Paul Doty
November On My Back
November on my back, a wet coat to be sure, clothes for raking up the leaves brown maples left like candy wrappers, I'd throw the job to other family but my sons are perennials in a distant April, and live with their mother in the Boston boiled New Hampshire. It's a plate I know well having shoveled it down at their age, but in a solitary mock farming of cold weather yard work (a solitude to be sloughed) I think about how it might of have been different had they this place these seasons with the nearby Adirondacks for a fatherly furrowed brow, farm girls for loves, and the Grasse River for weaving mischief.
Bio
Paul Doty is the Special Collections Librarian at St. Lawrence University. He has previously published poetry in Shot Glass, The Mississippi Review, the Cortland Review, The Walloon Writers Review, and the Rootdrinker.