assorted poems

Assorted Poems

Driving with the Windows Down
                        for Spencer

Finalist, Pet Poems, Cirque Literary Journal, 2024

                Prologue

Tonight’s stroll around the lake
was comfortable, cool and calm.
We took our time sniffing the start
of sweet-scented spring.

We walked in a weave with you,
pausing at the picnic table when you looked tired.
You laid at my feet in the shade.
I scratched your white face, and thought,
We can do this for a while.

But when we walked back to the car
I was watching as your leg gave out
and you fell hard onto the crushed gravel
of the path, filling the side of your mouth
with stones. Your legs trembled as you
rose, leaned against me, panted while
I cleaned pebbles from your mouth.

You took a few steps, sighed,
lowered your head and pushed on,
me matching your slow pace,
my eyes big and wet as your tongue.

                   First Visit

The next day
the sky was blue and the trees
were the lime-green
they only have in April,
spring’s opening act.

I hurried to get Spencer in the car
for his appointment.
The wind’s bluster bent
the treetops – made me look up
to see where the soft roar was coming from.

He’s getting old,
said the short man in the white lab coat.
He isn’t as coordinated as he once was.
No wonder he’s falling. My eighty-year-old
dad did the same.

I wasn’t comforted. Spencer panted
and looked away, haunches
on hard linoleum, expression tolerant:
I’ll put up with this guy, but don’t expect
me to like it, was the message
I got, but the doc didn’t seem to.

He looks like a good dog, he placated us,
and I knew the session was about over.
We were relieved to pay
the bill and get out of there,
drive with the windows down,
ears flapping, tongues out, leaning
together, into the wind.

                  Last Visit

I’d rather have a different doctor, I said
into the phone as I made another appointment.
I thought perhaps someone else would see
Spencer’s balance problems differently.
He was limping more, and my confidence was sliding
down the dark tunnel from concern to worry.
I needed help with the landing if despair was the outcome.

We’ll X-ray the shoulder, the new doc smiled,
and see if we find anything. I was the one who said
the word: My last golden had cancer.
I got a sympathetic look. It’s common in them,
she answered gently, and often shows in the shoulders.
We’ll see what’s there.

I waited a long time outside
on another cool and breezy day,
then went in to wait some more in the lobby.

The pleasant, welcoming atmosphere
behind the counter had changed tone.
Only one person was left attending the clients
who were sitting, standing, barking and meowing.
The assistants who showed their faces looked troubled
and disappeared quickly. I watched one gentleman
and his dog get turned away until the following day.

We were next.

Spencer was led back to me with apologies,
We've had an emergency. Can I schedule you for tomorrow?
Her expression was dark as she worked the computer,
and I leaned in. Is someone in trouble?
She nodded. We’ve had an emergency. Her hands shook,
her smock was covered with light yellow hair.

                              Epilogue

We returned for the X-ray, and you seemed
pleased to be back, despite my apprehensions.

The vet slid the film onto the light table mounted to the wall.
She pointed at a small white speck
and spoke to you.
Looks like a bone chip in your shoulder, Kiddo.
She rubbed your head as you licked the last of the peanut butter.
Probably some arthritis broken away.
The good news is, it's not cancer. You licked her hand.
We should be able to manage the pain until it eases.

At the counter, I asked again,
and was told someone else’s Spencer
had reacted badly to routine anesthesia yesterday
and didn’t make it. Someone had departed the clinic
with an empty collar cradled in their hands.

Home, we lingered side-by-side
leaning into one another under the cedar,
where in just a few short months
I’d lose you too.

Perihelion and Aphelion
published in Examined Life anthology, 2024

Earth travels around the sun in an ellipse.
The average distance between them
is one astronomical unit.
We lean back, dance in.
The average touch between us is infinite.
You scorch me to molten core;
freeze me in space and time.
I feel solar wind as I spin, spiral
in your orbit, ever entwined.

Sunlight takes 8.317 minutes
to reach the planet. The light
from you finds me in an instant,
lasts forever.

Western Washington November
WInner: Poems of Place, Cirque Literary Journal, 2023

2:00 pm, dark already –
thick blanket between us
and the sun, fifth day in a row.
This is why friends laughed when told
we were moving here from Alaska
twenty years ago: Get a good umbrella.
Why the state’s biggest music festival
is called Bumbershoot.
Winter on the west side.

