My Brother’s Squirrel Story

My Brother’s Squirrel Story

He ate mostly from a bowl of Holiday nuts,
Walnuts, hazels, pecans, brazils,
Which I bought at ‘The Dollar’
  For ninety-nine cents

When he was done leaving the shells all over
He would take the rest and hide them,
In closets, shoes, under the carpet in the corner,
  We’re still finding them

He was a baby squirrel, who
My nature-loving wife found that summer,
A furry but fallen unopened eyed thing,
She bottle-fed nursed him, until he grew up,
  A playfully friendly and mischievous pup

He would curl and cuddle in a crescent with the cat,
He made his own nest in an old upturned hat,
By the fall he had grown, but we hadn’t the will
  To put him back out before winter’s harsh chill

So we gave him the Thanksgiving centerpiece to eat,
Let him climb up the tree, Christmas Eve, for a treat, 
Come Groundhog Day and his shadow grew strong,
And we felt in our hearts that it wouldn’t be wrong
  To let him go out when comes Spring cleaning time
 
Since then we’ve wondered, where’s our baby got too?
There are lots of his kind, our neighborhood is a zoo,
No way we can tell one gray squirrel from another,
  He had plenty of cousins, and sisters, and brothers

Until next Christmas day, by the slider back door,
Maybe fifteen or more, perhaps close to a score,
Was a stack of dried acorns, all piled up nice,
  Far too large to be left by our chipmunks or mice

 

Hear, See, and Know

Hear, See, and Know
  (a Poem for a Christmas Morning)

Alive in lands held in Gods hands,
Wishing that all would change,
Imploring high, begging demands,
Hear - Jesus is the gift

Need we a more proferred prize,
Than what’s born in one’s mortal heart,
Look out about and raise your eyes,
See - Jesus is the gift

Hard burdens bend the knees of men,
When ill won’t heal, cold hearts can’t feel,
Ask for relief, and think again,
Know - Jesus is the gift 

A Chipmunk in a Scarlet Kilt

A Chipmunk in a Scarlet Kilt*

On Christmas eve, we spied out in the cold
A gay chipmunk dressed in wee scarlet kilt,
Playing on pipes, upon our window sill,
Tidings of Christmas joy an’ blessings old

When a bairn, a’ heard much a’ such a beast,
Tall tales, ye ‘ken, told to vaunt the olde yarns
Of me aged seanmhair, who meant no harm,
While we sat silent at the Nollaig feast

Gidheadh an’ so, yon Piper Chipmunk blew!
Snippets of yuletide chestnuts and olde hymns
On beag A'phiob-mhor held in fore-limbs,
For which we thanked him with a roast cashew

He piped a ‘Ding Dong’ Merrily Along,
Into the solemnist of Silent Nights,
Then Hark!, the Herald Angels Sang alright!
An’ many more, akin twelve days of song

When, as foretold, tho’ we’d done nothing wrong,
  With a nod he vanished, wink ‘n gone,
Stayed enough to make his myth live on
  Before he’d played for us a bit too long




* For help, access Google Translate,
   Set from Scottish Gaelic
        to English, and
   Type in word for translation

Someday You Can Be A Santa Too!

Someday You Can Be A Santa Too!

Every Santa Claus is really Santa,
  No matter who they are or what they do,
For everyone who cares is truly Santa,
  And someday you can be a Santa too!

The woman with the bell is surely Santa,
  Raising money for the homeless and the poor,
She doesn’t do it ‘cause she needs the money,
  She does it ‘cause she’s helping others more

The old man at the mall’s another Santa,
  And yes he wears a tacky worn red suit,
Although he’s in the malls’ and stores’ employment,
  He’s there to bring you kids enjoyment too!

The cartoon on TV is also Santa,
  You’d be surprised what Santa Claus can do,
Some say he can’t visit all the worlds’ children, 
  Look, now he’s on the air! He’s everywhere!

Your Mom and Dad are your own special Santas.
  Think of the things that everyday they do, 
Who else would give so much more than they want’a,
  Except for how much they are loving you?

Some day you too will be an awesome Santa,
  It’s not the world’s most hardest thing to do,
All you need to do is to be helpful,
  It’s the best thing in the world that you can do!

