Argument As Intimacy

At breakfast she places the pitcher of milk
on top of my tiny, helpless baby aspirin.
I can’t decide if this is from calloused indifference,
calculated aggression or careless abandon.

Do I retaliate by pushing her aspirin aside? No,
I do not because I am not a vengeful sort
but pouring from the kettle I might allow
her pouch of Earl Gray to jump overboard

into the saucer, whereupon she may inquire,
owing to her thirst for scientific knowledge,
if the inordinate number of blueberries
in my bowl of cereal is really necessary

for its anti-oxidant property or if my hoarding of them
was done with heedless disregard thus depriving her
of a fair portion to do battle with her free radicals
in their appointed mission to oxidize her.

Actually none of this happened except

for the inadvertent lifting of my aspirin, soon forgotten
since I am distracted by something in the newspaper
and she is staring through the window at a hummingbird
working hard just to stay in place as our tea bags mingle.

Summer's Gone

in this place of no seasons.
The calendar marks another equinox.
Yellows and oranges are left to
school buses and crossing guards.
Here and there a coral tree un-greening.

Pumpkin ice cream has been sighted.
Athletes, heroes in their summer day,
reduced to a one paragraph Obit.
My team’s final innings playing out;
mathematically eliminated.

In this weatherless place, it’s time
to bring all summers gone inside
where extra innings may yet wait.
Peaches and baseballs
overripe, still with juice.

When winter comes within
I’ll know by the return
of colors multiplied
by memory
alone.

Lunch With Friends

Four of us happily here not in Sudan order sub Saharan sand-
wiches triple-decker crisp fries in friendly fire we sit al fresco
commune with chopped salad green imperialism of oil
and vinegar how it colonizes the caramelized walnuts
talk of Tripoli to Tribeca enhanced interruptions suicide road
side burger blood-rare clots the streets no boots on the ground
round just bodies collaterally damaged with intelligent failure
drone remotely controlled missed the misbegot tempers rise and
plunge like Dow’s got the jitters while we sip iced tea talk bomb-
bastically as pensions are lost fortunes made topical tropical far
from barricades even as bulls and grizzlies gorge and gnaw. Who’s
wealthy stays wealthy and who’s Standard & Poor stays standard and
poor so much to chew on and on our plates full of subsidized crops
there’s a genetically tampered tomato gets us juiced while the suits
foxtrot on FOX over which tea is right enough for Iowans to round up
the bus-boy with undocumented arms up his sleeve refills our cups
clears our scraps one eye watching to make a run past border cops
while we chat umbrella cool Bachmann confers with God knows who
sending his wrath for you know what all we’ve been and all we’ve not.
Big government and who needs them I ask you says to evacuate
it’s on the move exactly where and when up from unrecognized Cuba
here comes Goodnight Irene. Check please keep the change. Climate
is as climate does no change and dumb is dumb and woe is we
Noah’s in his ark on the warm Atlantic soup in a boat of split pea.

Back Then

…we took it slow. Trolley car, transfer
and three subways ending with the GG local
got me to the double-header for a nickel
where I planned my life between pitches
but it slipped away in extra innings.
Beat me daddy, eight to the bar,
wasn’t about child abuse as I first thought.
One of us was always a slow-poke
so we came in anytime and caught up
to what we already knew.
It was all wallpaper anyway; the double feature,
cartoon, Sing-a-Long and March of Dimes collection.
Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, just you wait and see.
The Audubon bird on the wall barely moved.
Tea steeped, oatmeal simmered while they tried
to run a mile in under four minutes. Please rise for our
Happy little wash-day song. Oxydol’s own, Ma Perkins.
In September grandpa said he’d best fetch some wood for the stove.
What with his lumbago and all, he brought the wood
up from the cellar by late November.
The robber asked Benny, Your money or your Life?,
(Magazine just arrived with last week’s news),
and we got 10 seconds of silence while he thought it over.
Everything in Fibber McGee’s hall closet tumbled,
Chamberlain bumbled, Europe crumbled. Just wait
ten years for the $18.75 war bond to mature to $25.
We learned about haste making waste and waste not
to prevent famine in China.
Not so fast, Buster, come out with your hands up.
Crime-fighters on every station warned us it didn’t pay
considering the long stretch up the river or worse, The Chair.
We waited for the bus, for Johnny to come marching home.
The troop ship inched its way home.
Soles and heels, You come back next Thursday, he said,
with nails in his mouth, glue on his breath.
Where you running, Sammy?
Only The Shadow knew and maybe The Answer Man.
The second-hand clock made its rounds.
The fast lane wasn’t open yet. Memory Lane is a slow stroll.
Is it our eyes that still had wonder in them
or the slo-mo in looking back?

To Be Met

..for Peggy 

You, on your way to sharpen a pencil,

I, hurrying to the kitchen for a cold nectarine 

meet in the hallway like two ships merging 

in harbor light. How could I not embrace you, 

stopping the clock, the orb in its orbit, 

to say how we’ll never forget this moment? 

We laugh knowing we will forget, 

 there being so many stoppages. 

And yet when I spot you in the market 

weaving your way down the aisles 

I navigate past the frozen lotus, 

 black-eyed peas and Jolly Green Giant, 

to hold you in my arms and halt Homer 

in the blinding light of mid-sentence as if 

Odysseus is home to Penelope again and again. 

To be renewed daily 

 in quadrants of morning melon, the passing of pills, 

our ritual tea with glumper dish, 

a touch of milk and biscotti, dunked. 

The choreography of us: 

each other’s step and hesitation, 

 the measure of our silence and stare, 

a charged word and it’s cargo. 

How we know where not to go and meet there 

In a shared unknowing.

Cloud Drift

Wordsworth, strolling lonely in his bones
past daffodils, and cows. How now
the heifers in a crowd, some brown
some, no, no, no…he felt a poem come
beneath the clouds. If only Dorothy…

He turned his head across the vale
to the sound of saxophone,
half a century before it was,
such a visionary, he. The Bird,
not nightingale nor cottage dove

came in alto waves, be and bop.
Charlie P. would take the train far out
of town from Kansas City to district
lakes and serenade the green Grass-
mere cows to yield in their milky way.

In that cathedral abbey, not Tintern’s
stones, but gothic Brooklyn Bridge,
another jazzman, round midnight, wailed
his chords to those on the ledge, lonely
as a cloud, they listened till foggy dawn.