playground –
a popsicle wrapper
skips in the wind


.

In the night, in the darkness,
that old familiar steals around.
Emerging from corners of my room,
from the stillness and shadows
is a sad repository of memories
I can count on always to cheat
me of comfort and sleep.

–

I suppose the secret to happiness
as we grow older is living to enjoy
each day, not the sum of all our days.
If we tally the days, the years, it becomes
a cumbersome affair and we begin
to labor under its unyielding weight.

--

It's a difficult thing, admitting I've
grown old, no longer denying the truth
and feeling mortality's cold breath which
until now I've not wanted to accept.
In those flourishing days of my youth
I often felt as if I could outgrow my skin,
heaving and throbbing with life's lust,
but now I feel I am shrinking back,
too far back into this aging shell,
finally seeing how I'm at the autumn
of my life while it gathers about me
as brittle leaves swirl about a lamppost.

--

Your words, like razorblades,
lacerate and penetrate
this grasping heart.
I've cried out many times in pain,
pleading with you, asking why
you can't simply walk away
and leave with me a portion
of my heart to lose elsewhere.

--

There is no night like a bayou night,
the air pregnant with expectancy and
mystery, mingling scents of wisteria,
trumpet honeysuckle and gumbo mud -
a Dark Ages alchemist seeking an elusive
golden fragrance. It's a night dark despite
the nearly full moon, a night in which
fireflies pulsate as so many flickering
neon bulbs and the cacophony of insects
reaches toward an unattainable crescendo.

Mammoth cypress trees line the bayous,
letting fall Spanish moss as strands of ghostly
gray-green hair, and the oppression of dark
is waiting just beyond the searching lantern.
At times the wind moans like a sated lover,
at other times it howls wildly, but it's always
present and always vocal to those who
would listen. There could be fear in such nights,
or there can be a love of the mysteries inherent
with the bayous - I choose the love of the bayous.

I lived in Louisiana about nine years,
and there are many things about that
state I still love - bayous being one of them.


--

a lone leaf
clings to the winter aspen –
my child's grasp

--

blizzard –
the snow goose
there . . .
or not

--

seaside . . .
the moon pulls away
from its reflection

--

winter  forage –
the crow pecking
at its shadow



.