They tiptoe around back,
velvet flanks broad,
flashes of cream tails,
not raised in alarm,
but wagging in whispers,
graceful necks dipping for moss
or lifting for leaves.
I nearly missed them,
these soft, silent, beauties.
Don’t you, too.
Keep an eye out for the
nearly silent beauty,
still nibbling away
at the underside of shade.
It’ll be what keeps us going,
keeps us lifted and searching,
ears twitching, feet pattering
toward goodness and mercy.
Find and follow the tender path.
There’s still softness to be found.
Yes, the world whispers in watercolor sighs
through lemon-lime tree tops and songbirds in flight,
through apricot patchwork and tangerine glow,
she softly persuades me I’ve nowhere to go.
I bow to her whimsy, take shade-sprinkled paths,
leave briefcase discarded and footwear off-cast
take dappled indulgences, sun-skittled treats,
while light couples shadow, I follow the beats
of finches’ wings and bold insect song,
of cobbled trail and moss-laden lawn,
‘til a whisper of Wordsworth I feel at my ear,
melancholy Keats through the brush of a tear.
Shelley’s sublime catches fire in my rib,
but mostly its Oliver’s procreant crib
that justly uproots me
with riotous sound
head spinning, knock-kneed
I’m lost, then I’m found
by wind in the willows,
birds whistling spondee,
fuzz-bodied pollen thieves
humming off-key
tickling each stamen in
ramshackle weeds,
staining, sustaining
life down on their knees.
each citrus sweet moment,
kaleidoscope framed,
now central components
fused deep in my brain
for when the time comes –
when from depths I will plumb
the sensory memories
now blooming in me
the pigments of poetry
stirring inside
straining, complaining
to bring them to life.
silver tinsel sliding from angel palms
to slicken evergreens and other greens,
white oaks, red maples, hydrangea-blue poms,
my vision rapt with heaven’s garland strings --
When ribbons of rain thin as fishing line fall
from hosts of rods in the sky, casting, catching
rainbows in their threaded, shimmering haul,
my pulse entangled and splashing --
When champagne streamers spill from glistening,
sun-scented fountains, filling the tender
flower flutes with honeyed nectar, fizzing
my soul – sublime-stoked, I seize the ember.
Burning, I haggle with poetry’s muse,
drunk and in debt to ephemeral views.
That groundhog is cute,
I say. He’s covered in bugs,
you say. No that’s layers
of fur, I say. They’ve got two. And look how he holds up his cute little paws — those tiny front paws — like a toddler in prayer. He’s nibbling a nut, just look at those teeth, his gold chicklet teeth and that slack-bottomed jaw. Watch him whittle his food. Get a load of that nose as it twitches and stills, watch his wobble turn stone at first sign of threat. He’s so cute! I go on. Get a load of that bod, that pudge full of pudding, that folds like dough. It can twist all around to that itch on his back, to that two-coated stubbed silver fur on his back – see that weak-whispered chin of his going to town? He’s the cutest, I say. But you say, so unmoved,
Your pudge pudding boy
just ate bugs off his back. That itch –?
that nut –? Both were bugs.
She slips into her fuzzy bathrobe with all the sleep-rimmed focus of cream unfurling in coffee. Eyes but slits, she stirs the marble mist. Shadows spin and settle; shrubbery and tree line appear. Lawn purls silver-sage, and the yearling slips from his bed to graze at the sod-scalloped hem between clearing and wood. A roll of her perfumed wrist and his coat froths cappuccino; the dogwoods don lemon lime skirts. Onward she shuffles now, gathering steam. Wiping her eyes: the limbs limn tears. Flexing her toes: the moss fuzzes stone. The yearling cocks his head to the arched swirl of undergrowth, an almost-cave of wonder and wild behind him. The sun-sprinkled lawn, bustling and bursting with civilized snacks, in front. Inward or out? he ponders in pause. Meanwhile, sliding off her slipper and sash,
Dawn lifts gold arms
to comb back the last clinging
haze from her crown.
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