after the long drought
wildflowers spray the byways
blue obama bloom
Archive for October, 2008
valentine
By Turning
Your post card came with this afternoon’s snow:
two pelicans beak to beak form a valentine that says
Love And Kisses From Florida.
Remember when I pulled up a shell
and out popped a hermit crab to announce your love
of me, fellow floater on the gentle surging of waves?
We were startled to find ourselves exposed in the sun
waving our segmented limbs in awkward gestures of love.
Remember when you skated ahead with Izzy and Sal
suddenly you yelled Help I Can’t Stop?
How I raced, skates zipping
on the new pavement, grabbed the handle, and slalom-
turned us through linked half moons to a halt?
Oh, you laughed, us both panting,
I forgot, I forgot for one quick moment how to stop.
By turning, I said, by turning we slow down.
By turning to one another, beak to beak, two halves of a paper heart
that match because they were cut, so long ago, from
the same piece of folded red paper.
Fragment
The Swillings
“What has twenty-four legs and nine teeth?” my husband Kevin whispered. The backs of my legs and my pink linen suit were starting to stick to the white Naugahyde pew near the rear of Stall Two of the Little White Chapel Wedding Parlor. Up front, Kevin’s sister, Loretta, towered over her soon-to-be third husband, Dwayne B. Swilling, Jr., like a mountain of white lace, daisies and baby’s breath next to a bipedal weasel.
“The groom’s family,” Kevin said, and I choked back great spasms of laughter that spilled past my pink-lacquered nails and squinched-up cheeks in salty tears and snorts, so that everyone thought I was overcome with heartfelt joy. I dug in my hand bag, pulled out a tissue, and blew long and loud, as the guests turned their eyes back to the tragicomic spectacle before them. For the time being, I regained my composure and some sense of dignity, although both would be tested severely before the blessed day was through.
marching
Another March has turned
I wake to the trilling of sandhill cranes
sure sign of spring and seven days early
and spring to the bedroom window facing east
cardinal direction of foolish hopes.
The sun casts orange light
about the brown gray morning
especially on the thawing ponds
and although I can’t see the birds
I imagine them banking like B-52 bombers.
There’s talk of a fierce storm in the Rockies
but I keep hearing a fierce storm of Iraqis.
The caption reads a sandstorm at dusk
turns the desert blood red near Karbala
but I can’t read caption without thinking capture.
And so another March has turned.
And so I turn east and pray.
Ray Sharp
March 25, 2003
