I listen to couples make
comfortable word-work
with slurs slurred and
gawking at glazed windows
filled with the feeling of
forever empty—forever
falling into the pit of
“perhaps this can be real
enough” for me and my
lover and this child and
for that great long while,
left looming under dusted
streetlights. If only for a
short long while, can it really
truly be, just you and me.

It takes forty sap gall0ns
to 'still one gallon of maple syrup,
boiled down by the sun stored in firewood.
I remember well, my aunt Florence
feeding the boilers in the hill orchard sugar house,
wearing an old going-to-church dress,
that had, some years back, been handed down to workday chores
and on top covered over by uncle Fred's red and black mackinaw.
"Stand back," she said as she opened the boiler door
first the roar, then a bank of fire that painted
her from kerchief to boots flaming red,
her eyeglasses, two pools of glowing magma,
and everything above was steam and rising vapors.
In my mind's eye then and now when I read Dante
I'll think of her, she was and is, the very vision of a devil tender.

A ride today in Des Moines
that appraise law and counteract
any that country may enact
where Wichita lineman forthwith

and mackinaw shall really embellish
furthermore with Granny Smith
awhile down stream on a riverboat
that foregoing is never behind

where a river is always wide
and bourgeois with a paddle wheel stride
why his atropine smile
reach the delta with such desire
and let him take the home route

in an abode of parish shanty
where river dance makes day long  
a simple beast, a man

with chinchilla wrap round his neck
that sweep her off flourishing deck
these stratospheric ideals now  
for sovereign witness entail campaign.

Our family had an old blue bus,
It pretty much held the whole of us,
Mom and Dad, six kids and Gyp,
(Out pug dog went with us on many a trip.)
We all thought it was pretty cool,
Back before the seatbelt rule,
To sit on the engine between the front seats.
A blanket on top helped absorb all the heat.
In the wintertime though, we thought it was nice,
When our fingers and toes were frozen like ice,
To warm up on the engine of the old blue bus
Just Mom and Dad and the rest of us.

We went on more family trips than most
Dad drove that blue bus from coast to coast
Kids will be kids, and boys would be boys
Dad got annoyed when we made too much noise.
“Do you want me to stop this ****** bus?”
That scared us to silence, calmed down the fuss.
On the longest trips with lots of kids,
Mom took Mason jars with tightly ******* on lids.
Sometimes Dad would drive through the night,
We’d wake up at morning light
Never knowing quite where we would be,
Carlsbad Caverns? Washington, DC?
At the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,
At the Grand Canyon, South Rim, looking down.
In New York City, a little lost,
Finding out what slots in Las Vegas cost,
A coal mine in Kentucky, Disney World for some of us,
You’d never know where we might go in the old blue mini-bus.

Sometimes on the weekends, Dad tied canoes on top,
We’d put them in the river, and he’d tell Mom where to stop,
Most times she would be there, but one time she went too far,
Since those were the days before cell phones,
We were up the river without a car!
There were ball games in Chicago, ERNIE BANKS was in our bus!!
He didn’t show up in the picture, but you could see the rest of us.
Lake Bloominton, Clinton, and Mackinaw,
Oh the things that blue bus saw!
Boys Scouts, Cub Scouts, birthday trips with friends
Eventually the bus wore down, but the memory never ends.
I suppose somebody bought it – that old blue mini-bus,
But they never had as good of time as Mom and Dad and us!.
Phil Lindsey 12/30/16