December on the Road

December on the Road

The kite rising moon has got himself caught
  In the thatched Inn’s roof
His once wide eyed smiling face
  :O’s “Ow!” alarm!
As his white hot craters singe upon
  The roofs whispy stalk broom whisks,
Shall I tell the innkeeper
  It’s on fire?

I haven’t felt this warm
  Since I left home

The Old Parish Newsletter

The Old Parish Newsletter 

There was a Parish Newsletter,
3 sheets of paper, stapled in the middle,
Folded over, mailed quarterly,
  Bulk rate non-profit stamps

Mostly columns from Church People;
√ Updates on the diaper ministry,
√ Names of all the blue hairs working the rummage sale,
   (Which has also been discontinued)

And every quarter a page two opinion,
Often from our own small town lawyer, named Gene,
With a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Or some other prolix and sententious Saint

Extrapolating said quote into the need
For subsidized housing, health insurance,
Anchor babies scared their parents may be deported,
  Then I was never THAT far left

And he lived near by, summer and winter,
In clear weather (if he wasn’t at court that day)
He’d commute on his bike from his office back home,
  Passing by, I threw snowballs at him

I’d be out there, getting the mail, scraping driveway ice,
And up the long hill before our house comes pedaling Gene,
In low gear, cycling slow as you’d walk,
  Who can balance at that speed?

I didn’t try to hit him,
Ice in the face is no fair for a friend,
Just splosh twelve feet before, or ten behind,
  Splosh, so he knew how we stood on the issue

I asked him once, during church coffee hour,
“Ever think of writing an opinion on punk kids
 Who throw snowballs at old men on bikes?”
   His comeback;
“That’s only you, punk kids today are
  Too busy with their gadgets to read a piece of paper”

Then Gene caught the cancer,
   Took meds that gave him an almond tan,
 And when they stopped working he just gave up
   And made his peace

There was talk of starting a newsletter online,
  Wish I could write for that sometime 

A Poem of Lovers and the Moon

A Poem of Lovers and the Moon

Lover, can you look and see
  This same bright oval moon as me?
That far away, through we’re apart
  Will bridge the distance of our hearts?

I shall pledge to it I love you,
  Send it on as my envoy,
Wait and watch its lips for whispers,
  Let it answer in your voice

Lover, tell the moon you love me,
  Prompt it carefully on cue
Let it span the world between us,
  Say it while the moon’s in view

Blue Windows

Blue Windows

Reductive, the dusk and twilight
Condense to blue squares

Ebbing dark and brightly lit,
Dramas broadcast in the night

Divided some by a dozen panes
Others in two, double hung frames 

They’re walls, glowing by televisions,
Best as I envision, through windows

Behind which people are in bed,
Or couch pillows prop up their head

While I, who walk by in the dark
Witness Man’s adoration of video lightening

Visions that disappear
Without ever being real
Lives of others we supplant for our own
And welcome to come in our homes

Jack Kerouac wrote of similar scenes
  When, to become one with Nature
He similar suburban streets,
  Under these same pink celestial stars,
Him the 1950’s beatnik,
  Plodding his era’s identical picket fenced streets
And, like me, trying to pass beyond
  Our trans-fixation with deceitful self esteem
In blue shadows of airwave ghost dreams,
  While plodding towards inchoate Shangri-La

Which makes it at least seventy years
  (it being twenty-18 now)
Since TV stole our eyes and ears
  And souls

A Man and his Cat

A Man and his Cat


I hold up his treat bag
He pats with his paw
He knows now it’s empty
He’s eaten them all

“There’s more in the kitchen
 No need to get sore,”
(He thinks he’s the King here)
I go and get more

Flanders Field Revisited

Flanders Field Revisited
   (on the Armistice Centenary, Nov 11 2018)

On Flanders field a poet saw 
  Crimson sunspots in his shell-shocked awe,
                  Poppies!
Rise above the shallow graves of no-man’s land,
  Flowers tilled by death’s own hands,
Planted and furrowed by the Kaiser’s Huns,
  Batteries of allied guns,
And up they rose from the charnel grounds,
  Thousands bloody red round bullet wounds

Before the advancing fronts of Spring,
  Above the fire steps they clung,
                  Poppies!
Outnumbering the dead who’s tally
  Too few big push Generals know,
That lost soldiers may find
  Peace to sleep,
Come poppies, lay torn lads
  To sleep

