THE BOOTCH

Maybe some day they’ll name a ferry after me? The Bootch.
And everyone can ride The Bootch
to play Tourist in the Big City or go home to
the rest of America after a day of wonders.

I shall do a poetry reading. You can join me.
We’ll have others, strangers get on and off
and I’ll keep talking, reading my poetry,
pretending I still have feeling in my fingers,
that if I wanted to, I could write a poem
about this very box that rises and closes
and carries people up and down
like the ferry across the Mersey from Jersey
to the white tent building on Manhattan’s shore

I shall conspicuously spew these words on the ferry
named after me and anyone who
pays can come along to listen – I promise
I won’t read the old stuff and you won’t be
afraid of the water. Leave that to me.

- By Anthony Buccino
From VOICES ON THE BUS
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.
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WALKWAY

At lunchtime I tromp the long macadam trail
beside the Hudson River.
The Manhattan skyline is across the water;
you can’t not see the boxy towers, on the left
the north one’s got the TV tower,
the twins twice as high as everything around them.
They steal your eye from wherever you look.
The Jersey City skyline – a mangle of construction cranes
and glass buildings – has got my back.
Between opposing architecture helicopters buzz up
and down over the neutral river
on somebody else’s important business.
Seagulls squawk.
Ferries scurry across the water and back.
The Circle Line tour boat trudges upriver.
Low tide uncovers green rocks footing seawalls.
Some day you’ll walk this walk from the Statue of Liberty,
past the Colgate clock through Jersey City to Hoboken
and Weehawken, too, and rest, finally under the GW Bridge.
Meanwhile, nervous waves bash against green rocks.

- By Anthony Buccino
From ONE MORNING IN JERSEY CITY
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.