What My Grandmother Said the Last Time I Saw Her
Come back
tomorrow
when the sun
comes back
around.
I’m tired
Category / Poetry
The Arena’s Lights Burn Brighter When You’re Down in the Pit
what happens these days is what happens
for the rest of your life
the present moment clanging like
a migraine, or an alarm
going off so long you can’t hear it anymore
Mother’s Last Hula
On her deathbed paralyzed by a stroke she broke everyone’s heart
By doing a hula with the right hand she could still move. Her eyes
Closed, her mouth locked in what might have been a smile, her hand
Held for a moment the clouds that gathered over the Ko’olaus,
Then flowed with the streams that tumbled down to the sea.
Everybody Got the Fever
You wowed us with the horse’s neigh you taught
yourself to imitate so well that neighbors
thought we kept one in our house.
On the wall, as I remember it, a painting of a charcoal
colored horse on a pink background, a treasure
Quiet
In half-shade that signifies the close
of night I see the faded quarter- moon
poised mute above the faint skyline.
A silence of birds sits in winter pine.
The stillness of the dawn is tangible.
I sense her at a distance with no color yet,
Endings and Beginnings
It feels like the world is coming to an end
you muse as we walk. Some twang guitar drifts
near the party we just left. You’re calm. A smile
tries itself on your lips almost convinced to land
despite such a mood. The sun is dropping its beautiful hammer
Joe and Marilyn
“I’ll finally get to see Marilyn” were your final
perfect words. The last of the rose petals
faded decades ago, but your torch was so primal,
never flickered. What’s it take, then? What kind of metal
turns the dregs of life into a love like that?
Snake
Three months gone in the wedding season
and I’d mostly been sticky. I went swimming
in the Snake River in Idaho. Got in it in Oregon
and kept still. The current pushed me back to Idaho. So
I did it again. It was good to be a strange head floating
Standing Outside the Captain Whidbey Inn
A Madrona tree, with its peeling bark
and banana-shaped leaves, leans out
over Penn Cove against a pillow of gray sky.
Around the tree’s trunk, a gnat
pumps her white wings again and again
A Way to Measure Smell
My father smelled of computer paper,
shirt-collar anger when he came home.
He climbed the stairs and I thought he would turn to leave,
but he only put his coat and hat away into the closet.