For all war weary, who abide,
  Love’s primeval garden has supplied
                  Poppies!
A blessed sparing balm from Gilead,
  All love’s respite for beloveds who grieve,
And for every war’s worn soldier,
  Caring the same,
We offer poppies
  In their name

Five Season Garden

Five Season Garden

Winter days of monochrome
  We keep shivering in our homes,
Dreaming of the spring garden
  We plan to plant when winter ends

Kneeling like a muddy drudge,
  Hoeing ripe manure sludge,
The vegetables and flowers I see
  Are still imaginary to me

Summer and while picking fruits,
  A carrot snaps off by the root,
I’d not imagined it like this,
  Washing tomatoes off bird shit

Dreaming of idyllic fields – we woolgather
  Bright great bountiful lives,
Discounting in the moment those vexing chores
  Needed to make lives we desire

Fall leaves, vine stems, old hard and brown,
  Time’s tillering plow will turn them down,
Then rake all up & till & hoe,
  A garden grave made smooth for snow

Dance of the Yin-Yang Skeletons

Dance of the Yin-Yang Skeletons

They dance every black night within the ghost light of the moon,
They’ve danced since ancient ages, and they'll not be stopping soon,
Earthworms have eaten all the brain from inside of their heads,
They do not understand, nor care, so long have they been dead

Clicking and a clacking, spin around and ‘round and reel,
Immortal skeleton lovers spin in crazy dharma wheels,
When she dipped she lost her head again, about an hour ago,
He fixed her broken ring finger with his left third little toe

Yinnie and Yang-ling, so fast, they effortlessly twirl,
One cannot tell which one’s the which, the guy, or that the girl?
Yinning and Yanging they blur and disguise all the world,
‘till left and right, all wrong and right, are dizziness and swirls

Each dances in support of their old ancient skeleton lover,
The love eternal that they share, is caring for each other,
He catches her when she falls down, lifts with a ghoulish grin,
She takes his hand when his white ribs are exhausted of wind

While having loved Yin, Yang makes schemes to do away with her,
He plans to grind her bones someday, and into bread flour stir,
Yinnie too much too loves her Yang, thus his life’s too at stake,
For while she gnaws upon his heart, her hunger goes unslaked

Back to back and arm in arm, they count off twenty paces,
Then shoot fat holes into each others black gap tooth-y faces,
They’re the dual in duality, the ways of earthly means,
They give birth to dead children who cry horrid banshee screams

Over potters fields lost they strut macabre promenades,
Treading on old tired ghosts, who cling onto their rotting bods,
The skeletons there consummate their sworn vows to divorce,
By breaking specters from their flesh, and stomping on their corpse

And on anon the skeletons dance,
  Their jig of crass romance,
You ask how long on can they go on?
  Have the living any chance?

When all the Earth’s dust’s blown away,
  Still Yin-Yang skeletons will dance

Fragments of a Skeleton

Fragments of a Skeleton 

For eight years,
He has come to mean Halloween
  Outside our home,
As much, even, as the Rabbit or
  That Jolly Tubby Man
  Embody their Holidays

Most the year he spends hung in our garage,
Across on the wall from Blue Polyethylene Mary and a Joseph
  With their swaddling baby, who it is foretold
Must suffer naked nights out in December’s cold
  Then back in here for hot summers of cruelties too gruesome
  To be mentioned in Dante’s annals of Hell
 
He’s a skeleton whose ghost is gone
Lynch like he swings from dusk to dawn
  Upon a tree branch over our lawn
One yellowed tooth now lost and missing
  Which the whistling wind makes hoot and hissing
  As if possessed by owls and snakes in song 

From seven years’ October Suns
He’s discolored to a gray ash yellow,
  As gone is the green night glow that he once shined
When was first purchased and was new,
  His blinking eyes having both gone hollow
  Since a leaky battery corroded his mind

These rank October days and Sun
Bleaching crisp his haggard bones, everyone,
  While the desiccate wind scales him to bits
That mow and leaf rake will till in
  What hallowed ground will take him in,
  Not much longer until he’s gone

So lonely to hang with him here,
We had like zero kids last year,
  My bones too have grown stiff and creak
My tendons ache, I’m sore and weak,
  With him it’s all I can do to sigh
And mourn the season in a world
  Where even skeletons must die
 

The Billion Dollar American Haircut

The Billion Dollar American Haircut

I never play the lottery
This week I played the lottery

I thought
  What it would be like to win all that hair
     Shimmee-and-a-shake in a Beatle wig

I let them take a little clipping
  Which they put into a basket, then
Other people let them take little clippings
  Which they put into that same basket

They put that basket into a bigger basket
Which went into a bigger basket
Which went into the biggest basket ever in the world

And we all thought
  What it would be like to win all that hair
    We could make a new Woodstock and close the New York Thruway, Man!
   
