It's deep night, damp and sticky with the
residue of southern heat which refuses to
totally dissipate this far into the night.

The night is thick with the voices of insects
and sleepers sweating atop their sheets,
committing sins in their vivid imaginings.

Dreaming, I'm standing by the wide river
wishing I could fly with the breeze through
the trees, the soft, warm, cradling breeze

that comes up from the Mississippi River.
It stirs the boughs of cypress and oak trees
and arouses a wind chime's music somewhere

down the dimly-lit street, while scattering
a newspaper like huge leaves; a wind that smells
of magnolia and dogwood blossoms and

river mud. A full moon casts long shadows
which melt into even darker, yet benign
shadows. The night has compiled its secrets,

mysteries, transgressions; surely that is the
charm of night - it frees the mind to settle not
on what seemed important during the day,

but on the longings kept locked away, hidden
from the disclosing light, struggling to break
free and take wing with this night wind.

--

Snow fell deeply on the graves that night,
falling on both the wealthy and not so,
coating with cleanliness and purity all who
do not deserve and the very few who may.
The snow descended coldly and quietly,
blanketing gravestones and statues alike.
Distinguishable only by their shadows
and heavenward thrusts and stances,
they continue to designate where bodies
lay and bright hopes are finished.
Despite the softness and the silence,
above the solitude and endless white,
the boundless rage of ended dreams
seems to penetrate upward, to shriek.

--

We'd laugh at life
if it weren't so serious;
we'd laugh at death
if we weren't afraid;
we'd laugh at pain
if it didn't hurt so much;
we'd laugh at circumstances
but we'd get nowhere.
I suppose, truth be known,
we'd laugh if only we
hadn't forgotten how.

--

Sometimes it is, poor Sylvia,
that we cannot find the answers. They're
not to be found clinking about in the stars,
blowing about in the August wind,
or blooming among the tea flowers, no matter
how scented. No charlatan soothsayer discerns.
No pull of the cards deciphers. If answers come
at all they'll be found deep within yourself, only.
Don't we all prove that countless, wretched
times? But know this, dear Sylvia, even though it's too
late for your sanity and your life, your daddy didn't
die because of you, for you, by you. Death simply
drew the line and pulled him across.

What were you to do when life puzzled you
to the limit, when all poems disappointed,
when the ink failed to flow smoothly,
the pen tore at the paper and the paper
turned to ash before a line could be written down?
What to do when your child's smile failed to ignite
motherhood, when Daddy's image floated in and out, when
emotional pain dragged you terrified under its
black cerement, that cold, wet, smothering grave cloth?

Fear, oh my God, fear, and the doubt that you had,
the whirling about of a shattered mind, bouncing
from this trap to the other - your muted, stifled inner
screams unheard, or worse, unexpressed. Yes,
you found a solution, poor Sylvia, but suicide
doesn't always equate with an answer. You found a
sad poem, a dirge to be exact, something that moves
us, but there is no rhyme to it and the ending is an
enigma, a great puzzle yet to be invoked, understood.

----

The dream haunts me
often, far too often, building
in intensity but is initially
disguised in absurdity and the
nonsense of a young man's lusts
with an old man's deficits.
This woman-like entity,
ill-defined at first but forming
voluptuously, emerges from
swelling curtains. She moves, more
levitates, toward my bed, buoyed
by what I don't know, but angelic-like
it would seem. Or perhaps
an Aphrodite reincarnate?

Oh this goddess, what pale
skin, as Parian marble, full bosomed,
jutting *******, ***** that
beckon, nearly drool, and pursed
red lips beaded with sweet
juice stolen from the wild cherry
tree beneath my window.
Far too much clarity for a simple
dream. But such a dream! And what
seething testosterone I feel!
I am become a hedonist, raging,
pulsing spermatozoa, renewed
of time and youthful energies.

