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Don Bouchard May 2016
Two Christmases ago,
Morning cold hovers in electrons.
Frost covers the Chevrolet
Backed by whiteness
Under zero degree sunlight
The old farm place sees morning
Bright and calm....

The ancient barn,
**** frosted roof agleam,
Stands downhill to the north,
Below a curving tractor trail
Cut in the snow...

At the other end of those tracks,
Eighty-one and counting,
You are crawling down
the tractor steps,
Pulling battered buckets
from the ancient fodder shack,
Hobbling to the cattle troughs...
Doing what you love to do...
Have done for fifty years....

I am taking pictures at the house,
Amazed at the cold and frost;
An onlooker now,
Somehow aware that I can not
Follow you...or won't,
Wistful still for attentions
you always freely gave
To kine instead of kin.

Could I go back,
Would I go down
To trough the feed?
I tell myself I would,
Or I would not.

The image burns coldly,
Electrically before me,
And only vaguely I'm aware
That you have slipped away.
Don Bouchard May 2016
Leaves have disappeared,
Only the last,
The fallen fruit, remains,
Fading red and waiting frost.

Not yet visible, the latent buds
Hang silent now on leafless boughs....

Summer's work,
Fallen in this garden of the Lost
Beneath autumn branches lies...
Graveyards of apples.

Only the passing deer,
Only the roosting turkey,
Only the raiding geese,
Bend low to pick the last of harvest up,
Quick provender
Before the coming snow.
Don Bouchard May 2016
A farm screen door latch
Should slam with the urgent drumming
Of a man or woman going off
On urgent business:
To see the cattle fed,
To till the fields,
To clang the dinner bell...
Should sing relentless songs of returns,
Not stand and wait for days...
Sagging as the hinges sag,
Lonely in waiting those who've left,
Forgetting to come back.

A door is meant
For entering and departing,
Handles on both sides.

Door latches that see
no leavings nor returnings
Are kindred to handles on coffin lids,
Opening containers only....
No longer home....
Don Bouchard May 2016
(Alone, I wanted love, both to be and to do...
Creation is a dangerous fling when love is on the line.)

Wood carvers' magic lies
In the carving of their knives;
Sticks of wood and cotton strings
Give hardwood imitative lives.

Always, tough, a thing is needed,
Or the living and the dead move only
In surreal dance, a lifeless reflection;
The dead must imitate the living.

Somehow string life is never quite enough;
True love must choose to stay...
To dance a half step slow or quarter fast,
To jive against a jink and twirl an unexpected twirl.

And so I cried each night and prayed
For genuine, not wooden love,
And life arose in wooden hands;
Pinnochio was born, and stood

Wobbling on wooden feet, but living.
Full joy I felt, to see my son,
My own creation, moving on his own.
Then he, like any living boy, began to run.

Some say a loss is better if love comes first;
Some say it's better yet, to be alone.
Seeing both, I can't determine which is best...
Pinnochio, Pinnochio, my wandering son,
Remember me, your father, and come home.
Don Bouchard May 2016
I think I may be coming
To a surprising change of mind...
After all the drumming
Against censoring of any kind....

I've read some poems on this site
That gave me food to think...
Not talking about explicit *****
That I can skip with just a blink.

The one that someone wrote a week or so ago
Asking what the world is coming to...
That little children grow up to see and know
The things not even adults used to.
(That's the one that made me stop to think.)

We have uncanny access now to things
No one twenty years ago could have predicted
And every sense and deep desire can have its fling
Which leaves our children open, unprotected.

I won't go rated R or X in this, my turning point,
Just want to lay a few thoughts out...
And grow some dialogue around this joint,
So here goes nothing...please don't pout.

Censorship, it's odd, somehow has ***** connotations,
And every person has the right to make a choice...
But children, innocent, don't know the dangers they are facing,
And we adults might raise protective voice.
---------------------
Don Bouchard May 2016
The cells in my fingernails contain atoms enough
Their own whirling systems
To form ordered constellations in layered universes....

Space between solids goes down and down and down...,
Around us mostly nothingness
Down and in and down and in....
On and on and on.

Do we need to look outward
For outer space?

Didn't Robert Burns tell us that fleas have fleas and fleas have fleas, and fleas have fleas that bite 'em?

Infinity runs hard both ways.
Don Bouchard May 2016
Young trees stand in clumps,
Bursting forth in tender leaf,
Chattering in the early fall,
Silent in the early spring,
Tender shoots alive,
A school yard thriving.
Thin bark, food for winter starvers,
Antler rubs for summer bucks...
A stand of youngsters
Waiting to be thinned..

The old trees root down,
Twisted, misshapen,
Root masses exposed,
Bolls huge at intervals
Intermittent.
Solitary veterans of Time's war,
Arms twisted and split,
Cracks in the roughened old skin
Letting strangers at the heartwood,
Grown sponge-soft,
Home for squirrels,
Sleep-seeking 'possums,
Note-leaving lovers.
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