch Goldwater, Two Poems

At the Now Vacant Lot on Bayard
Mitch Goldwater

I crouch to look at crocus blooms in random array
that trail along the sidewalk
and back across this urban square
of fresh-turned dirt and rusty debris.
A man stops his shuffle and stands above me. He has just returned
from the hospital, he says, a week after a transplant.
His skin is yellowed some.
He calls the purple heads
and golden eyes
on their stick-figure stems
Proud.

The Pedestrian
Mitch Goldwater

I want a car
like that Porsche, so beautiful
it kills, it holds your gaze,
stiffens you to stone
behind the wheel of your bland sedan,
which, like life, goes on
without your control
toward the phone pole,
the rear bumper just ahead,
the pedestrian
crossing with the light.

Mitch Goldwater teaches poetry writing at Mansfield University. Nowadays he mostly crouches between song and poetry, trying to fit the one into the other, right where he thinks they belong. He has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and lives in Corning, NY.