These are poems that aim at reflecting something uniquely American in experience. Be it a place. Or a person or an experience. It had to happen somewhere to become something.
Home,
Home again
Not my home now
My mother-in-law’s home
Now
Now
Not home
The home of my youth
My old house and school
in a drive by
Through the Alley
of Memory Lane
Somehow lame
A bit run down
40 years passed
This ain’t my town
“Happiness is Lubbock Texas
in the Rearview Mirror”
Happy to leave this home
That made me happily
Weird
The table’s set, the food is made
Here we sit and give this grace
We’ve gathered here to share our wits
A funny quip, a story with grit
I remember the grand house on the Cimmaron
I’d play in the woods when told to “run along”
In the hills and trees and on sandy shores
The red, red dirt where the water pours
Those days of youth when I was carefree
Not burdened by this loss that’s coming for me
Of my gracious aunt whose lovely smile
Was warm as the hearth after a cold country mile
Never the center piece like her beloved Yellow Rose
But always the backbone for all of those
Who have come and gone doing God’s work
Filling trucks full of clothes and food for the Church
No she was never the center of attention
Just a helping hand, a cup of coffee from the kitchen
An open door to her welcoming home
A meal, a blanket, a place to rest weary bones
I never once heard her ask for her turn
Always on task to help those who yearn
To find God’s grace in an unforgiving land
To help without question her fellow man
Her radiant smile, her questions about you
So gracious, so kind, so ready to do
Anything she could to make things run smooth
All she would do to comfort and soothe
Her presence is missed as we gather today
One more moment or kiss or kind word to say
From this lady of grace who asked for no return
On her investment in you, your life, your concern
We should all be so bold to live life like this
To give all that we have of ourselves in kindness
Like our fair lady who we lay here to rest
Who spent her whole life giving only her best.
If I stop and take
A minute to write
Or a photograph
How much Life
Am I missing?
If a notational ear
Or observant eye
Can pull from the landscape
Into Memory than my
Experience my be more enlightening…
What is your approach?
Coleridge’s observational reproach?
Or Wordsworth’s walking as he wrote?
Which will glean and which will gloss?
Who will find meaning? What will be lost?
I find myself quite often
At a loss for themes, my memory softened
If I take too long from my observations
The meter fades and the propositions
Wash away and become forgotten.
Yet if in the moment I focus too much
On this art I offer and the places I touch
Do I leave too little of this world explored?
And proffer false narratives for you to adore?
Not the depths of this moment I’m here to explore…
Terrifying
Is the first sensation that
creeps up my spine as the
long trail of stars creeps
across the just blackened night
Sky of dusk out in the desert
The stream of lights arched from
Horizon to Horizon – a steady
pace of objects un-evenly spaced
giving it the illusion of a
Naturally occurring phenomenon
Without internet out in the dark
Night sky of our camping spot
We could neither deny nor
Confirm the spectacle we had witnessed
By referring to the digital brain
We could only speculate the
Nature of these UFOs with
Our New Mexican mythology
Some 160 miles north of
Roswell in the darkness at Villanueva
It’s hard not to insert myself into
The Poem
Of course these are my feelings
Expressed herein
To de-objectify my experience
Is often a poetic sin
For how am I to communicate
These thoughts and dreams
If I don’t put myself at
The Center of Things
My desire to write has come
And gone but it is
My love of Nature that brings
Out these songs
I must denote these beautiful places
That bring me joy in these outward spaces
The winds whip
the wiley willows
Young with spring fronds
The waters swish
and turn as the morning birds
search for meal
They caw and call
As they peck the soil
And live to breed another day
New Village
Pecos River
Peace and Heaven