Nerve into nerve we join, ecstacy
compounding ecstacy, bodies wantonly
impaling the other on this love bed
to the result that each cell of our
individualities melds. We are indistinct,
yes - as one, and any ****** impulse
between us is shared to the point of
utter exhaustion, depletion. I am
nearly drained of life, it would seem.

Then, as it always must,
the scene changes, Act II.
Inexplicably, shedding a ******
serpentine-like skin, she slings it away
and drops limply upon me - entirely
skeletal, dry cartilage, sinew, lifeless,
sexless, motionless. The horror
of a diabolical hollowness
stares through me, and I am
suspended, fully terrorized, in
this paralysis. So, this is
succumbing to the Succubus?
God, my dear God, that I should
never dream again!

--

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.


--

playground –
a popsicle wrapper
skips in the wind


.

Early on, we passed this pebble between us,
each in turn
trying to avoid possessing it.
The pebble
is worn smooth,
each palming it off on the other,
refusing to
acknowledge it even exists
so we don't have to talk
to each other.

After all, it's a tiny pebble.
A pebble of non-communication, but tiny.
Nothing to it.

Over the years the pebble becomes
a stone, albeit a small one -
more conspicuous,
more awkward.
The words between
us grow sparse, and if we do speak,
the words are sharper,
more piercing as we attempt to disown
the stone.

But by now the stone is a boulder, massive,
like some squat, ugly beast it has come between us,
pushing us out of our lives, what was our home,
the dreams
we were going to share,
the dreams
we would once talk about.

--

Tall prairie grass, wind-swept and
burnished gold, whispers with the
long-dead voices of all who passed
on this trail in their dream voyage
to Oregon, or California, or who
died, disease-ridden, exhausted, to be
buried just off the rutted trail
under a lonely stretch of sod
or cairned atop a barren lava bed.

A bone-white wagon tongue,
its carriage long ago disintegrated
and fallen into splintery planks,
laps thirstily at the dry sod along the
edge of the trail, finding only
parched earth and no water, burrs
and beetles instead of hydration.
More prairie than desert but still
more a place to leave behind, only
insects, lizards, hawks and the curious
chickadees seem to make it home,
this dusty stretch of history.

Hawks hover, then spiral effortless
high above, as they did so many years
ago, dark against a soft patchwork
of azure blue sky and creeping clouds.
The occasional click of grasshoppers
is barely audible in the billowing prairie
grass shaken by the incessant wind.
Dry bones of beasts and luckless humans
hug the edges of the trail, mute testimony
to the brutality of the westward rush
and the following of the Oregon Trail.

--

I've been trying to poet off and on
now for awhile - but it's hard for a guy
like me, born and raised in small towns.

I've never really learned to swear,
not like a poet anyway. Not like Bukowski.
I mean, what kind of poet would

the world expect me to be? Except that
I'll admit I can drink with the best.
A Huffstickler I'm not, or a Bukowski,

or Etter, or Kerouac - guys who knew the
big towns, the *****, the dives, the rehabs,
the back alleys, park benches, soup kitchens,

flop houses, drug pushers — Humm, come to
think of it, we got all those here. But not
the all-important big town poet attitude.

I'm just this hick, delusional perhaps,
trying to fill a blossoming hole inside
of me that grumbles and claws for more,

and there's gotta be more to life than this crap.
In poeting I used to try and rhyme, like as
in "poor" and "*****", but there's

no rhyme to life, just grab it and clench.
Just life, death, burial and maybe a little
something for the dog afterwards.

The preacher says there's more,
the devil tells me to forget it,
(I'll listen to him occasionally).

So, for me, I'll probe a little deeper and
scrutinize a little harder, perhaps drink a
little heavier, and maybe find a plug

out there that'll fill the hole inside me.
Maybe even put it in words.
Become a poet.
--

on the grass where
the dappled fawn had lain –
dappled sunlight

--

humid night . . .
only the cat's tail
stirs the curtains

--

a leaf flutters
in an old spiderweb
. . . these gray clouds

--

swirling leaves –
the tattered scarecrow
flashes a motorist


.

