Archives: Poems
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Second Times (for 25th Anniversary)
Second times are like slumber parties. You pick the guests (but your mothers can come). You stay as long as you want. You worry about not enough dip and how many glasses, but not about rehearsals and your father’s sister’s second husband and your cousin Rose. You may forget the horseradish or the Tamari salt,
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Behold the Lily
Lord give me a lily I need not tend. Can’t tell a weed from a seedling, clay from droppings, acid soil from my own bitter spring. Wouldn’t know a pest from pollinator, or if the earth, still frozen to my touch, will ever warm to blooming a goldly fragrant field flower.
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Two Frames for 2010
I. A few minutes past the next decade the black corgi barks at street firecrackers as if for the first time. II. Muffled under the doubled-up down comforter remembering the coffee shop on El Camino Real New Years Day 1966 Thousand island dressing with pickle relish and shredded iceberg at dawn.
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Tuscan Oil
The letter to the editor said It is useless to work for world peace under this administration so I will just work on peace in my own home. When I spoke to the Buddhist She told me that she had spent the first day cleaning up. After what, I asked. Just life, she answered in
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Just Before My Father’s Last Flight Home from Atlanta
I will buy you a basket of cellophane wrapped strawberries shipped in from Salinas, two for four dollars on special. You ate the entire last carton in a day or so, the one your grandson brought after supper not even dark when you were already sleeping, dreaming about Palo Alto and the red trumpet vines
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Non-Refundable Ticket
Since I did not fly to Tulsa I went to the Morningside market where I touched the okra and sunflowers where I bought two late summer Japanese eggplants a large bunch of lemon basil, good for chicken or fish, and caught the season’s first tiger swallowtail on my rear view mirror.
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Breaking News
I choose to tell my perhaps grandchildren that when this war of wars was called I was lying in my own bathtub in dollar store bubbles. I could not watch the sober suit, the narrow stripes, the pious stars, the proud and final fall.
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Rally in Georgia: 2003
In my town square 250 gather in a Southern chill to chant that war is not the answer. They speak out to the statues and the few brave wrens. In the state capitol troops mass for the rebel flag, for the old dead and grassed over battlefields.
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Blackout Days in Albany
The last time war made me this afraid I was drinking Earl Grey tea in Mary’s kitchen from Belleek cups with matching saucers. Giving up Peets coffee and network news for the duration. Living one town over from Berkeley in an overgrown rental, cracked window out to a shuttered street where the old ones played