Just A Ghost Of A Game
Every so often I think I hear
the sound of a Whiffle ball on bat
– imagine that – there's nothing there —
only the faint memory of a run-down, rutted path
the boys had built on the backyard grass,
but even the trail of those tracks have disappeared -
just a ghost of a game from over the years –
so that now my wife and I are the only ones
left in the stands with a wide window view
bearing witness at the state of play
— standing in the kitchen, remembering those days —
years away from the excited cries
of a home run hit with a blast,
the whistling ball set sailing over the wooden fence
into our next-door neighbor's yard,
sneakers falling off darting feet -
like a banana-peel cartoon reel -
as they race on with a quickened beat:
sliding, diving, arriving at home -
our hound dog watching
the whole show with a chewed-up
ticket-stub rawhide bone
video version: https://youtu.be/_EpFduj0JQQ
Four small Cardinals
dancing in half-time, inside
the empty Ash tree
for #ds106
Four red Cardinals
dancing in half-time, inside
the empty Ash tree
for #ds106
These woods we know so well seem empty as we walk. I let her off the leash and now she is the lead, and I am the follower. I sense the river, swollen now with the early Spring rains and late Winter melt. She looks back, constantly, to make sure I am with her, and I am, with her, moving forward, noticing but never seeing the orchestra tumbling towards some distant sea.
A river roars through,
out of eyesight but still, there,
a voice, shouting: time
for #VerseLove
Just as the day rises,
we're up and at it, early:
birds with poems like worms
for Algot
Prepared Piano
You have to nearly crawl
inside the rib-cage
with the tools in your hand —
the Maestro will never understand —
Lean your body in
to find the strings
you hope to change
Lean out to press the key,
to watch the hammers
in motion, a simple machine
Each note, rising and falling:
a jagged edged hailstone
a soft quilted cloth
marbles on a kitchen counter top,
one by one by one, dropping off
until the odd song, composed, is finally done
for Poetry In Motion workshop in Amherst, using Wedding Vows by Wyatt Townley as mentor text
I do love me a list
of all the many things I need
to get done,
and the satisfaction
of my pencil scratching,
'cause it's one
less thing to worry about
for the day; and now I'm on
to something fun
for #VerseLove
I might
write more in a day
than I am able to do now -
stories, poems, a novel, perhaps,
even tackling that musical play
taking up space in my mind -
when I have more time;
it just might happen,
but who knows?
Thinking on writing's
a little bit different
than doing the writing:
some drafts just never get written
for #VerseLove
They like to label your lake,
with humor, an ocean,
but Goshen, I have to tell ya,
you're the smallest town
in Western Massachusetts
I'd ever want to live in -
I can't even begin to say
why we bought land that day,
but after a year of searching,
it seemed to us, right away,
that this, someday, would be
the place to root us home
for #VerseLove
My mother was in a college class at Quinnipiac
when she asked us to take a handful of glass tubes
to the Mill River to collect water for samples
to see what was in there that we couldn't see
Curious, we did as she told, and then waited
We skipped stones, and walked across bridges,
and in winter, we teetered on ice barges;
One spring, we saw the largest snapper turtle ever
and ducked down on a summer day as a heron descended
In memory, it took forever for her to know
Then, she warned us to never ever to drink the water
of the river that ran through all of us,
and we never looked at the flowing currents
the same way, ever again — only the factories
for #VerseLove