Long legged woman-girl,
step across the parking lot,
slap cool asphalt with your pink,
rubber sandals. Pay no mind
to the man who studies you from
the sidewalk. He is old enough
to be your father or your uncle.
He is full of morning and sweet
surprise for someone lovely as you.
With his free hand he shakes a smoke
from its pack and blows white wreaths
into the pale day. Keep walking, cool,
long legged woman-girl. Keep watching her
grey-bearded man, caught between admiration and desire's husk.

The animal inside me wears a sweater when it snows.
He lives in Logan's house with his new wife,
and is afraid of the neighbor's electric fence.

The animal inside me eats only cold food from a can
that Logen scrapes into a metal bowl,
and plays with scuffed, rubber toys.

The animal inside me hates the toys and the Alpo,
though he gulps it down and makes a show of play,
ever eager to please.

The animal inside me sings of the Ones who ran wild.
He has a fine collection of bones buried in the back yard,
and revels in rolling in fresh deer ****.

Sometimes, when no one is there to see,
the animal inside me chews the new wife's leather shoes,
although this is mainly a thing of the past.

The animal inside me loves to run, which hardly happens anymore.
He is waiting on the doe-eyed collie who lives down the road,
and wishes that Logan would just burn the stupid sweater.

For Randall Kruk

Although no stranger to yourself,
you were your own undiscovered country,
always pressing on some border of awareness,
always asking more of who you were.

You were the one who asked of life,
who spoke for spirits and for memory,
who wished us at that last meeting over coffee
to have the time of our lives in Madison.

You demonstrated time and time again
the plain necessity of kindness, of honesty.
That would be your legacy, my friend, your gift -
and in the giving, you became that gift.

After all the words spoken in memoriam,
the Guinness and the soul-soothing jazz,
there came a shifting bow of color in the sky -
rain pouring from a blue cloud at evening.

My sister dreams of flying tortoises,
cockatoos and parrots flapping in a
perfect randomness. She watches
from the porch of her cabin on the lake,
strangely grown into a manor, and recalls
the promise of someone soon returning from
a time on the water. The tortoises make her think
of portobello mushroom caps, frayed and black
against the stainless blue. She wonders what this means,
this tumbling opulence, this message in the night that my sister dreams.

The sky above the treeline hangs
grey and yellow as old linen.
A wild-hearted wind
is from the south,
arriving in waves and troughs,
arriving and turning and rushing past.
Out of sight, a bird trills its presence.
A red-wing blackbird rides the wind's current
up and over and down-gliding into a wide green field.

Laced in bluebird's song,
cicada's needle shrill, the
morning rushes toward noon.
I amble through the neighborhood,
pausing, moving on. It is midway
through the month of August,
Bermuda grass already sprawls
and goes to seed. Dew beads glassy,
cupped on blue-green blades
wide as fingers. And in the
eastern sky, silent silver wings
slide beneath a mare's-tail cloud,
it's knife-edged contrail loosens
soon into a bland and terrifying scrawl.

i
A still, white curtain balanced in
the perfect blue delights, confounds
the senses, promises a timeless time
when narrow yellow wafers
spin the air around
and diamonds slide down to the pavement,
spatter across the rippling pavement.

ii
The wind’s wisdom teaches me
to take a moment’s rest beneath
an angled awning. Overhead a span
of green and red and blue
banners the northern sky:
a blessing and a memory of blessing.
Soon a second arc,
fainter than the one beneath -
together these hold up the sky,
hold children’s wonder till
they fade to shades of grass and rust.

iii
The bridge trembles under black wheels
and the sliding river flashes gold.
Wreathed in cold white sheets
the pale, piercing sun
illuminates a slide of color
rising in the east
riding the grey leviathan cloud.