With it, depression. Lewis and Clark
wintered here, named places Dismal Nitch,
Cape Disappointment. My first year it rained
105 straight days. I almost slit my wrists,
I tell people with a laugh, shake my head.
Thing is, it’s true.

The barometer is dropping.
Another storm, hard on the heels
of this one arrives tomorrow
just in time for Thanksgiving. After guests
leave, I’m working on a plan: tabbed
on my web browser is a page:
Washington’s 100 Best Waterfalls.
I’ll pack a waterproof cover for the camera.
Wear raingear. Pretend I like living here.

Coal Train
published in WA129 anthology, 2018

A month ago winter slid out a sunny Saturday door
and we went along, to the Columbia River gorge
where tilled fields and waterfall mists
filled the air with the scent of moist earth.

The spring sun was warm as we drove a late
afternoon highway lined with chartreuse-tinted
bushes and trees; the road wound between hills,
and the river glittered back the blue above.

We crept up on a freight train plowing west to the coast,
only a few miles an hour slower than we were driving,
hopper car after hopper car, filled with glistening black coal.
We paced them for miles, for dozens of miles,
until I wished I’d been counting the cars so I could tell
the story accurately, but I hadn’t. It was surprising
how many there were. By the time the sun set,
the train and road were all we saw;
the blue sky paled above that race.

The road finally turned from the tracks,
the green of spring slipped back into the branches,
the gorge didn’t appear so pure,
and the world lost a little more of its magic.

Our smiles faded;
we faced forward in the front seats,
oblivious to the invisible exhaust following us
as we exhaled the rest of the way home.

Choices: The Pebble Mine
We have to win every time. They only have to win once.
~ Jon Broderick, founder, The FisherPoets Gathering

published by National Fisherman magazine, 2018

Choices

We make our choices:
The Grand Coulee
built for irrigation
of drought burdened
farmland,
killed the salmon
running the Columbia.
June Hogs,
100 pound plus
Chinook salmon
ran there for centuries
fed the first peoples
created culture and religion
gone, spawning grounds locked
forever behind concrete.

Dams killed sockeye, coho,
humpback and Chinook
throughout Washington.
Salmon fishing now
a ghost of what it was.
Phantom fish don’t need
to spawn. Each dam
was a choice.

Migration

To wander the seas
tour a blue planet
until chemicals mix
produce hormones,
influence instinct
(a clock ticks)
and tides send you home.

Belly fattens and swells
as you ride currents
back the way you came
years ago, over canyons
mountains, around islands,
through valleys.

Millions
swim with you,
ahead, beside,
beneath, above,
behind.

Until, what is it, a scent?
reaches out from the river you knew,
grasps you by the part
that remembers,
and pulls,
quickening the pace,
tightening the urge,
and you all
arrive together,
frenzied, leaping
up a stream
to lay, fertilize
and die.

Only the river is gone.
Instead toxic waste
slides from a hole
where your
birthplace
used to be.

You didn’t know
your corpse
is the last.
Your species
will join the litany
of all those gone,
gone before.

We did.
And it happened anyway.

Mine, not Yours

This is about greed.
A copper mine
at the headwaters
of the last epic salmon run
in the world? A copper mine
with an earthen dam
holding a poison lake
in a geologically active
environment.
What could go wrong?
Ask the fish

Ask the Fraser River salmon
caught in the toxic slurry
that rolled down the watershed
when its copper mine tailing dam
failed and flooded salmon grounds.

We only have to fail,
they only have to win
once.

Not the Time
published in Raven Chronicles, 2018

He balanced himself behind his walker
on the sidewalk in the spring sun,
and smiled as he shook his head.
I didn’t get to do all the things I wanted.
He looked up at the bright blue sky
empty of clouds. I have all the money I need.
Just not the time.

You didn’t know what to say.
None of us do, rattled hard against your skull.
Your stance wobbled in the glare
as a soft spring day turned hard inside his words.
You felt concrete press against the soles of your feet
and the vast immensity of sky stretch
above your head.

Don’t matter now, his hand waved away the thought
brushing at something that had flown too close,
and he shuffled on, leaving you standing there
bathed in blue and yellow, watching pink petals
of a flowering plum drift in the breeze.

