Bells

I heard the bells play Gloria
this morning as we walked our usual road.
Yesterday my daughter was suddenly unsure
whether bells could run out of rings. We laughed,
but I know what it is to lose your certainty,
as if home isn't where you thought it was.
Now the year is running down to darkness,
and the promise of renewal is for a distant time.
I should remember to tell her that the tower says
bells don't run out of chime.

December 6 2016

Purple Cars

Purple cars
are so painfully like grape candy
that my mouth feels the shape
and tastes the sudden memory
of childhood.

December 2 2016

Fortune Cookie

"Before you answer a question, question the question."
-- The Collected Fortune Cookie Sayings of Michael Kei Stewart

November 20 2016

The Significance of Leaves

Never before have the leaves
been so significant.
You could stand
in the middle of 5th Avenue
and shoot somebody
and the leaves would still
be there.

November 15 2016

Kate's Trousers

Katherine Hepburn's trousers:
just one of the billion things
in the process of being forgotten.
So important then,
but almost unconsidered now,
yet still the memory's infused,
like water in the ground from which
our sapling wisdom springs.

October 20 2016

A Winter

The snow slipped in so silently
no brother wind
it was only the alarm that told us.
Five more minutes.
The dog was daunted by the depth:
no place to pee.
On we slogged
and somewhere sleep sloughed off me
leaving us alone
in the woken winter.

September 9 2016

@Goethe @Longfellow

Well,
but can't you be instead
the sword that is forged,
or the plowshare beaten from it?

September 10 2016

Breakfast

The weight of a dog's warm behind
on your left foot as you eat your cereal
is certainly no bad thing.

August 25 2016

Gypsy Moths

We walked through a hallway of gypsy moths
by the river which was then at high tide.
The boaters' happiness reached us easily
but not the words they said.
It was hot. He waded,
chest deep and grinning
where the anglers might reasonably object,
but a dog in clear water is an absolute good
and fish should swim hookless anyhow
on such a day.

August 10 2016

Trouble at the Plate

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it (see how).

Dorothy Amelia Palmer (June 1, 1873 – November 11, 1932) was the first female Major League Baseball (MLB) outfielder. Nicknamed "Trouble", Palmer played for the Maryland Cavaliers (1899–1902), the Illinois Gents (1903–1909), and the Ohio Highpockets (1909). Palmer recorded a .315 career batting average, and in 1904 she hit a home run in each of 3 consecutive games, an outstanding achievement in the dead ball era.

Palmer earned her nickname when the manager of an opposing team, variously identified as Bob Shotuck of the Nebraska Hornpipes and Ned Festin of the Idaho Ranchers, complained that Palmer was "nothing but trouble at the plate." The phrase caught on quickly among fans, who took to chanting, "Here comes trouble at the plate" or simply, "Here comes trouble" when Palmer came up to bat.

Although Palmer's statistics rivaled those of many Hall of Famers, she was never inducted. Whether--as seems likely--this is attributable to gender bias, or is simply a matter of bad luck, it is probably one reason that Palmer's name is unfamiliar to fans and players today. The later rise to fame of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II no doubt further eclipsed her fame.

Early Life

Dorothy Palmer was the only child of Frederick and Bonnie Palmer, beet farmers in Gostock, West Virginia... (read more)

Steinbeck--and Howe

The Rose of Sharon blooms
and summer's wrath is trampling on the vines.
Vintage trucks are migrant in the glory
of dust they kick up swiftly
as lightning by the sward.

August 4 2016

HaiQR

Dog Lines 4

Excepting This Alone

Beach

Dog Lines 3

Dog Lines 2

In Lines

Allah writes in the outline of things:
A dog's crooked leg,
the sloping scalp of a stone,
a bare branch fingering cracks across the sky,
and telephone wires
hung diminuendo down the road.
The line is the message,
and the message is the line,
but still the cursive burns
to my eyes with a deeper fire.

May 13 2016

Last One

To the last pistol shooter in America
there are flowers in the hallway for my Jim.
Please lay them on his grave
and your gun down there beside them
so he'll know.

April 1 2016

Broken Sleep

Sleep has shape, you know?
One night dreams were drawers for me.
I shut each one on its raucous contents
only to find the next one open
and myself inside.
And there was the night of code,
whose methods and whose attributes
were useless, through every iteration,
for debugging my subconscious.
On such nights,
waking is a temporary mercy:
another dream will swallow me like a suitcase,
and I'll never get back the time I spend
packing and unpacking what's in dreams.

March 22 2016

A Daughter's Memory

My father spoke in tongues.
He was an articulate man
but glossolalia marked him.
There was nothing of religion in it;
his speech was catholic
(I looked it up)
and born of humor,
and maybe something more.
Why did he exercise so much
his talent for fictional language?
I thought perhaps he was reaching for
an expression of something he didn't understand,
but honestly I felt that whatever it was,
it was pulling him away. I'm sorry now
I never asked him why he spoke in tongues--
and on this, of all things, he was mute.

March 6 2016

About Some Nights

What tedious road
will I blunder down tonight?
Will it take me only partway to
the kindergarten room I can't find, to make up
the classes I missed but can't now understand?
I suspect it may peter out
in a corner of the city unknown to me,
but it could also sweep me away in a sudden car
past all the right exits to a highway with no more.
Please don't let it bring me to the house with the basement,
or put me finally by the elevator banks where none will stop
at the floor I need. And by all means,
don't strand me where I will need the telephones
with their tiny keys.
That is the curse of roads: they take you
where you don't intend to go
and then run out,
and at some point you always find yourself on foot,
in a mall whose stores are never the ones you want.

February 23 2016

Sailor's Tale

Shore down in the Ditchy Roads
when the first of the peals came over.
You'd have thought the master of ships would have said
it was a chancey lie,
but as it was, we were pressed to the back,
and keeling till to the boards, with none left over.
Well and well, it was a hard claw, no denying,
but we after took and belled the horn
with all sails flying ribbons to the sky.
Who'd ever take that course again,
you must heed this warning, truly given:
Take no loft to the peal, for God's eye is in it,
and you'll likely be sent all a-bearing to hell,
for a man is a man,
and a woman a woman,
and only the children may sail.

February 3 2016

Seawalls

Sometimes of a night the sea
in scents of seaweed visits,
to sing me songs of distances unguessed,
beyond the boundaries of concrete walls
that stand for hubris blind to failure.
I am everything you are not, the ocean whispers.
I can take the things you make,
your houses most especially,
and toss their decks, discarded wrecks
on broken roads. You claim
to gain serenity from simple sight of me
on summer days, but deep within your eyes I also see
your fearful worship.

Tomorrow, my dog and I will go, well-clad,
to answer the endless water. What I will say
is not yet clear, but something it will have to do
with the seawall of my skin,
and the kinship of the ocean
to one that swells within.

January 23 2016

Calmative

No more what.
No more how.
No more why.
Only this.
Only is.
Only I.

January 14 2016