Spring Snow, April 2018

New Home Day 4, March 2018

Gray skirts of afternoon trail

wind chimes, curled leaves, and

the rhythmic wooden thump

of cars above the pedestrian walkway.

Beneath the bridge--strange world

of sand, tire swings, and signage placing

the risk entirely on those at play.

Coffee shop festooned with colored lights--

men at the bar discuss anime and Lord of the Rings.

A man with tattoos on his forehead and soft black eyes

offers to buy me a drink.

Changing Light

Night creeps into the glass
figures on my window sill.
Shadows reveal layers
in the thick bud vase.
Its flowers hold only
a clue of red, a guess
of green. But the bluebird
and my mother's tiny cat become
three cobalt dimensions
and the street lights
are planets inside them.

Grace Note

Looking up at the moon
above these wires is like
lying under four silver-white
viola strings--and you
a throb of song.

Cook County Nature Preserves

Tiny, still refuge,
rock in sea of noise--
car and truck traffic parts
like water around
your miniature forest.
Outside, an ambulance
shrieks. I am glad,
when my time comes,
that someone will be hiking,
shoulders easing,
limbs swinging,
body settling back
in stride with soul.

Wonder

Now it pays irregular visits  . . .
I lift my head and suddenly
the trees are mysteries
in the half-light.
The corner bush
(crushed against stained siding
and mangled into geometric form)
becomes unbearably tender,
its evergreen fingers holding
a down of snowflakes
unbroken, unmelted.
 . . . the dusk has eaten almost all color,
but not the red slash of cardinal
foraging under the dormant apple tree.

Walking

Getting up, I dreamed already
of walking in the woods--
those few miles stashed
in the crooked arm
of Route Six and Torrence.
I had to wait 'till after school
and taking out the dog, and even then,
even walking leaf-incensed paths,
I still felt a'jitter toward myself
and the world.




Three others passed,
one wielding hiking poles and striding
shcrunch, shcrunch as if the trail
were more than a mile, as if she were
an arrow tight for distant heights--
and two gingering along, a man
and a woman who carried a broken shoe.
When next I saw her, both shoes were off.
She went so gently, touching the world
through soft black socks.

An Old Note

A couple scraps of paper with some words I wrote while visiting Starbucks a few years ago has been lying on my bookshelf since I rediscovered them recently. I want to throw the paper away, but not the words. So I'll type them here, even though the note doesn't necessarily reflect my current style or perspective. I still like it :)

The world around me seems especially beautiful. It is one of those moment when I sense that the world is awash in wonder and beauty, like a long stream despite debris of ugliness or sordid evil. In the coffee shop, light catches, apricot colored, in the large bowl-like light fixtures. Against the gray wall of windows, a woman's red curl of hair looks like some work of art. The black man on his phone is a living sculpture--dark against the gray glass and behind the black tables. A lovely voice sings meditatively to a guitar's strumming, and the very leaves on the sidewalk are worlds of wonder--their pale undersides covered with a bright river delta of red veins, their snakeskin surface studded with the gems of last night's dew.

It's odd how different days we see different things. And which vision shall we choose to believe?

Afternoon Pond

You can feel it in your body--
just where are your feet?
Your center has shifted,
pulled forward and down,
like moving against wind
or knee-high water.
Walking is too much work,
so you sit and watch
the gull's crumpled-airplane-angle
toward pond, the heron's
spear-tipped tranquility,
and the turtles--
how they poke from domes
of horn, their deliberate
lives quickened by an
almost summer star.

Take Care, Now

8:20 and agonizing
over engaging my first towing company
for a car which I suspect
has given up the ghost--
but the young driver is courteous,
friendly, even. The winter
was so short, he kind of misses it.
He carries food in a grocery sack
and water in a gallon jug because
he's seen how bad it can get:
a car up a tree, one under a drift,
and the human gore that drunken
"assholes, excuse my language"
leave behind.
He's witnessed, also, the aftermath
of the quaking blur
between good and bad:
the woman in tears, not from
injury to self or car, but because
"that car was in her backseat,
and she'd just dropped
her little kids off at daycare."

We both admire the magnolias.
He would like one in his front yard.
The route is confusing;
he doubles back and I,
never good at geography
(local or otherwise),
lose my way walking home, later.
A woman at a bus stop
points me in the right direction,
explains two or three times
until she is satisfied that I understand:
"Take care, now."