Dead-Heading
published in Cirque Literary Journal, 2018

The mid-April air is sweet.
Dogwoods have their turn now,
magnolias a forgotten dream;
spring wind strips plum blossoms,
scatters pink snow across the street,
delicate drifts swirl in the gutter.

Azaleas and rhodies
kick heels at the curb –
Can-can dancers raising dresses:
pinks, reds, oranges, whites,
purples all in a line.

Frogs chirp at dusk,
remind me of cicadas,
thick Midwest evenings
catching lightening bugs.
No matter how many holes
we’d punch in the lid
they were stiff, lights off
in the pale morning.

I’d bring you purple bouquets
of Mayflowers from the front yard;
you’d cut lilacs for the kitchen table,
the one I’m refinishing in the garage.

I can’t bring myself to throw away
the ladder-back chairs we sat upon,
where we said grace each evening
– bless this –
they collapse a little more each year,
yellowed, brittle, brown,

last year’s blossoms.

History Lesson
Published in Raven Chronicles, 2017

When you sort it out alone
you become weightless,
at the mercy of whatever mean wind
rustles the corn.

You spend the time
holding your breath.

I drag out
brittle photos,
beaten journals,
bad poetry,

words frown
from decades past,
surge at me out of a dark
I turned a long shoulder to,
so I thought.

I fill with water
that rises
to a boil.

Remember?

Of course.
Long nights
under the bed
with dust-ball spiders;
behind a locked door –
flies buzzing the window;
scramble to a basement corner –
dirt floors and crumbled masonry,
where a shadow walks past the crack
at the top of the stairs.

Gorgeous Mistake
Published in Word Peace, 2017

When they write the history
of humanity in the Last Scrolls,
what will be declared
the turning point
of our gorgeous mistake?

Will it be when Science,
that explorer who
puzzled the stars,
split the atom,
rode ahead shouting
Look! while outstripping
our ability to keep
a guiding hand
on the reins?

Or will the blame fall
on the flitting bird of our
curious talent to continually
look the other way?

Perhaps it was the moment
we handed salvation
to priests, imams,
holy men with bowed
heads, our hands open
in petition: Please,
take this burden –
define the path
of crusade and jihad
for the rest of us.

Or was it the line crossed when
we granted power to shadows:
those who deceived the best,
had the most, spread butter
on the lies so they would taste better?

They don’t, you know.
Ask the frogs, belly-up in the water,
Sperm whales, mouths overflowing plastic,
or the delicate white bones of passenger pigeons.

The bees will tell you. They’re busy
these days impersonating canaries.

Flight Plan
Published in Claudius Speaks, 2017

We repaired the fence today
after last night’s winds.
Been a lot of storms recently –
seems the election stirred things up.

We were working in the rain
one minute, sun the next –
that’s spring around here –
when a flock of geese flew over,
in the middle of what sounded
like an argument.

The noise was so compelling
we looked up, arms at our sides.
Even as they bickered over policy
about who was leading, what direction
to take, what was best for the flock –
they held their course, the ragged V
of their formation kept its shape.

But not one of them had a passport,
green card or visa. They were flying
through sovereign airspace with no
flight plan, certain to land without
permission, consume resources without
paying a dime of tax, leaving behind feathers
and goose shit for someone else to clean up.

Good thing it wasn’t hunting season.
The migration itself pissed off half of us.
The other half was richer because they were here.

It's Like This
Published in the Linden Ave. Journal, 2017

I
have come a long way
to point something out:
   I left my mother
at Memorial Hospital in Logansport, Indiana
64 years ago
         (and change).
It was her fourth separation;
   it was my first.

I spent the next 24 years
tripping through cornfields and back alleys,
smoking Marlboros, pumping gas,
cooking fries in lard-coated burger joints
         part-time.

I ran my bow onto a gravel beach in Alaska,
pewed salmon on blood-spattered boats
   summer after scaled summer.
One sunny day, thinking I was a spectator,
   I almost went fishing
      during a strike.
  Years later,
I shut down the boat on a calm night,
      surrounded by
         beluga whales swimming between
reflected stars on a black ocean.

