Hand Gestures I Make in the Mirror to See If I Belong Anywhere
 

Salute. Peace sign. Hailing a yellow cab.

Pointing out the man in the courtroom

I saw flee. Pointing to the emergency

exits above the wing. Middle finger. 

Pinky drawing the letter J. Thumb out

on a lonely road in New Jersey. A dog.

A duck. A gun. A fluttering dove that

splits in two beyond my reach. A fist

pounding the conference table. A fist 

raised in solidarity. Scout’s honor. Heil. 

Hand at my neck. Hand at my heart. 

Hands hanging lifeless at my sides.

Hands on the counter, leaning forward

so I can look myself dead in the eye. 
 

The Ways They Die in Saranac Lake
 

They drink too much and pass out in a snowbank.

They salt the walk and miss a stair. 

They inhale woodsmoke, they doze under a blanket,

one tassel stretching a golden finger toward

a space heater. They go fishing up Colby, 

they don’t come home, their augur and bucket

after the wind in drifts sweeps the ice clean

discovered lying separately and alone. 

They get hypothermia. They Skidoo hard,

they crank it open, they forget to duck where 

the trail dips beneath the fat arm of a downed elm.

They go bareheaded. They wear camo

and take hot buckshot to the neck, mistaken

for white-tailed deer. They hike Lower Wolfjaw 

and at the picaresque precipice where the path 

curls out to a rockface over an emerald valley 

they slip on scree, on wet moss, on microalgae. 

They mis-tie their crampons. They chainsaw 

and misjudge the felling cut. They meander near

during the backswing of a double bit axe or maul. 

They hunt with muzzleloaders and blow up. 

They go upriver during highwater spring,

lose the channel buoys ten feet below the hull 

and end up on Class VI rapids. They canoe,

they capsize, rise for oxygen and bang themselves

unconscious on the keel of a tumblehome. 

They stroll out to get the mail on a warm morning

with a melting, six-foot-long icicle poised

from the rim of a tin roof. They whistle

beneath a white pine widowmaker dangling 

by the skin of its bark. They swerve to avoid moose. 

They are crushed when a two-by four-foot brick 

drifts down through space from the grip 

of a log loader rented to construct the Ice Palace. 

They contract cabin fever over a six-month winter

and trudge out to an open field, nock an arrow

along a compound bow and send it straight up 

at a gray strip of constant, confounding sky

that idles briefly before hurrying off 

to another town, beyond the mountains.