Easter Sunday 2016

Walking back
from celebrating
in a tradition to which
I do not belong
(thickness of incense,
 spit of water,
organ's postludal
jubilation),
I pass two older women,
perms a red molasses,
tucking pansies under
the funeral home's sign.
Birds are singing and,
despite probabilities
of the perennial
April snowman,
we are out of the woods.


We have survived
another winter.

February Flowers

The Light In My Kitchen

The light in my kitchen
comes
whether I deserve it
or not.
In the morning
it lifts
through the eastern frame
of my bay window,
ebbs out
night's mystery
with
a pastel wash,
and crests
white fire
above Providence Bank
(prosaic, but true.)

In these winter afternoons
(so early)
it falls yellow
along
the door and the curtains
and
the honey-colored boards
which need to be swept,
and drops
in a triangle
of orange glory
between
the tall garages and
the trees.

in short spaces

I have, in one corner of my backyard,
a mini-temple made of two pine trees,
scrawny and mauled by electric wires,
yet thick enough to keep off the snow
and sanctuary the ubiquitous sparrows
continually chatting (in fluffy vestments
smudged fawn and brown and gray)
the Sermon on the Mount.

Inside, warm and well-weighted
with worries--'twould be a pity
to refuse so short a pilgrimage,
small as the turning of the heart.

Monday Praises

Beyond the park and pond,
the Calumet River runs
under dark brown banks
alligatored like home's backdoor,
like legs of an ancient snapper.

The water runs two ways:
with the current, mostly,
but sometimes counter,
leaves and ripples going otherwise,
following the wind.

Watching, I, who claimed car trouble
as excuse for skipping church,
find praises on my lips
and a squirrel drawing near,
as if I were a certain saint.

Fairy Tale

We stride in haste through cold October air
through city's dizzy mix of dark and light,
and leave the twinkled skyline for the pier
and solitude and waves beyond our sight.

Hansel and Gretel contemplate a woods
of waters; our own story has gone strange--
backdropped by dazzling towers, neighborhoods
of lives stacked row on row, and heedless range

of wheels that never sleep, however deep
the night. Above the lake, the airplanes hang
like low swung stars, like spacecraft. Skyships keep
each compass tuned by earth, huge kites on string.

Like freeways, awe and horror run parallel.
The whitecaps on the night-black lake can tell.

Botanic Garden: summer's end

Anemones' delicate sketchings
on September air, five petals
lifted, come to life in cool pink.

Weeping willow leaflets pave
a yellow-flecked path
across the quiet water.

In the lily pond, a sunken
Victoria bloom is mum
about fantastic transformations.

Last hummers of the season
shimmer ecstatic energy
from spire to penstemon spire.

Rough Sapphic

City heat and smog-armored sky engender
blank ennui. But see the unshaven grace of
scraggly margins, chicory bristle, heaven's
commonest kisses.

Farewelling this School Year

The peonies at the edge of my landlords' yard are unfurling. The petals are pale, with rich, dark veins along the undersides, making them look like blossoms from some master's still life. Every morning on the way to work, I view a new page in the saga of their brief and lavish display.

My internal cloud cover inexplicably lifted a bit yesterday and today. I noticed again those pieces of connection and harmony that are easily undervalued when one is caught in the throes of disillusionment. An absent student sent me, by way of a classmate, a picture he drew of Jesus. Another student typed, in the laborious hunt-and-peck style of a second grader, the most beautiful note of appreciation. My coworkers recounted moments of joy and faithfulness shared within their families.

Tomorrow we will hold one last morning together before we scatter to our summer lives. Only a handful of children will straggle in to before-school care, since most parents will already be taking the day off work in order to gather the children back up after an early dismissal. When they leave, we adults will straighten and dust shelves, wash lockers, give the floors one last good vacuuming.

This work--tied to a school year rhythm--comes with a flow of beginnings and middles and ends and new beginnings. It brings its own pacing, a threading of days with points of mercy to regroup, to remember and value good things which may have been forgotten.

Watching Sunday Come

Under and above the net
of electric lines like strings
of some forgotten violin,
find echoes of Eden.

See the soar of gulls framed,
ephemerally, in triangles of wire.
Watch the scruffy robin fledgling
leap across the lawn--
such tiny legs, such great  hops!

Cup lime/cream hydrangea spheres,
cool between palm and cheek.
Note each golden fistful of maple
helicopters affixed to branches
beneath the layered heavens.

Hear the haunting robin call
from childhood when you went
to bed before the light
had quite left the window.