  Nobody won all that hair

  Repeat

Mean while, 2/5ths of the hair went to government wigs,
  George Washington had a whiter wig
  Lincoln had a fuller beard
  Hamilton did a Broadway jig
  Jackson was replaced by Harriet Tubman
  Grant had his nose hairs plucked
  Franklin had a new fur collar on his coat

Don’t believe me? Look at your money

And we all thought
   Wow, that’s what it looks like to win all that hair
      Let’s get King Louis pompadours, and call it macaroni

  Repeat

Except this time
  Somebody won all that hair

Nobody I knew won all that hair
Everybody I knew was balding
I’m balding

We don’t resent them
  Like sheep to be shorn we stand on line again
We stand on line again to be clipped again
  We stand on line again to give hair we can’t afford to lose

We all thought
  Wow, somebody somewhere is in a room with all that hair
I wouldn’t know what to do with all that hair
  The things I could do with all that hair, like maybe …

My ears are cold,
  Did I ever tell you ‘I love ‘Ewe” ?

Savor October

Savor October 

As the sun sets sooner
  Upon a cooler day,
As nor’easter blows will beckon
  Damp and wet like weathermen say,
After the last lawn mow, before
  The leaves have blown away,
This aroma of mildew and compost and rot
  Has blended in a hummus
Delicious enough in to dip a carrot
  Or paste upon a pita,
(Could a breeze be so substantial
  as to spoon spread) then
Washed down with ginger beer
  And black Bermuda seal rum

Tastes
  I will re-savor
When boldly standing here again
  Come crisp winter’s sterile air

Lullaby of Summer

Lullaby of Summer

At times insects come with winter wood,
Making scenes, and they but rarely one good

Such as the ant colony awakened,
Thawed in here by heat the wood stove’s making

Chinese fire drill ants running all about,
What could I do but throw them all back out?

Tonight it’s a more tenuous chirping,
Creak like in the boards of the woodworking

Examining the legs beneath my chair
I found naught there was lacking for repair

And brought on dreams of past summers’ thickets,
Joyful buzz whirred behind clean white pickets

Seems this cricket thinks my hearth a
  Warm compline sun,
While winter night claims Earth
  And everyone

Cat Curious

Cat Curious

That’s curious,
  See - all my shirts
Have a hole
  In the right shoulder,
A little bit before
  the seam,
It needs a close look
  To be seen

I clip his front claws
  Once a month,
It’s possible I missed one,
  Once,
Then when I lay back
  For a rest,
He perches sphinx-like
  On my chest,
Kneading my shoulder
  With his pets,
And soon enough, each one
  He gets

  Huh.
 

Rubber Ducks

Rubber Ducks

Legendary;
A container of rubber ducklings was washed overboard,
Made in China, for children’s hands,
  Soapy in the bathtub,
They bore no food,
  They carried no water
And floated adrift,
  A speckled yellow diaspora,
Tossed about warm foamy seas

After the men with guns put us in the boats,
Out from Viet Nam, to never-land,
  Bouncy on the sea waves,
We had no food,
  We had no water,
We floated adrift,
  Another speckled diaspora,
Without a shore to wash upon

Eight days out something pecked below the gunwale,
Tiny yellow smiley, a childish face,
  Persistent in the sea waves,
It was not food,
  It was not water,
We took it in,
  Come join our lost diaspora,
As we would wish welcomed ashore

Social Media

Social Media

Looking at pictures of young school friends,
They have grown up,
  (Creases) mark the smiles

Their parents are shrunk and wrinkled,
Old crabapples left too long,
  Mine are already gone

