We wait for the crabgrass and dandelions and wild onion
To shuffle aside the fall leaves, our feet crunching
What has died, our attention focused on sun and wind,
The beauty of not-yet-spring, oh but almost, almost. Continue reading
Tag Archives: relationships
Holding Your Hand
We parked the truck and stepped out
Onto the road that used to be a highway
Of my childhood, winding through Mayes County
To the Grand River bluffs, where my mother
Said hobos made cave camps and where a train
Ran a solitary line amidst the blackjack
And sawbriar. I am holding your hand. Continue reading
Your Skin
I came to you after the scars, came to your skin
In our fifth decade when it wears its past,
Two pale circles at the base of your spine
Almost glowing in the dark, and on the other side,
Your navel gone, taken in the surgery that almost
Took you. I am beginning to know your skin, Continue reading
Abandon
I am looking at you through a window
I work to keep open, through the world
At 50, and I’m seeing a landscape
I had not anticipated, a life waving
In this still image from the abandoned garage Continue reading
A Winter Dream of Spring
Let’s get lost in a ditch
where the hoary bindweed grows,
where the sun is at half-mast
and the wind won’t reach our toes.
Without
Each morning has stopped being the same
Though the dogs don’t pronounce this.
It’s something in the sound of the car
Responding to my touch, something
In the sleep left in my waking bones. Continue reading
In Dead Grass
In the field of dead Johnson grass,
The red-winged blackbird landed.
It swayed the desert-colored stalks
With its weight, then held its place.
Like a swollen tick plucked from a dog
Then dropped, it did not move.
From this distance, I could not see
What suspended it there, what attraction.
T-Ball
The boys running the bases like rabbits
scurry to far-off places, not moving
toward targets—just moving. Montie Jean
recalls the ballgames she played as a child
in the dusty pasture where milo died
early. She can’t believe she was ever
as small as these kids. One sits on the bench
crying. Another has smeared snot and dirt
up the side of his face and into his hair. Continue reading
My Brother’s Glass Banana
When he was 10 and I was 13,
He pulled out all the stitches
From my baseball glove
And strangled a GI Joe with them
Because I called him a pansy
And a lily-ass and something else
I don’t remember anymore. Continue reading
To Day
Here is what I bring to you, Day:
A restlessness haunting the hours,
Like the moon behind the trees—here,
And here, now here. A belief
In the core, the place of origin,
Creek water walked in as a child,
The dirt tracks toy Corvettes made,
My son’s laughter exploding
From a pile of leaves we never
Gathered in fall. I give this all up Continue reading
