Standing by the weathered deck rail
I stare down at the larger fly
It walks around the glass obelisk that towers above
And studies it as  
I a glass ringed skyscraper down town

Wings flicker golden in questioning bursts
Looking at the welcoming hole in the bottom of the trap
Inside some are swimming in the mealy water of sweetness
Ugly crazy eight paths in their last circles

Some are climbing up the glass walls,
Entombed, striving futile escape through the silver dome
Some still fly their trapeze patterns before their last dive
Wings flicker golden in questioning bursts
Pondering what entrance next

Another breathless afternoon slowly vanishes as darkness screws itself
Around the horizon
Another dented chair from the kitchen, rag wiped clean and still damp, is dragged under old cottonwoods
Another light from the rented farm house goes off
Another frayed fan from Woolworths slaps the humid air with no effect
Another prayer for relief
Another sigh slipped from the prayer drifts in the night on a small journey to nowhere
Another attempt at escape for the old woman
Another tortured wait to feel a change, a yearn to feel a breeze, but yet still the heat
Another day of my short visit over
Another night like the last
Another like another like another

Another chair dragged close by hands work worn rough
Another scorching July night, in the low plains, in a sheltered valley
Another humid night when sweat drips off old chairs and old fans and old brows that pray
Another night when sweat has enveloped us like a wet summer jacket zipped tight around the valley
Another laugh from the tavern down the hill
Another place where they don’t go
Another moment for the two old lovers to share in stillness and be like this wind; of no movement, no sound
Another with another, forever
Another chance for darkness to spur the change, to stir the wind, or cue a cloud to rain

But no, just another non event …this evening of hope
But there is no cue
But there is no change; there is no breeze
Swelter is relentless and constricting
But these two patriarchs will share this evening’s oppression like their life,
…together,
Both, of substance and hopeful, with little to celebrate
But they will cope and do it all;
Meet the challenge of life, like this night.
with very few very, very small words


Gram and gramps of the country
in the summer.
of my youth .
in the evening
A few years from a/c

I.
Come hither soon sweet yellow ball of spring
With honey dipped and blazoned slow by subtle fire
To this our porch of winter dour
So laced in white and tied by frost

With bounces quick and deftly turned  
With your first touch from feathered flight
Pray, brew this cold
To spring’s own sweetened mead


II.

Smash well that bloat of frozen drift
And melt it into crooked runs
Like mountain streams reduced to flow
Away along the curbing

Lay low the lengthy strings of ice
And turn them into fresh warm drip
And bid new sprouts to split the brownness
Of their ceiling

III.

And as you bounce
Strum lightly on your warm and flowing breezes
And so the gentle music play that heeds us of
Your coming

IV.

So soon… Oh Spring!
In lightness fed
In greens to live for months this time
We may bloom in rapture’s rise
And loose these blocks of numbness
That harshly choked our move and flow
And seal our days with light and heat
And sweet passion’s move return

When soon
I touch again the naked grass
It caked in layered frost of grey ground street
And clay of Lancaster brown-girded on its
Many slender leggings

It could the start of summer be

At spring no cake of rotting ice
But clay on slender leggings
No snow to hide and stifle life but spots of clay and grind
And chance for life at angle down the side

As on the side a hole upon my trample
And greenish specks of life