This week’s poem captures a moment of quiet tenderness between two brothers walking together through New York City’s famous park.

Mike Bove was born and raised in Portland. He teaches in the English department at Southern Maine Community College, and his first book, “Big Little City,” was published this fall by Moon Pie Press.

Walking with My Brother

in Central Park

By Mike Bove

 

It’s not a clear day,

but we’ve got the sycamores.

They barrel upward and I point

to the white patches

on the trunks.

It’s raining now,

and walking

this city with you is

something else.

A month after you were born

I spit in your face

as you slept: a family joke

all these years later.

It doesn’t make any sense

to apologize.

But I do.

And I love

the wide arms of this place.

This walk and this rain.

These sycamores reaching

down as we

move through.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Mike Bove. It appeared originally in “Big Little City” and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

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