  The tragedy is everyday

Turkey Tankas

Turkey Tankas


A dozen flock here,
Hens peck feeding at their grit,
Grand the cock displays

Look at him ruff his tail fan!
His harem has had enough
_

One has a long beard,
Stepping through the unmown yard,
The other one short

These two toms have owned these lawns
Since the hens went off to lay
_

Sweep up a grass stalk,
Beak strips all the seed in one,
He gobbles his friend

“And where is the coyote?”
Four eyes – better to scent him
_

Scaring grasshoppers,
Ruffle run wide five foot wings,
Turkey in the grass

Collecting his lunch is a
Task before the autumn chills

Echo of Xu

Echo of Xu

Orange leaves have not yet fallen in the Charles,
  Though curbside collection is scheduled,
On our ranch house roof nor’easter rains rumble,
  Uneasy is to rest in Watch City,
As I lie, I’ve a longing,
For a home I left longer ago
  Than actually I lived there,
Where my heart remains the age of seven,
And then future was a word bearing promises
  Of releif from childhood stricture,
Rather than fifty-seven, here to
  Look down the lip of the slew
And into the tin-silver chutes
  Of diminishing age

A Remnant

A Remnant

Under a gray sky
  Portending of a September hurricane,
The once green Mantis
  Has turned brown,
Listless in the autumn chill
  As if with leaves soon to fall down

Gone are the gleaming jade
  Eyes of the nymph,
Gone is the second branch on the
  Sunflower stalk
That motionlessly
  Seemed to walk,
Gone too are the two husbands
  You devoured with loving care,
No telling sign on your waistline,
  Your abdomen tapered and spare

Your eggs, lain warm
  In the secrets of August,
Shall safely abide
  Toothless winter’s harm,
But languid in this autumn chill
  Whither, Mantis, are you bound?
How few for you are setting suns,
  Before the earth pulls you to ground 

The Sparklies

The Sparklies

Attempts to look at it fragment in blinks, elusive, phantasmal,
I look around the corner and it moves around the next, 
  It is that light that cannot illumine itself, remains aloof,
That irreducible spark one can neither measure nor find,
Not in the center nor the corners nor the unity of mind,
  That is, this me, who claims identity, these I’s of ours,
Who can claim defiance of asomatous time, concealer of vacant death,
We, who clutch tickets to Heaven, reincarnation, a “rebirth?”
  Or to be lost, unmade, unexistent, alike time before time

And then one day I met the Sparklies

Mowing the lawn, stung by a yellow jacket,
On the calf, annoying, ow, I left the mower
  And pasted baking soda on the wound,
Resting I thought no more of bees, anaphylaxis was not a word,
  Neither I nor my brothers had ever been allergic to anything

A month later, Labor Day, I mow again, knowing where the nest was,
I mowed them over once, mowed them over twice,
  Felt the ground give softer under foot there
And come around the third time - they were waiting,
A circling cone of vigilance, I naïve of danger, 
  And they stung me 5 times,
Panic, running, brushing bees from socks, legs, under a glove,
I removed a detached stinger with my thumbs
  While it pulsed stuck in my shin
 
Countless details too long for metric time
And tedious to re-describe in rhyme

And I lay upon the driveway,
911 having been called,
  Medtechs hovering over,
When there, in the corner of my eye I saw their yellow swarm,
  The Sparklies,
They, the absence of input from senses growing faint,
Twinkling stars and colored bars too peaceful to do harm,
  Well knowing I was going, 
I wondered only in what form I would awake,
With not a moment more for thoughts to make   

A Poem for Diane

A Poem for Diane

I thought we had the same grade school,
  Then you did not go there,
I thought we had the same high school,
  Then that girl wasn’t you,
I thought we watched the same sit-com,
  Then you wrote you never do,
We went to the same college, true,
  Though you’re not someone I knew

Your pictures show a lot of folks,
   I see you all the time!
So I know you exist – online,
  Which one of them is you?
I hide behind a frivolous face
  So tell me how are you?
I post a lot of pictures too,
  Most of them are not mine

You hang with many old school friends?
  Since graduation, the old crew?
I don’t do social media much,
  Sometimes I’ve real things to do,
But love to hook up with old friends,
  You make my profile new!

