Old Woman, what do you do, alone in the woods each day?

Yesterday, a feathered throat of red, surrendered between my cupped palms.
It felt like trust.

Alley Jig on the Old Astray

There’s a heady deft tightening, encapsulation

Cat’s eyes gleaming from a black walkway

Sticky prickle stings my salt-pepper pelvis

Bird call sync, wings low, bent and circling

Memory’s core still heats through my body

Red-pecan harness tight limbed and aged

Sex smells break-up out through my breastbone

A boxcar coupled, shriek spark of iron

Slip past and shed the weight of this cold, come

Follow me down this vast depth of winter

Come, follow me down ~

Follow me down this vast depth of winter

Come, follow me down~

Solstice Joy

Want to bring all of the spark and growl you’ve shared with such finesse

to all those we know, and all those we don’t, that they might stir it into

a large batch of the sweetest chords, maybe John Fahey’s Christmas Medley

and  from the roots of the tallest trees cast out throughout the land,

Here’s the thing! It happens now, and now, and now, and now…..and it never gets finished

Get with it and laugh, we’re allowed into this life by no small miracle and the rehearsals are over

shanty at 32°

It’s a suspended sense of liquid
Compressed snow on a shallow body of water
I listen to the clock tocking the tired space-heater
oscillating endless hours as the act of hearing
helps to calculate the inevitable  push of tide

Fall goes on never getting round to winter

Daily battalion of yard warriors

are blowing leaf beds

and raucous unlikely blossoms

circle wind cracked trees

~

My coffee’s cold

sweet and dark as the view

spangles of ice glint from air-conditioning units

while the furnace won’t,  yet

bubbled asphalt slows the plastics and aluminum man

who’s chilled and wrapped, moving

beneath an ancient order of Turkey Vulture

and  parrots, squawking their garish circles

Climate confusion melds the unlikely

in this stratified desert city

Remarkably, it seems to keep working

Europa and Ganymede ~ November 17, 2009

The Leonid meteor shower,
should peak very late tonight!

The afternoon will offer the shadows of New Moon
Algol should be of minimum light

for a duo of hours, those
centering on 5:58 ~ after dusk
in the East

from a telescope,
Jupiter’s moon Europa overlays Ganymede
Only a ring shines forth
in the East

Holding breath, not to fog the lens
they appear to merge…

then separate as the minutes
tick by

Tickets to Go

Grand, your courage to diminish – teeth bared – haggard-nails – spark eyed

a primal extension  ~ an invitation and refined warning

to grip the terror, desiccation so individually personalized

your skeleton, frail in its iron grip reveals a depth unrecorded,

a chasm of sound in which I hear my name

Health Care Coverage ~ The Hinterlands

Things are tough everywhere.

Taking the time for professional health care is often a matter of first finding the courage to walk through the door.

Then again…

The Wild Side of the issue.

(thanks to northernl from YouTube)

Friday Mid-October

eight hundred-thousand insects
chime marimba beat
our final autumn

slowing from
the cool air
below

cinnamon sheets
spread  celery
comfort

Garfield, Godiva and
pump humming
fragile

clever time

Even though

We’ve had fifty-six years to get to know each other, and at one time, when your polar-axis flipped, I thought I’d become you. Now that I’m dead and you’ve gone back to your lives, I want to talk with you. Stay up all night like we used to when your father was visiting.

Everyone would be around the long kitchen table, windows open and the heat hanging heavy, sweat dripping off of so many arms and foreheads of all sizes. The crickets are singing in through the open windows and we’ve  turned off the lights. A candle or two drizzle lazily over crayon colored wax sculptures, originally Chianti bottles. And the stories are  rolling.

You always felt I wasn’t enjoying myself because I chose to remain standing some distance away.  I’d drape across the kitchen island, skipping over the newspaper. You’d push hard to make sure I was engaged,  picking up every stitch and I knew how much you loved me.

But it wasn’t easy, especially if your brother was telling the stories, (my God, he could make us laugh). I was usually the subject of the hilarity. It would be my mishaps he’d spin tales around, generally some old rage that had backfired onto everyone and everything around me.

He’d cause us all to hold our sides, rock back and forth laughing till we hurt. We nearly wet our pants we’d be laughing so hard— in fact I remember, one night I did!

Never could hold it after a certain point.