I stand on the side of the road. For she has stood for me, stood for Freedom, for choices, for opportunities un-bounded. Of course, she stands for interruptions as well. Dead ends; roads closed; terminus and for some she is the end of all things before her. The end of a journey; the end of a life; the end of a generation of prosperity. As I stand on the black tar in the hot desert, the orange glow of the sun casting my shadow across the glimmering mirage that dissects her never-ending sprawl across the sand, I can’t help but feel lost. Evacuated from time and space. I don’t know if the sun is rising or setting. There are no clues but my own presence observing the history of her procession across this place. I fall to my knees as if to pray, kiss the hot gravel and feel the surge of every road I’ve ever taken — After hours of driving through the Rockies we reached the end with a washed out road and had to turn back the way we came. The miles of road we travelled all night from Walla Walla to Las Vegas on the bus, the city a beacon of light shining out of the desolate night. Trading cigarettes for whiskey with a Navajo man at 6am when I wasn’t old enough to have breakfast in the casino back in the days before anyone cared that you weren’t old enough to be in the casino buying breakfast and pulling slots. The long drives from Prescott to Oklahoma along I-40 (aka Rt. 66), Albuquerque being the mid-point where I always remembered the dancing cottonwood leaves shining behind the bridge as we pressed on for Texas. The back and forth between Lansing and Louisville via Indianapolis or Cincinnati where the highways were pulmonary arteries throbbing with American life. All of this pavement laid down over the bones of those whose land this once was. So many forgotten dreams of the dead who got in the way of the road’s progress. So much progress fallen under the knee of authority that presses faces into pavement until they can’t breathe because they believe this black road must be painted with white dividing lines. These bypasses that left behind and isolated these segregated communities who now struggle and cry for the American dream that was paved to make way for Amazon and the next off-ramp to the nearest Wal*Mart. And, yet I must defend her. She has given me so many choices; taken me time and again into the beauty of our mountains and forests. She has driven my dreams of change and fueled my ambitions to do something bigger with my life. She has done nothing to us or for us, yet she lets us be good or bad or something or no one. She is my friend and my lover and I must forgive her abuses by the hands of the unworthy. I must revel in her possibility to bring dreams into the night of our awakening dawn.
The blue screen won’t load
The news is old
The fire is hot
The coffee is cold
I must be in the right place
The wind whistles through the trees
The air wheezes as I breathe
The dirt is dirty with blackest soot
The trees have fallen exposing roots
I must be in the right place
I am in the write place
With time to think
And craft this space
With smoke in my eyes there’s time to blink
I must be in the right place
With many miles and tires worn
My skin the sun seeks to absorb
The camp is set, the children fed
No fingers, smashed, no nothing bled
I must be in the right place
Sly, daring, road running
Time of Love, not quite spring
But the waning days of winter sing
Of the promise — A Whisper
Of the returning season
Of raising a new generation
Of cunning birds…
This one with Lizard in mouth
An offering for his devote
Lifemate and lover.
In the road they dance
And show that they have
No patience for the changing clime
Rare to take flight, in pursuit he might
Soar from rooftop to rooftop.
With coos, clicks and beeps
He woos his sweet and as we pass
They pay no mind to our kind.
Boys are dumb and I was one.
My brother yet another…
Having started our vacation in canyons
With adventures beyond our imagination
My brother and I headed out for a walk
Into the sandstone curves of Arches’ rocks.
Taller and faster he tracked on ahead
And separated we became instead.
Too far out to go back, without the
Brother I lacked, I kept searching around ’til
I found him at the edge of a sweeping bowl.
And, down deep in that hollowed out hole
Laid the scattered bones of a horse that
Became known as “Unlucky.”
Fascinated by this find, into that hole we climbed
Only to leave ourselves with no escape route.
After hollers and shouts, our luck too had
Run out and we resolved to settle
In for the night. Our backs to the wall
We sat with whistles to blow
Tunes as our call out for help.
As day finished up and the sun drifted
Down, it’s hard to know how long we
Chirped. Long enough that our Mom, full
Of worry, dragged Dad out to search
For these dumb boys who kept running off.
These whistles that they bought us
For just such a cause had led them
Unto our holey predicament. Mom found us
In our hole, with our backs against the wall,
Chirping like birds getting ready for the night.
Our father she found to haul us out of
The ground, too happy to scold,
These boys they raised to be bold.