Here is Cedar Draw, a stream which
spills free from the dam upstream
and then slowly licks its way westerly
among the billowing cottonwood
and volcanic boulders that still appear red-hot,
flattening out, pooling here and there
where fat trout and perch can feed
on luckless grasshoppers and mayflies
blown into the water by the wind.

Here is Cedar Draw, widening into
lush shallows with bulrush and cat-tails
clicking in the wind, showy red-winged
blackbirds clinging to stalks high above
the waterline, and where snowy egrets
ply the mossy banks for frogs. The
only sound heard is the chittering of
birds and that warm summer breeze
softly moaning and sighing for you alone.

Here is Cedar Draw, as fine a place
a poet could every hope to find to relax,
meditate, sip a little port wine, tease the
iridescent-blue damselflies that abound
here, cool one's feet at water's edge,
scribble in a notebook disjointed thoughts
that may or may not make it into a poem,
perhaps to doze a little and finally to
rouse up and thank your muse for such
a great day and such a splendid spot.

--

A drink isn't hard to swallow,
but a divorce, a lost child, death, they are.
The wind comes up, blows away dreams,
ends marriages, sifts through plans,
hopes, throws out what it wants.

A drink isn't hard to swallow,
but growing old, pain, dying dogs, they are.
The wind comes up, tears our garments,
exposes our frailties, our nakedness,
thoughtlessly shreds our defenses.
At times like these
A drink isn't hard to swallow.
---

Praying on still more
of the man-made nectar,
it's a hooded monk on the wing
and it kneels at the bright
blood-red throne
swaying just shy of heaven,
genuflects several times
while vocalizing its disdain,
sips hurriedly of my offering
and then scuds away without
so much as a blessing save
for the assurance of its
repeated appearances.

--

It's the smell. The smell of hundred-year-old
hardwood floors in this old school I recognize most,
floors grown thick and corpulent with untold layers
of pine-scented oil - floors darkened, smoothed
by the trample of children herded, then corralled
in dank stables down those long corridors. I also
remember the confinement I felt, pinned within
those stables, wanting nothing more than to run free,
with the wind of youth combing my untamed hair.

–

Lacking self-respect, I again seek her out,
my wounded heart oozing intimate poetry,
sonnets and pleadings of love in my
addiction to her lustful wine red lips,
mesmerizing pale thighs and *******.
She smiles perfect teeth, indifferently
sipping on one of my love poems but then
spews minute flecks, revealing nothing,
perhaps feeling nothing; I'm certain her heart
remains either dormant or nonexistent.
I know her ****** routine so well as she
becomes that familiar raptor, and I allow
her to sink razor talons deeply in my nape.
Night animals stir with fear as she carries
me off toward the blistered moon, trailing
precious bits of my love, her sensuous
midnight blue silhouette seared into
this dulled brain as my dreams of reciprocal
love are left smoldering on the foul ground,
all for another night of disdainful love.

---

Several miles beyond, the dark mountain
looms threateningly - mirroring my mood
as we both brood coldly. Snow clouds hold
grip of its peaks and melt in an icy drizzle to the
umber, wind-swept valley below.

Inside this dank motel room with its peeling
walls, my addiction is both hidden and enhanced.
The room's grimy window is closed to the world
by a threadbare curtain which hangs
askew, sealing me inside my drunken cocoon.
I can now lift bottles to my mouth with abandon,
gratefully lacking the contempt of others.

A tinny television mutters a string of profanities
from a corner, and a faucet drips incessantly into
the filthy sink. It all seems to echo into what I
have evolved. I have become as this dead fly,
scraping back and forth along the window sill,  
manipulated by currents of stale air.

_

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



.