White Shadows

White Shadows
  (a poem for August 6th)

As the rising sun 
  Blinds on the horizon,
She is warmed, she’s a girl,
  She’s iridescent, she’s the World

No more eating peas and rice from her lunchbox,
  Now carbonized, displayed on the museum shelf,
No more worry brother won’t return home from war,
  No more Mama-san work in the kitchen

Come see the pearls of purity
  Grow about her bright new soul,
Cleansing crass grains worldly
  As an oyster from its shell,
From sex, from lust, take money,
  Of impoverishing the world for our fear we’re hungry,
The crimes of empire dishonor a nation,
  But not her, not now

As with her we laud pure angels

Now we are too white shadows, cast,
  Daisy petals from the blast

The Poem about Holding Sand

The Poem about Holding Sand

When she and I bathed at the beach,
It could have been Aquinnah,
Or Bend in the Road, the Jetty,
  I think it was Dyke Beach on Chappaquiddick,
Wherever it was,
  I wanted this forever to stick

  So …

I grasped some shell’n grit beach in my hand
To clench this moment, on the strand,
I held it tight with all my might,
  Some did slip out, not quite alright
But no matter, most still there,
  I only need grip with more care

Wise men and fools try to hold hours,
The precious moments that are ours,
And holding tighter what little left
  Meant I could not reclaim time’s theft
Of lost moments, however divine,
  I could not hold the sands of time

A Squatter on the Lake

A Squatter on the Lake 

Four white plastic barrels
Fit inside a wooden frame,
  Lidded with old plywood
Since bleached gray by sun and rain

Yesterday while swimming,
I found a whole dead sunfish
  Encrusted on its deck,
Sun-baked tough as leather,
His fish face grimaced hard,
  He was left there with a purpose, 
He as someone’s calling card

And today, there it is,
That orange footed lake float squatter,
  Squawking rudely on my float 

  “It’s my float, it’s my float,”
   He calls the Seagull-ettes to know,
  “It’s my float…”

Not twenty yards away,
But I can hear the neighbor’s talk,
  You are too close, yet not enough
For me clock you with a rock

Middlebury Gorge

Middlebury Gorge

Toes on the edge,
The thought of accidental death is
  A word there is no word for,
Son of survivors, his lineage
Is all ancestors who had children before they died,
  Another word there is no word for,
And there are girls to impress,
Down in the gorge, on the rocks,
  Where a clear golden river flows
Just like beer with mountain foam

“Don’t dive, hold yer nose and
 Be sure to wear sneakers ‘cuz
 Yer feet ‘ll hit rock bottom”

On the ledge of the bridge
The thoughts of injury inspires,
  Break a leg, yer arm, hit yer head,
Spend some time in a hospital bed
And everyone’d come around,
  Sign my cast,
“I could’a died,”
Girls will swoon “Ooh!”

”Jump jump jump,”
There is a crowd chant down below,
“Jump jump jump,”
His voice or theirs he does not know,
“Jump jump jump,”
Don’t bother count three two one go

  And he jumps

The Innocents

The Innocents

Around and round a drone yellow bee,
Sipping nectar brewed for humble bee nuns,
  Probes each purple floret gleefully,
She draws her head, crawls on the crown,
To the next fresh floret on the way
  As she works her row around

Soon lands a sister aslant of the first,
Commencing to work, she’s filling a need, 
  Fresh flower faces yet to nurse,
Black elbows caked in yellow, persistent on she plows
Sexing pistils curved in rows,
  Countless hundreds on the bough

Virtuous drone, do you know the difference
Between your honeycomb hexes, and
  These wild flowers that you mate, (or even what sex is?)
When you’re done here to another you’ll move
Where on you’ll work, chaste making love,
  Another virgin rendezvous

Splinters on the Boardwalk

Splinters on the Boardwalk

I remember fearing that
  If my flip flops slipped off, my kid feet
Would be splintered by the rough wood of the boardwalk,
  Sunbleached and dessicated,
Boards laying diagonal,
  Barkers before their stalls at right,
Benches and the rail overlooking
  Sand and sea surf rolling left

After a day at the beach
  Mom wanted to show me the boardwalk,
Or her boardwalk, this storied place
  Where her Father had brought her,
I don’t recall wanting to see it,
  More like she was the kid this afternoon

Us walking along, my mother commenting
  On the attractions that had been here, or there,
Each having been replaced by a new one since,
  And my mind elsewhere

“Are you listening to me?”
  We’d stopped before “The Yacht Club,”
Basically a green water circle that ‘yachts’ went around in,
  Obviously on wheels,
Rolling over ramps unseen below the green,
  Immatating how a rolling a sea cruise feels

“Mom, I want to ride the boats…”
  “How much?”
The Italian Barker said “A quarter,”
  “Wow, rides used to be a nickel!”

