Blackbird:
       In a field, pecking corn;
       At a pond, drinking;
       At dawn, stretching;
       At sunset, disappearing;
       Chasing dinner, a bug.

Blackbird:
       In flight, bringing the storm;
       Circling my house, waiting;
       Over sea, with the wind;
       Spiraling up, diving down;
       Quoting Poe, nevermore, nevermore;
       At the window, knocking;
       Bringing omens of trouble.

Message delivered:
Blackbird in a tree, observing me.

Bang! bang! went the screen door,
"Don't slam the door!", my mother.

Decades later...

Bang! bang! went the screen door,
Sounds like heaven to me!

She was twenty on the night she came to our street.
And where she was, there are flowers by the curb.

She was twenty and from abroad, but living in Ardmore and sad.
Her friends, who were not really her friends, left her on our street: drugged and dead.

But every year, her mother brings plastic flowers to that spot on our block,
And what could have been, is remembered.

When I first heard Elvis, I shivered.

Blue, blue, blue suede shoes, heartbreak hotel, you hound dog, you!

But when the Beatles came along, I left you behind.

Later when you came to Huntsville, you were fat, and then you went back to Memphis and killed yourself--- **** you!

My road is not a highway, well-traveled and straight.
Nor does it meander through the woods or follow a country brook.

No, it's often like a cave with short horizons;
And when there is a fork, I take it.

Paintings delight my eye and ignite my imagination: Devotional icons, the omni cubist view, the brazen eyes of Whistler and Manet; and Monet's lilies.

The perspectives of the renaissance and the violence of Caravaggio; the lush glowing skin of Rubens' nudes; and more!

I celebrate the intellects that created these.