Mom died 42 years ago
         and I have lived thirteen years longer
  with her dead
than I lived while she was alive.
  “It’s like this,” she once said.

Mary
Published in Soul-Lit online Journal, 2017

What if Mary
was indeed the mother of God? What if she
was standing on the corner this Sunday
like the woman I drove past, her cardboard sign
Kids and I Need Food,or the one she had last week:
Need $60 for rent? Is $60 what it takes to rent a manger
for a month? A stable? A twenty-first century stall
lined with straw? How much more did she need for food?

No, she wasn’t pregnant.
But what if Godwas already born, an infant
in swaddling clothes, hungry, alone in the bushes
behind mother Mary, tucked out-of-sight for fear of DSHS?
What would happen if the state took away the Child of God
from her loving mother, and put her in the foster system?
What kind of God would that child grow up to be?

And where does that leave us?

I wish I could say
I rolled down my window and handed her a dollar
or sixty. But I didn’t. I was in a rush to get to the store
before it got too crowded with Christians after church.
Too embarrassed to look another Mother of God in the eye,
I pretended to be a more conscientious driver than I am.
I checked the traffic over her shoulder before speeding
away, echoes of a crying child in my ears.

Mazama
above Crater Lake, Oregon, 2016
Published in Soul-Lit online journal, 2017

I stand, 65 years of packed baggage
intact on the caldera rim while sun sets,
blazing fire above parched landscape:
August, and it hasn’t rained in months.
The snow is almost gone, melt drains
into pumiced slopes, reappears as waterfalls,
plunges to a lake bluer than autumn sky.

The planet rolls from waning light. I ride
a dormant volcano, seven thousand feet
above the sea, into darkness. Eight millennia
have passed since ancestors of Klamath Indians
witnessed a battle of Gods create a crucible for
the deepest lake in the land, a cradle for their home.

Dozens of stars appear above darkening water
and silhouetted slopes. I adjust camera, eyes, attitude
to embrace an unveiled Milky Way. Glowing cloud
on a cloudless night, galaxy of stars – each a sun,
planet or galaxy of its own. I gaze at ancient light,
every dot radiated billions of years ago. My baggage
spills on the ground like a meteor: fleeting streak
leaves lingering afterglow. No wonder this place
is known for clarity.

Best Effort
Published in Cirque Literary Journal, Winter Solstice, 2015

Flying through time at 70 mph, you,
my youngest son, ask, Of anyone
who lived, who would you pick
to sit with, have a conversation?

I can’t choose.
Socrates, Jack London, Einstein, Maya
Angelou come to mind. Hemingway.
Isaac Newton, we both agree, or any
of the minds on Cosmos– discuss stars
with Galileo or Carl Sagan. Human
rights with Rosa Parks. MLK. Gandhi.
Overwhelmed, we drive on.

Later this evening, it lands:
I would talk with family: parents first, then
work back. Aren’t they the ones, all foibles
and faults, bad choices, bigotry, dishonesty,
filled past the brim with errors and meanness;
aren’t they the ones to sit across from, with
their knowledge now of death and life?

Ask them the hard question: What was the most
important thing? And hear the answer ring,
shattered crystal:

Early Summer Sex
published in Cirque Literary Journal, 2014

I have been flirting with
the ladies of May this month:

afternoons spent with redolent rhodies –
bursts of color drip onto my tongue.
Strawberry pistil and peach stamen
curl in delicate arcs to nibble
on my ear and give me chills.

In the sultry evening,
I drop on trembling knees
before sweet lupine, drink sugar
from sticky lips, my black-fly
proboscis wet with juices – hers and mine.
I moan as I investigate her fragile recesses.

At night I bury my face into the
moist petals of iris – a deep purple flashes
in my eyes as fold within fold unveils
smooth, succulent surprises.
We roll apart with a sigh.

I stand, swipe the back of my hand
across my mouth and stagger,
stretch and lick lilac. The scent
closes my eyes. I inhale
all the bouquet she offers up.

A morning stroll past plump lavender,
and I give her a pinch. In her
excitement, she clings to
my fingers. I secretly
smell her again and again.

Noon. I join baby blue eyes
on the ground, naked in the light.
We listen to a honey bee lullaby
and cuddle until, spent in the sun,
I sink into the damp summer soil.