Run

It all loops around to this to this
brighter ballpark green and the beauty

of it the beauty of red and blue
and uniform white and the players tall

and loping and sunflowers that spray
from their thresher mouths. The beauty

of small wizened men in jerseys looking
wise and the red faced father with his beer

hand pointing his daughter to the play
to the ball to the squirrel bounding

across the field to the vendors trawling
in the aisles and buying her Cokes

and ice cream and badly folded boxes
of popcorn-shaped salt but mostly

sitting there just silent and hopeful
he for a winning season and she
to stay there forever with him always glad.

Killing Frost

No, not a bullet into Robert.
Just the sudden snapping cold
when the leaves were newly dreaming
about popping their britches.

Can you hear it without thinking
of Wildfire, when a songwriter’s
sleight of hand turned a tender
lettuce’s death into a pony’s?

Drop

The flowers try to kill the others, like a slow
assassination drowning them in a thick

mulch of petals. The hyacinth spangled
with cherry blossoms, then cloaked, then gone,

and I try to shake them free but hurt more than help
the stems now bruising and browned.

The blossoms are tacky with rain and rot and stick
like a bit of cellotape or like a bit of shining onion skin

when you try to peel then chop then cry
and it clings to your fingers like a dying friend.

Smaller

His head is. You can brush
the thick fur back to show the line
of his jaw, the way his eyes are full
of sparking branches and somehow bigger
than his TARDIS skull. And my memory
is, or strangely shaped, the way algae
might show the imprint of a tossed-in twig
that sank, palimpsest, into the pond.

I thought a gleaming jar might hold
enough, a salt cellar squatting on the sideboard.
Twist a silvery chain around an agrafe
and wait for the moment nothing
else will fit. A stopper in a bottle
in your nautilus ear. A cork’s
fractals chasing off into the green.

Whirlygig

I always saw four wings spinning and wondered
at the species of bird, butterfly winged (but someone

will tell me that butterflies have eight wings, or twenty,
or only one) and blue. The cat is feathered down

his front legs in those layers, like a small, albino
Farrah Fawcet plastered to them. My brother

had a poster, all hair and teeth, all gold
as anyone can be gold, and that reminds me

of the rumor of a dead woman needing
a dime of bare skin on her gold-painted torso,

or dying to the clangor of a host of church bells,
and Scout and Bombadil and the handmaid

and the Wife of Bath, and they spin and spin
and here I am, counting wings, and pages

and the creep of my refractive error and an ugly
inability to blend all those feathers into flight.

And your little red

My father was a Big Red, but small. He laughed
when he said he was on the football team and we
all marveled at the shrimpiness of the 50s

and his twiggy legs. But his hair was red,
and big with it like an aura glowing, like
the round saint halos big as afros, shining.

Demonstrative

We got an email that there were protestors
at the corner, and that explains the traffic

weirdness we can see out the window facing
the other way. Otherwise, we would be hidden

up in our loft, like owls uncaring it’s the time
for shearing, or pigeons, just waiting for a tiny

message to be tied to one twiggy orange foot.
Who could know that somewhere across the country

someone died and rioters are rioting? It’s silent here
inside these walls. We watch tennis

instead of news. The email comes. We read.
Say “What are they protesting anyway?”
And shrug and root for the underdog in the major.

Migraine

I try to describe the way the kaleidoscope stumbles
around the center of my vision like a drunkard

and I wonder where my hands are. Wikipedia
has an artist’s rendering of auras, oh, forgive me

scintillating scotomas, though that sounds
rather grand and wonderful, not something

that makes you want to barf then scream
or the other way around. Glitter in a snowglobe?

Something swirling and bright that your eyes can’t catch
and your feet go floating away, untended.

Recording of NaPo #11: “Letters of”

Nesting

The cat sits in his basket like a fat hen
brooding over eggs. I remember my mother’s
complaints about being sent to fetch the eggs

each morning, the way the hens would peck.
But if I reach my hand under the cat,
into the warm fluff of his belly, I could not know

if he would purr or bite, could not choose
that over the swift predictability of hens.