Heated dreams of my middle age:

lurched montage of women and girls

and real estate. Eager, dark haired

girls and a gargantuan yellow farm;

broad porched, hipped roof, spread

in cool wooden rooms and sheds

along a road in southern Maryland

lined with pines.

Storm Warning

A blowing white wall. My windshield
sweats off the ice and snow
Maybe ten miles an hour. Muffled tires
chuckle on the corrugated strip. I creep
left, back into an invisible lane.
I turn on the radio for reassurance.

The announcer reports Australia is flooded.
Bullsharks swim upriver into Brisbane's
streets, and snakes shelter on the second
floor of houses while cars float out
of garages and join refrigerators and recliners
and bullsharks, apparently: a surreal armada.

Its crazy out here.  Hide in your homes!
The world and its weather will do what it will.
It isn't safe, not on this road in the snow
invisible behind white billows.
Stay home on your sofa until it sails
out into a street full of sharks and snakes.

The ignorance of tons

Now the ridgeline is sharp-edged, purpled, flat,

featureless, matted upon the brighter sky.

That afternoon it seemed stippled and hatched

with bare trees against white. Last night it snowed.

Then, moonrise showed the ridge blackest beneath

a black sky. Just cresting over, sharp backlight

picked out four or five treetops in silhouette,

limbs detailed against a bright arc.

The moon rose free and blackened all, everything

black except white light and white flakes in the air.

Our walk will show it fuller, gullied, open

along the switchback trail, staired

by great fallen blocks.

Light's straight lines invent edges of the

thicknesses our hands might grasp

pretending an obverse world. Petals

our fingers will hardly acknowledge as

solid as stones to our sight. Which stones

weight my palm can heft I'll measure.

But those boulders' mass is all secret.

Sums my estimation makes cannot

move my body's ignorance of tons.

I'll never have them like I do

the taste of water.

Fat Tuesday Tanka

Plastic Jesus Christ
That I just found in my mouth.
Do I spit Him out?
I show everyone my prize:
King Cake's backward Eucharist.

The Feast of St. Francis

Watching songbirds wintering at the windowfeeder.

Money, again, on my mind.

Francis loved the poverty of animals,

who own only hungers,

every expectation exhausted within

their perfectly tailored lot.

Who are always as they are made

and die in the dress they were born in.

My daughter and I drove down

the highway one day last week

and along the road in an hour

saw seven hawks, still

on limbs or overhead looping circles:

watching to stoop, take and eat

some songbird.

Perched on orchids. Fed.

Long evenings quiet study of Persian calligraphy.

Genoese history. Latin. The theory of games.

Who can say with authority the birds,

exotic, ill-fit to these climes, resent the aviary?

Who but they? Perched on orchids. Fed.

Who say, in fact, nothing to us but themselves

serenade. Our joy accidental to theirs.

Greg's Service

Fumbling, at a loss,

those talking, those dumb

Why he went vague:

his habit, lies unmentioned

His friends, using, jumpy in their corner.

Others that knew him but not one another.

Lovers comparing their afterglows awkwardly

in his childless parent's home.

Promiscuous, faithless,

what deity exactly that might

take him from this crowd

was unclear.

He'd been Godless, beloved.

And now dead. All of us pressed

into a hot kitchen for a funeral

with no body, no grave,

no minister, no rite.

His ashes somewhere

in an urn.

Swimming the Quarry

I

I had heard as a child and never forgot

that the first people here had tickled for fish

slipping their hands, foxily rippling, in streams

and so tricked the trout right into their fists.

Scholarly, slow, I saw study as this tickling

in words for some true thing, alive

in all the clauses of textbook and banter.

II

That morning we swam the flooded quarry.

Pale ledges, ridiculously deep water

transparent and bright. The doctor and Greg

dove while we floated alongside our daughter.

Fish appeared and came on slowly as,

unseeing, she slapped the water. Grabbed at it

with small fists. Their progress was steady

and invisible. I turned to show her and was bit.

A tiny, implausible jolt. Disbelief, laughter.

The shining living thing found me

inconclusive. Removed itself to its mates.

III

We sat on the porch that warm night.

Sang to the little girl cautiously stalking

a toad that sporadically leapt, paused,

and sat on the path. We cheered on her hunting

and cheered when she had it, carefully cradled

in both hands. Tiny kicking efforts

to escape its gentle little cage.

She considered the options: prince or warts.

She had it then. Wild, real, caught.

In her life's short career

the finest thing she had done with her hands.

Stilted Delivery

Tonight the actors run the rehearsed lines

again. The same lines they have tried for weeks

to make stop and go like real speech.

As everyday words do. No rhymes

or devices to mar the flow of life portrayed.

on stage. In routine words they recite the show,

but it does seem as if just now

it occurred to them what needed to be said.

I have the same few thousand words

you do. Our expressions are unoriginal

(the frown, the slouch, surprise, a smile)

like the beautiful, fixed vocabulary of birds

or alphabet blocks. O is for orange.

Every toddler invents the same tower.

Each a private victory for its little builder:

Perfect, countless, duplicate lettered efforts.