Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer poet freed finally after working 40 years for The Man and sometimes The Woman. No more useless meetings under fluorescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. Now he’s able to devote serious time to making better poems when he’s not, of course, satisfying his wife’s legendary honey-do list.

Galapagos Tortoise
By Michael Estabrook

Out the back window
next to the mulch bin
topped with watermelon rinds
corn husks and withered pumpkins
a Galapagos Tortoise, not moving or eating
just resting, steady, sure
as the harvest moon, two front legs
stretched out, wrinkled head
pecking out from its dark carapace.

But I know it’s not a Galapagos Tortoise
because this is winter in New England,
light snow powdering everything.
I look again and see it’s only
the large rock at the end of the path
resting sure and steady as Mars
in the winter sky, looking down
at me standing next
to the mulch bin
in the snow.