“Are you listening to me?”
  It’s you and I a generation later,
We’re stopped outside a ride called “The Speedway,”
  Boxey plastic racing cars that went around an oval race course,
Plywood street painted ramps providing the ups and downs in the illusion
  Of a Monte Carlo race track

You said “Dad, I want to race a car!”
  “How much?”
A Pakistani Barker answered “Three dollars,”
  “Wow, the prices have gone up!”

When Stars Go Out

When Stars Go Out

Whither the faerie fireflies,
  Glowing only in a summer’s memory,
Extirpated by lawn treatments laid down too hard,
  Leaving only this squid-ink gloom in our back suburban yards

Except, sometimes - is that a bright blink, in the brush?
  Must be a trick of the light, an optic nerve that twitched,
A stray reflection in the glasses I never had glare protected,
  For a second look shows all is dearth and dark again in the dusk-night’s absent light,
While city street lights obscure the glow of evening stars
  Making them too as seeming put out,
And no - that was a plane behind night trees,
  With landing lights descending on a breeze,
Now that Rachel Carson’s silent spring
  Has become our millenial summer stillness

Yet again, like steel on a flint, they are the sparks that light my memory,
  So long ago …

  … A July 4th weekend,
Our parents had brought us to our Great Uncle’s cabin,
  On Chebeague Island, Maine,
His old butterfly collection upstairs,
  Pins through their hearts, flying under glass,
A white boxer slipping a brown one the Ace of Spades between his toes,
  Dogs playing poker in a picture frame,
With oil lamps and antique things,
  Humid night memories too many to recall

When our Mother pointed out “Kids, look at the fireflies!”
  As she waived us outdoors into the clear night yard
Where the Milky Way spilled down before the tree-line, upon the ground,
  A blinking neon glow lamp mist in which we gleeful ran around,
Next Mom brought out something from the kitchen,
  One for each of us, and then
We chased the flies about with mason jars,
  Clamping them under the lids,
My older brother discovering he could catch some by hand,
  Four hyperacive kids spellcasting with magic hurricane lamps

Next morning we came down and discovered
  She had let them go,
“Mom! Why did you put the fireflies out?”
“Because it’s morning, and when the sun comes up,
  That’s when all stars always go out”

Pink Apples

Pink Apples

Generally, as a man of descretion,
I don’t say things I ought not mention
  Like, when she leaves her laundry on the floor,
Collapsed stockings, bunched band underwear,
  And a sling like to slay two Goliaths

But her bikini top upon the beach
Left out upon the shell worn sand,
  And seeing no one but we each,
Leads me prurient to think
  Soft pink apples are in hand

The After Dinner Question

The After Dinner Question

It’s at parties with friends, if I’ve not before mentioned,
After dinner, I will pose this most impertinent question, stating; 

“May I presume to say, if politely permissable,
That giving cats food serves to make them invisible

“Before meals, our cat’s alarming, howling ‘Meow meow meow,’
As if he’s hungry enough he could eat a whole cow

“Pick a can, pull a tab, smells so good, fork’ in bowl,
Watching him gulp it down, ‘snack snack snack,’ -  never old

“Once he’s done, once it’s gone, once it’s all in his gut
He walks off, silently, watch his britches and butt

    “As he fades away below his tail, curved,
        a disapparating question mark above
           that final feline pink period dot

“For sure I don’t know, though I probably ought to,
It may be just because I don’t know where he’s got too

“He has shelves, secret caves, an assortment of boxes,
I’ve found fur, sealed in drawers, where I keep my clean socks in

“Not a hair nor a whisker, even under the mattress
For long hours not a trace, one would think we were catless

“Until that alarm all cats have in their stomachs chimes sublime,
  And he’s apparent again, and howling –
‘Yeowl!’
   Meaning ‘Kitty Supper-Time!’”

Chores (for Father’s Day)

Chores
  (for Father’s Day)

Like picking elderberries and 
  Mushing juice for summer wine,
Dad makes sure I’ve done my chores,
  And that they’re done on time


Then there’s taking out the garbage,
  Mowing grass or raking leaves,
Sundays it’s all laundry,
  Fold diagonally the sleeves


You might think it not at all fair
 Dad himself has got no chores,
Yet his all consuming task is
  Telling me he’s keeping score,
    ‘cause 

 That’s how I know he loves me,
  And is his never ending chore