EDDIE KRZeMINSKI

THREE POEMS

CLEWISTON, FL

Dew over the sugar fields
this morning, soft
as the white-capped mushrooms
sprouting beneath the cane.
I drive toward the sunrise
into the town of terrible
beauty: the smokestacks
pluming the wide Florida sky,
where the men work all day
and burn the sugar
in grey autumns,
breathing the fumes
that will one day kill them.

WISDOM

He says happy is a big love
seat and a TV set and a remote
with too many buttons.
A garage at the end of the driveway
promises so much.

Over the years his successes roll onto your shoulders:
the company, the good paycheck, the well-kept house
and backyard that’s finally starting to fill out.

 Sometimes, you admit,
you'd like it easy.

 A big love to fill the space between the nights,
a room with a lot of light, a bank account
swollen with a year's hard work, actual work,
the kind you read about in all those books
that line the shelves your father built.

I MADE A MISTAKE

When she asked me to save them
I thought she meant keep them
in a vase full of tap water
until they slumped over.

I am of the mind that when roses die
they are thrown out just like fruit or potato salad.

She doesn’t believe in this death, she believes
in heating the iron, pressing the flower heads
between sheets of wax paper, and shutting
them inside the dark pages of a book.

How foolish I was to throw away the dead flowers.
Nearly as foolish as I am tonight, slicing through trash bags
on our porch with a Boy Scout’s pocket knife,
blade glinting in the milky light of a moon
that would laugh if only it could.

Eddie Krzeminski received his MFA from Florida International University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grist, Split Lip, Saw Palm, Small Orange, and elsewhere. He teaches writing classes in Southwest Florida.