Kindness is a Rake

Even under a merry morning sky
Her mind drags its shirt tails through gray slurry.
Best medicine - work, she thinks and
The yard offers her a blanket of leaves.
Rake in hand, she starts at the sidewalk.
It's a slow transfer, this brittle, brown tide
crawling toward the street, still
Worry chafes her shoulders.

He just shows up,
Blind to the melancholy under her rake.
He fixes instead on his favorite fall ritual -
Can I help? with kind chatter, contagious.
Now the sycamore and maple surge swells
With ample energy to waylay her troubles.
Gloom tumbles with every tarp load to the front ditch.
Soon two rakes return to the shed, and

Thank you - her prayer to him.

Comments

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off, glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy– full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse, to tithe the land. And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles. Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free. We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year. We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China, four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats. We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices. We have had little or no contact with them so far. Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages. It’s Iowa and the gove...

Likely Liable

Daylight cracks its brittle seam snapping apart a wish bone night. Venus has mounted Jupiter already headed for the barn; water simmers in a cracked kettle, just enough for two. And you, dark man, curled like a leather belt in the back of a dresser drawer, unfurl; I’m curled too, like paperback pages in August; we’ll meld mauve dreams and first light. I study you like a self portrait, you hover pretending to understand the chaos of shoes about the room, they lay like punctuations, a tactile Morse Code. I study these dots and dashes, you haunt my sleepy head; we crawl under apostrophes behind question marks. Your gesticulations play havoc with runway lights as I struggle to lower landing gear. Our best intentions for enhancing this entry, have arrived confused. Even so I’m grateful for awkward aubades, dark coffee and you inside my skin.

What the Muses Leave Behind

Search This Blog