The teenager sits curled around
herself in rehab, matted hair, skeletal arms
bruised by needles, scarred wrists,
metal gouged grotesquely into and around
every orifice, sunken eyes exuding
a generous measure of fear and defiance.
God, She could be my daughter,
had my daughter inherited
my weaknesses and propensities.
Her demeanor tells me more
than her lack of words -
She is filthy, scabby, loathsome.
She looks at me and I can tell she's
thinking the same of me.
Judgmental *****!

--

Down from the icy Sawtooth crags
and through the winter-laden landscape,
the wind eventually dips to the canyon
and creek we loved so well as children.
Continuing on, it threads through the
hollows above the creek, sculpted even
today by stooped cottonwood trees.

Twisting above granite outcroppings
and lava boulders, the wind courses
through the giant arteries of this canyon,
passing among quaking aspen, river willow,
and gnarled cottonwood, shorn rudely
by now of every dryly-veined leaf.

At ancient volcanic escarpments the
wind bears south, scraping hard along
canyon walls. Upward it moves, out of
the canyon, slowing and sallying about
the hillocks, the gullies, the poplars
until it finally comes to stir ever more
gently, warmer even, my dear brother,
around your gray marbled headstone.

Primeval of days, this very same wind
blows for eternity upon eternity, polishing
and purifying even the roughest of
the earth's elements and impediments.
This said, at this hill's crest where you rest,
there is no need of further refinement. Feel
how the northern wind quiets for you,
as if it knows over whose stone it passes.

--

Going back out,
that's what he fears most.
To resume his last
miserable drunk,
homeless, loveless, broke.
Scratching up money for a fifth
of whatever he's drinking
- ***** when he's semi-flush,
cheap wine when he's not.

Lacking the guile to beg or steal,
he washes dishes in a dive
for a meal and a bottle,
sweeps out bars for drinks,
knowing he can't hold a job
much longer than a day.
Scavenging cigarette butts
from barroom trash cans.
No place to get out of the cold
except for the missions
and flop houses.

And he hates the flop houses
with their toothless managers
spreading their ****-eating grins.
He dreads the city winter
as the cold seeps in and wraps
its tendrils around him,
and he fears seeing one more
sooty gray dawn with grizzled men
like himself mindlessly shuffling,
searching for the next drink.

He fears the back alleys,
fears he's destined
to live in their filth, huddled
in whatever hole or box he can find.
No longer caring for himself,
just craving alcohol.
That insatiable craving.
And it's the grayness he fears,
the empty, pallid expanse
of his remaining years
and losing people who
used to love him.

He's frightened of going out
and not coming back.
And he fears thoughts of suicide.
He has no answers to why he drinks,
why he gives in to the bottle.
His mind cannot or will not grasp
that final thought.
---

It's probably always been there, this
transcendent connection, a strand
to the ethereal, a most excellent
poetic cord smothered by youth
and denied each time it reared its
beautiful head, left to writhe, waiting
the day when age and character
finally fashion the person into a poet.

What use had youth for deeper emotion
other than lust? What use the forming
of feelings into higher expressions,
so often ridiculed by the young?
Comes the day, however, when beauty
and sensitivity prevail and poetry flips
on the switch to enlightenment.

--

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 old farmer hung back,
as rickety and battered as the
‘50s Allis-Chalmers tractor upon

which he leaned, hunched,
clung, as if the auctioneer's words
and the wind might carry him off

like the implements he'd treasured
much of his life, machines with
which he had toiled and sweated

and which had helped him chisel
out a meager existence in his
40 years on the farm. His wife was

dead now, his children scattered
like the clucking chickens and hissing
geese, all he had left were memories

and the old homestead, and it was
leaving him bit by bit on the backs
of creaking pickups and low boys

and stuffed into the cavities of shiny
new Cadillacs and Buicks. The cruel
wind had driven in from the southwest,

stealing a little more topsoil from the
threadbare farm, swirling and *******
at tattered curtains still hanging in

the mouths of grimy windows left ajar.
With each piece of his life leaving
down that gravel road, a draining

of his dreams and energies followed.
A few more raps of the gavel and he
too would be as dust in the wind.

