Tim Mayo
Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, and Salamander among other places. His poems have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award, and his chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper also won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Butterfly
For Betsy
Since I have no long-handled net
to capture what I want to offer you,
I turn to Dunn’s poem Instead of You.
In it, he’s invented a butterfly to distract
from the reader he doesn’t name, whom
he’s hidden on the page as a faint watermark
beneath the butterfly’s paper-thin wings.
I watch the wings flutter their dust
toward the foolscap corners of his poem,
and I decide to take his butterfly, pluck it
right off his page and put it on mine,
make it the symbol I will use for us.
I even tell you it’s my own invention
as I spread and pin it in all its colorful
splendor on this page you’re reading
right this moment, and you’re not
a graying shadow smudged beneath
this butterfly like an afterthought.
Now I am ready. I feel as if the gist
of what I could thrust with my pen would
transpierce that hollow, thoracic hole
we’ve both known, you and I, that place
collectors of such metaphors have been
trying to fill with this last specimen––
too fragile to ever put our finger on––but
which would complete them (and us), so then,
the glass lid could close over their lives.
Big Nose Blond
For Betsy
Last night, McNeill’s burned to the ground,
the brewery/bar at the bottom of the hill.
I remember a beer McNeill used to make
called Big Nose Blond. I think of salt,
when I try to taste it in my mind. Not
because it tasted salty, but my palette
recalls how it was the perfect antidote
for that bitter saltiness whenever some
aftertaste of life curdled on my tongue.
It would always be a recollection I couldn’t
bear to enunciate almost like biting into
the liquidness of its memory, trying to
surround it with the hard consonants
of courage. And I remember a word
I never used, hidden in a ribbed cage,
which kept my heart from beating too fast,
from tearing itself apart for a reason I couldn’t
fathom. A dangerous word, dangerous in
its velvet softness, a word I no longer fear
as I think of you in the dark of this morning,
before the dawn arrives, and I drive to work
with the memory of your hand in mine
as we walked toward the fire, where the big
nose bottles rattled and popped in the flames.
