Maple Leaves

Citrine bits scatter sown over

The lake’s memory of black quartz

Drift like golden light-filled dories.

So the sowing goes all day

Across the broad field of the water,

Off and on, in gusts of well-populated wind.

But sometimes in an artful dropping,

One by one, each leaf settling on its twin

Until the maples lose all their inhibitions.

List poem:

I am a secret

longing to be whispered,

I am the clock face

you must check time and again--

my hands steady and deliberate,

pushing forward.

I am the blue which precedes

blackest night, indigo and iris,

the blue of forget-me-nots which follows dawn.  

I am bright and dark,

a welcome and a warning.

I am a slow and studious

walk through the woods,

a joyous leap from the driftwood log.

I am driftwood, changed by water and sun

and dead to the place I came from.

I am the most inner pink crook in the conch shell

and I am the broad smile of sky

over open pasture.

I am the honest cold pain

of ice cubes between the teeth,

I am the spreading warmth of sun on shoulders.

Return to September

Our idle hours for months
Had been
Campfires and ghost stories,
Drive-ins and the Hocus-pocus of
Tadpoles to frogs,
Cutting across fields then
Checking each other for ticks, and
We practiced oblivion
As far as school and winter
Was concerned.  The dread of
Virgin # 2s sharpened to spears and
The shrieks of new tennies on
Polished floors was postponed until
The last two weeks of sunburned cheeks.
In my day,
A shiny new penny
In the eye of each loafer for good luck.

Starlings

Starlings

A noisy cloud descended

Upon our pasture bare

And called to my attention

A flock of starlings there.

They clacked and shrieked in numbers

Impossible to guess

On their way to somewhere

They stopped there to eat and rest.

The ground seemed black and moving,
Swathed in the feathered herd.
Such boisterousness, it seemed to me,

Should not come from a bird.

Like a thousand nagging sisters
Haggling on my lawn,

They sat noisely discussing
Almost an hour long.
There rose in me an evil
To dabble in their fate.
I snuck out near their resting place
And stood beside the gate.
Mischieviousness in my heart,
I loudly clappped my hands.
A silence fell over the pasture, then
Like the whoosh of a thousand fans,
They rose as one together
And lifted into the air.

Above the trees, it looked as if

A black cyclone hovered there.
Just as a pang of guilt

Began to swallow me
This noisy, black cyclone

Settled back into my trees.
I gladly opened window,

I gladly opened doors
And listened to the starlings song

As I sent about my chores.

In honor of T S Eliot's birthday, a challenge to respond to the Wasteland. 'April is the cruelest month of all'

Should April be the cruelest month, then

August will do us in, all

the sparks flying of sun off water

igniting the tinder of past loves and losses.

Bright lit corners along the curbs, beneath

the trees shaking every last leaf

of memory down upon us, the whisper

scraping of what once was, the hushing of the now

warm wind, always fortelling the winter

of what might have been.   We curl up

beneath that scorching summer grin, infatuated

with the light and cloudless days only

to find fitful rest between the roots remembering

the green of life above us, in our yore.  Gone

the hyacinth and lilac, gone even now the lillies,

sere.  You are the only vestige of desire.

Looking for Poetry

Silver light, warm through the window,
warm over the table and across the page.
The words make shadows
in me like empty oak branches
jittery in the wind.

September

Watch. The twilight,
golden tinged, washes into
the purple-black ink of night,
the sky a watershed,
moist with desire and dew.
In the dark a whisper
from the trees
as birds settle in, all of it
together, writing
a mystery as the year
turns pages and brings us
forward, a chill
of anticipation.