--

You are banded for life -
marked and set apart
to be despised, hated.
The yellow stripes tell it all -
you're to be feared
should one get too close.
Only among your own
are you accepted,
and then but tenuously.

--

He was an elderly man, clothed in desolation,
a gray man fading into the stoop on which he reclined
as if he were already turning to dust, disintegrating.
He coughed, and coughed again the rasp of an ailing
man, a rattle vibrating from the fathoms within,
and he fumbled for his pack of cigarettes
as if to reaffirm his intention of dying should his
bottle of cheap wine not propel him into oblivion. He
was muttering, muttering secrets to himself, or of himself,
or perhaps proverbs to show someone, anyone,
how enlightened he could be there on the gray stoop
as dust and the remainder of his life swirled about him.

--

even on gloomy
days, the sparrow's song –
warmth of her smile

--

cumulus –
a hawk spirals down
the updraft

--

ancient pine –
the sun climbing
limb by limb

.

Neutral seems
to be the sum of
all my colors - any color,
any combination - no matter
what I mix on this diminishing
palette called my remaining years,
all that emerges is futility
and grayness. Is
this what my life
has become?

–

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.

--

It's late autumn but the colors
simply aren't there for me. Leaves, trees,
the sky, my face, my hair, my mood,
everything has become pall and gray.
Everywhere that color should abound
there is only lack of color. This canvas
remains indifferent to me - staring
blankly at me. My brushes sit unused
and rotting in solvent, the colors grimy
and dry on my palette, a spider has pulled
its hairy carcass through black oil and
then white and died gray upon the
edge of my painting table - its web strung
at the bottom of my easel. I feel no more,
paint no more, sell no more, I'm used up.
"Colorless, odorless" reads this can of
brush solvent - it's what I've become!
I have become nothing, even without odor.
I'm completely gray, insensitive, consumed.
Looking into the broken studio mirror,
I confront the artist I used to be. My image
grows diffuse, without form, then dissipates.

--

Today I came across your fragrance, your scent,
for the first time in years, and I thought of your pale
skin, your *******, lips, the yielding of your body.

I always assumed it was lotion you wore, as if the scent
and the allure were unintentional, not a purposefully
and seductively placed essence, but simply your scent,
carried so appropriately upon the spring breeze.

Why don't I smell it more often? I wish I could. I don't
even know where it came from this time - some woman
on the street, or wafting hauntingly from a vendor's
cache of perfumes, or through the doorway of Macy's?

The memories struck me like a dull arrow straight
to the heart - I turned but you weren't there, nor did
your scent last for more than a few precious seconds.
It was there and then it was gone, just like you were.

I've obviously never gotten over you  - you continue
to linger in that special niche in my memories, waiting
for the occasion to leap sweetly back into my conscious.

--

**** this bitter dusk!
Shadows of my death gather
about me, torment me.
Ah, these waning years -
the good years disappear
and what was once sweet,
turns bittersweet, then sour.
Only memories remain
of all those shameful years
and memories have become
a caustic and hated bile.
**** this bitter dusk!

--

morning snow –
a canyon wren singing
just above silence

--

skimming
the belly of a storm front –
southbound geese

--

in the hollow
of an oak tree –
hollow of a nest

.

Hear it, feel it! Above the live oak
and Spanish moss, above their
gnarled, grasping canopies, the
night wind flies savage and free.
Without constraint or direction
it inhales, blows, flings about at will,
tearing wantonly at primeval fears.
And higher yet, to the east there's a
cooper moon rising sinisterly, lighting
the way for wary night hunters.
Is it the howling of their hounds, or
the howling of that feral wind, or
something more I hear?
Yes, something more, I fear.

