The road to the South Hills always
has a message for me, always wants
to whisper something secret to me.
This special autumn day it's a
message that the hills have groomed
themselves and are ready for me
to be overwhelmed by their beauty.
The hills await me, the road whispers,
and the road reveals to me how
the hills have clothed themselves—
brightest autumn finery brought out
again this year from stuffy, hidden
trunks, with gold and yellow dresses
now covering the spindly legs
and knobby knees of quaking aspen,
while brilliant saffron sashes gird
the expanse beyond the trees,
with willows trimmed in scarlet
and ochre meadows completing
fall's wardrobe, but for the mist.
Above it all, a misty veil hovers softly
between trees and mountains on days
such as this. Of course I'm perfectly
willing to be lead by the road, for
I relish where it always seems to lead—
for this road never lies to me.

--

She stares into her canvas, drawing
to her brush a blood-red droplet
of paint for another flower, her hands
delicate, as diaphanous as the wings
of a white butterfly, with blue veins
running a precious lace-like pattern
from her thin fingers to her heart.
She knew she didn't have long to live,
but death was uncharacteristically
slow in fulfilling itself, as she sought
week by week to finish her painting.
Not a masterpiece, I sensed, and
perhaps not even intended
to be finished, but instead a sweet,
wonderful journey of the heart, as if
retracing a memory-strewn path
back to her beginning. She paused
at times in her wanderings along the
sunlit path of that canvas, too ill
to leave her bed, or looking upon
the world from a hospital window,
the shadows of her death intensifying.
The last time she was able to paint
she seemed aware that her death
was near, and thanked God for the years
allotted her. She died several days later,
her canvas, her life, largely incomplete
but her true journey now underway.

*(For Dorothy, my painting partner,
who died Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010)

Early dusk and it's as if
all the birds have memorized
lullabies; they've quieted
to delicate refrains
as the summer sun descends
flame orange and spent
to its western berth. Birds huddle
deep within the cradling
catalpa trees and murmur
in their soft way to one other,
barely audible to those who
would listen, perhaps
reassuring each other that
the night will not be long.

--

The constricting walls reflect nothing,
allow nothing, it's simply the dusty
depression of a room within
a house within a failed marriage,
barren of love or hope of continuing.
Only a break in the tilting blinds
allows a razor's shard of light through
to the suffocating heaviness of the
room, slanting across the floor
to the feet of the man in his chair,
clutching the near-empty bottle.
The man he is now, a diminished shell
devoid of dreams and plans,
of sexuality and a passion for life,
can only long to be the man he was.

–