a seasonal offering

The first poem is a timely one because 'tis the season, and I have included the second one for being the first's equinoctial companion.  For their simplicity and precision (if I may humbly congratulate myself), I am often jealous of these poems when I look back at them and I try to emulate the effect as often as possible though mostly without success. 

Easter

My family at church,

I watch the birds again.

How they flick millet

and thistle, hunting

sunflower seeds.

Chipmunks forage

under the azaleas.

The maple leaves

are splayed and jazzing.

Everything moves—

Grows through loam,

Flies and feeds.

I should join in.

Find crannies

For the candy eggs,

Filth my fingernails

Unearthing weeds.

Anything but this:

Sun-shy on the deck,

Watching from my

Rocking-chair—

reach, retreat, reach, retreat—

waiting for the bells

so I can close

my eyes and sing.

(first published in Steam Ticket, v. XIV, spring 2011)

Jacket Pockets

Autumn is a time to feel things in our jackets we haven’t felt

            For at least a year—

The folded five

And the coffee shop receipt,

The peppermint in plastic

And the crumpled reminder to self—

When, from the warmth of pockets, we hear the crackle

Of a dead leaf

And feel its dusty bones.

(first published in Muse and Stone, Summer 2011)

broad brush (neuro-oncology, basement floor)

This poem is several years old and the sentiment is another ten or so years older.  The "you" in this piece is roughly me in my twenties.  It's a tale as old as doctor's office waiting rooms, a tale of disparate characters in the proverbial same boat.

On Monday for the umpteenth, I go back for more waiting--older, as always, than the last time, and more likely to be in the median age range as opposed to a relative youngster.  In that sense, this poem is a time capsule, a few lines to commemorate an epoch of awkward commiseration.  In a related sense, though, this poem is a testament to the ongoing appropriateness of its theme in which the "you" is roughly anyone.

Broad Brush (Neuro-Oncology, Basement Floor)

On walkers with tennis-ball feet,  the old escort the older.

A man with a mummy-wrapped head stumbles like a drunk.

People in your lap, you smell the faint, wet-wood odor

of magazines.  You peel stuck pages, but you aren’t reading. 

A nurse in blue scrubs calls for Joseph Stallins—mildly funny

until you see the scar on his skull, temporal to parietal,

black-blood crusted and stapled like upholstery.  And the old

keep hobbling, filling the sunken seats and sofas.  You all

get ten minutes older between each clipboard roll-call.

Then it’s you watching the blue scrubs shift stiffly at the nurse’s

back and rump, answering questions lobbed over her shoulder. 

Weight, temperature, pressure, pulse taken and jotted, she leaves

you alone on the papered, not-quite-bed.  It’s just you feeling

young again—rightly twenty-something, here for a cough

and an ahhh.  Out there where the sick are just getting old,

is all, where God paints with His broadest brush, you were in line,

queued for bad news, and in your hundreds.  In here, though,

where accolades are hung in gilded frames, where the wallpaper

is white with clouds against a crisp, blue sky . . . In here, you rifle

through the drawers, fiddle with the forged-steel implements

and spongy gauze, free to feel in your twenties, hell, in your single

 digits, free to feel not so bad after all and sorry for Joseph Stallins.

(first published in Blood and Thunder, Fall 2010)