Jessie, I’m at work. You may think that
I’m cutting grass in the cemetery,
or that I mean I’m “doing poetry.”
Jess, you know grandpa well enough to know
both are happening at once and much more.
What is this much more? It is white water
at the fall-line of consciousness; it is
a whirlpool spinning off from the main stream.

In this section of the cemetery,
Ole’Jim pops up and Huck. Mark Twain follows
to mock the Gothic mood and make sport of
Huck’s drunk cluster-bomb father and it
strikes me that Twain must have seen such a man.
Jess, do you share my claim that Mark Twain saw?

Edgar Carlson is a native Long Islander. He lives in Farmingdale. Farmingdale is flat. But the Barn, on 2 High St., in Huntington, was instrumental in widening his poetic world. More recently, he has been writing letters to his granddaughter, Jessica Bellini, in a sonnet form. They are experiments in plain suburban language and simple pleasures.