Time Is treason to my freedom.
It bends these words outside my will.
The question, if I understand
Correctly, has to do with love--
Some say it can't, some say it must
Endure, must overwhelm the church
Bell, explosion of at least one
Universe and the possible
Mistake$ we've made in naming God
As our witness to the gallows.
Meanwhile his daughters lay in hell,
Distracted by the devil's *****,
That offer up a homesick blues,
An unsprung harp, a slide trombone.

Days without much news,
The ordinary pleasure
Of lovers,
Homecoming,
Dogs inside from the rain--
More the thunder,
Not understood.
No more than the time
That won't stand still
When the question of death
Cannot be quietly ignored,
The absent father shadowing
Eternity

I miss the stripteases,
Even the arguments--
Less bitter than the loneliness.
It takes so long to make a friend,
Even longer
To adjust to experience.

You are your mother's eyes,
Her innocence and guile,
Gossip of the single-chair salon.
She say count
Your friends on fingers,
One hand held behind your back.

You were young and casual,
The bed post carved and whittled,
Woodchips on the floor,
Not wanting to be known,
Or even placed in memories.

Forgetting was the great effect
Of the twelve packs
And occasional *******,
Swearing by its value--
While I, some freakish lobe,
Remember every ******* thing.

You never knew how to need love,
With its circumstances,
Gift of the restless father,
A long train ride
Into thin air,
Some years a summer visit.

Rooms with moving pieces--
Morning's unmade beds,
Disenfranchisement of the afternoon,
The self-help hucksters
And baloons--
Children waiting.

Transition of your oldest friend,
Beside you in your husband's arms--
Before they both are gone.

Inside this wilderness I wait,
Temptation having ample time
To waste suggesting miracles
That my misguided mind should want--
Delight consumes my will, my thoughts
No longer innocent at hint
Of your return, your lips that part
Expectantly, so long ignored.
Your errant latitude so long
Endured, I  promise nothing more
As evidence than things you know
Already to be true, your steps
Adjusting to the dark where I
Have stumbled lacking even words.

Quiet Saturday in April,
Sliced inbetween the sacred days--
Black eyes of the cave dwellers son,
Stone sealed and no longer breathing.
Reerection of the temple,
A barn raising, takes its sure course
Among the sunburnt carpenters
Whose hammers were inherited.
Should anyone be left behind,
As everyone is leaving soon?
Not even leaving--remaining.
Such useless information should
Perhaps be left untrumpeted,
Old news just mentioned in passing.

As if an illness
Long endured
Lost its grip,
You have that feeling--
Seeing your own self clearly--
Of new life,
Not looking back.

She raised good vegetables,
Named the barn cat Bluebell,
But never let it come inside,
Swept her husband's shoulders clean
Of sawdust every weekday evening,
And Saturdays at noon.

He always called her mubber,
With obvious delight
That she had been persuaded
To choose him eventually
To father my father,
When times were lean.

She passed out chewing gum at church
To restless children,
Planted flowers and discouraged weeds,
And showed my father's only son
The way to stitch a toy horse--
Blue scrap cloth, foot-pedaled machine.

Smell of woodsmoke winter evenings
Makes me smile through tears,
As Peterson's piano
Knocks out C Jam Blues,
And that old horse
Sits sideways on the mantle.

March saw yellow flowers grow
And I transplanted them
Beneath the pines that lined the drive,
Amid advice they might not grow,
Which would have been the case,
Had she not watered them.

When someone leaves, their feet go first,
And she was there to see him go
Beside those flowers inbetween
Knotty pines and stacked firewood,
To lie in wait, outside of time,
Outside of spoken words.

The melting snow, the most in years,
Gives way now to those flowers,
Or the children of those flowers.