Thin metal man
     arms  opened to the
sky
wet clothes
       rust his feet.

The blank page
smiles, beguiling
crinkling up lines around her
beseeching eyes, behind the grin
you see her boredom for
such utter emptiness upon her.
She calls sweet nothings to
the pencil
as he stands at attention
waiting for his commands
before he crosses the field
leaving a trail of bent stalks in his
wake.
An eraser follows leaving bits
of its skins as it slithers across the trail
undoing the marks on the land.

When work is done
soldier, snake, lovely lass lie in
the grass as the moon rises above them
and the words fly up to the night sky.

By a thread
Twisting
vacant shell
oh spider
gone

consider
the field is never always smooth;
there are times that the grass turns brown
and the flowers wilt and their petals
return to the ground
…consider these things…
what was a frolicing maid becomes a hag;
the virulent man shrivels and becomes incapable
and so the sky, never always clear and boundless
and so the clouds, not always childhood pleasantries
but they come into chaos and dreariness
and pile dollops of dark humor
and so our lives,
darlings, O sweet ones -
regard these things well -
and so our lives too pass from radiant days
to gasp below dreary shades
from a happy, happy song to a dirge over the dale –
and not all our rosaries and beads and prayers and faith
nothing will halt, in spite of stories they recite,
nothing will halt the sun and the passage of time
and so like the artist it is best to observe
like the artist in the field
capture the moment, savor the life
and if anything, make of one’s life a beauty
that others may pause to gaze at
as pausing to gaze at a rose, the cherry blossoms…
be you makers of beauty,
darlings, O darlings, consider these things
O sweet ones…

1

         do you remember the first death?

unlooked for
     when we are
unprepared, have no reason to wonder
what death will mean to anyone
         and the gripping power of grief

(or, the guilt, if you have no particular
              feelings of grief, at all)

2

         and the spring rain

as it washes the brownness of winter
     from the yard and into
the street, the gutter running with
          snow melt
the boys plugging the storm sewer
to make a pond in the dead end circle

          where they still play