2 Poems

An Inventory Taken on the Eve
Of the Year in which I reach my
Seventieth Birthday

I have them still:

My adenoids,
My tonsils,
My appendix,
My prostate,

Except a wisdom tooth,
The only one I ever had.

I am missing it.

***

Don’t Look Now, But There
Is a Hole in the Calendar
And it’s Taking on Water

St. Christopher, Rome tells us,
Never lived. He’s as fictitious
As the fabled fox that carried
The Gingerbread Boy on his back
And, mid-stream – you know the rest.

This other Kit, it seems, did not
Ford any brook, fiction or fact.
He carried no infant on his back.
And now, from the calendar of
Saints expunged, he disappears.

Leaving the infant to tread water
Until, eventually, he gets the nack.