Dan Murphy Two Poems

Two Poems

A cloud bursts over Broadway Street. Through a car window, everything’s blurred— traffic lights diffuse a rolling glow, storefronts

fog to a collection of impressions—save a man ambling slowly, clear through the strafing rain, a Boston Herald held above his head, news

bleeding down his face, all those story lines that more or less the world signed off on surfacing blackly in the path of his shoes.

Even as the icy crust of winter was finally breaking—

a strangely warm day in early March— even as I enjoyed the ease

my shoulders felt, a breeze through my t-shirt, I couldn’t help but read

the sign on the steep and moguled slope of the Arboretum’s bald, idyllic hill—

bare lilacs like flags on a slalom— and hope for a brief but substantial snow.