Two Poems by Mike Chrisman

After the aquarium

I hadn’t known I would want a ceremony
when my big angelfish died
that I raised from a nickel-sized thing
to a silver dollar or greater, but I didn’t
want to toss it in the toilet
like my grandfather’s cigarette butts,
so my ten-year-old daughter and I
bundled up against February
and walked the road a half mile
until the culvert that opens
into a pool almost deep enough
to swim, certainly to snag a brookie
or two as the neighbor boys will,
then down the steep bank six or eight
feet through thigh-deep snow, my daughter
struggling in my path until we stood
at the pool’s edge, where I said some words
about a fish from the tropics gracing
our northern home, then thanked it before
bending down to let it slide
from the plastic bag, surrounded
by warm aquarium water, shiny
onto the icy brook’s surface, where
it spun briefly before catching
current southward, down Avery Brook
to the Deerfield, the wide Connecticut,
into Long Island Sound, the sea…
then father and daughter trudged
home, while the fish receded
into memory. As will we.

View from el parque central

on a wooden bench watching the tourists,
the Mayans, the pigeons navigating
among each other, the concrete
path littered with fallen
jacaranda petals. I’m sitting
to eat my little cup of ice cream
and remembering an ancient time:
summer, Central Illinois, and Zesto
soft-serve, plus three kids
happy with their cones;
a nickel each in ’55 –
cheap even then – and the short trip
home in our Chevy station wagon
perched on a more dangerous bench:
the tailgate lowered, where we ride
backward, our short legs nearly
touching the pavement … and jouncing
slowly across the train tracks –
“Hold on, kids!” to the house,
where our big collie waits
to greet us, his reward the sweet
and soggy cone-bottoms none of us
would have believed might survive
in memory seventy years after the fact.

Mike Chrisman is retired, living in Antigua, Guatemala. He worked for years in the mental health field in rural Western Massachusetts. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at UMass Amherst. Chrisman has three daughters and five grandkids. His poetry book, Little Stories, has an ISBN, and his own translation of the Bible, The Bible: Warts and All  is on Amazon Kindle.