Such an eerie night on the bayou,
where fireflies pulse phosphor green,
dangling, dancing like marionettes
above jutting cypress knees. Along
the farthest bank, tip-toeing in mire,
a pale night-heron walks as a ghost,
dropping its head to strike, to give
final croak to some hapless frog.
Were crows awake on such a night
they'd caw and clamor and sidle up
to each other to see which could
provide the most reassurance
against such a dreadful night.
Latch every door, shutter every
window, light every candle!
The night wind is on the prowl!

---

hospital visit . . .
the hush of snow falling
outside the window

--

old neighborhood –
even the memories
have moved on

--

waning moon —
the cricket's chirp
in a spider web

--

morning wind . . .
my sports pages delivered
to the neighbor

.

Just before waking this morning
I dreamed I was still walking with
a cane - I found myself walking in a
very shallow stream, wading nicely
as it were with just the cane - lift one
foot and then the other, no longer tripping
and falling. No need for the walker,
no need for the wheelchair, just the cane.
I was free again. My mother, who
had died years before, was in my dream
and I was showing her and my wife how
I could suddenly wade in the stream
with just a cane. It felt so wonderful. Then
I awoke and after taking a few minutes
to clear my head, struggled to my feet and
with the aid of the walker, dragging the
bad leg along, I made my way into the
kitchen and brewed some really strong
coffee. If I was going to be awake
I may as well be ****** wide awake.

--

There's a brisk autumn wind sweeping the ochre
and rust farm fields and that late summer hazy
that had hung above the valley for weeks, warm
and comforting, leaves with the scudding clouds.
The fragrance of burning fields, pungent but
yet somehow sweet-smelling and mildly
memory-provoking, charges the senses as it weaves
among the parched, plucked corn stalks, while from a
distant corner of the field an animated scarecrow,
clad in shredded polyester, has reign over the field
but instead flags a ride with the north wind.
It too seems to sense time calls for it to move along.

--

The sleet
falls harsher,
colder than
I've experienced.
The morning's color is no longer
color, simply achromatic, and
my heart warms neither
to this canvas, nor the
brushes, nor to her
smile, not even
to the dog.

–

The breeze carries magic
on this flourishing spring morn,
with the scent of lilacs inspiring
memories of golden days and
long lavender nights with you.
How long ago has it been
when in the depth of innocence,
of youthful lust that current
of something crystal clear
and sweet coursed through me
with each thought of you?
Closing my eyes, you are here
beside me, vibrant and utterly
charged with sensuality, and
just as easily, you are diminished,
like the promise of my life.

Obviously not spring now, but
a poem I started then and finished
today

--

frigid wind –
a snowdrift and the dogs
at the back door

--

winter painting –
mostly grays
on my palette

--

warm spell . . .
the snowman leans
into the sun

--

icy wind —
the dead spider
spins in its web

.

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.

--

water’s edge
. . . briefly, the tracks
of a sandpiper

--

a snow goose
cups its wings to land—
curve of the shore

--

a ribbon
of starlings twists, turns
— this narrow road

It might be noted that I love
to write haiku about birds, in particular

.

twilight trees –
a flock of blackbirds
empties the shadows

--

morning mist
lifts from the forest
. . . a haiku rolls in


.

How is it that another's love
can be so easily abandoned,
so thoughtlessly divested, like an
indifferent breath exhaled into
the frigid morning, visible but
for an instance then vanishing,
and meaning nothing at all?

--

I wonder if her death has been duly noted,
whether the trees in the forests became hushed,
the wind paused for a few respectful minutes,
and the rivers that run wild, grew briefly tamed.
Did anyone notice light was somehow less bright,
and that a far-away star flashed and disappeared?
In her honor, did the fragrance of wild flowers flood
the woods and did even the tiniest of creatures pause
in their meanderings, not comprehending the why,
only aware that something good that was there, is gone?

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

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.

--

It's the tear of a brother
who is slipping into, out of
confusion, oblivion,
dementia.
A tear of recognition,
of reassurance.
How to weigh
this tear?
How do I
preserve it?
What value
this tear?
Priceless.

*Written prior to my
brother's death

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.

--

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.

–