Butterfly Heart

Olive oil glazes onions & garlic diced

(tears in the chopping)

sizzling in the cast iron pan

(tears for the fragrance)

waiting for dinner

he visits the garden

(tears of the loss)

Yellow powder on his fingers

like silentsmelling curry

Flightless

he  pressed her wings too hard

and she flutters

Helpless

Robert Frost Reads at Kennedy’s Inauguration

New England

Cold, taciturn creaking birches

yellow leaves gathering in the chimney’s elbow

 outside my window

I remember the way the wind blew through the microphone like thunder

And tossed his white hair across ruddy cheeks

And his voice had that same whispered flutter

The pages flapping, holding on for one last show

While snow threatened

Long Remembered

Speaking freeform

origami shapes

without ink

her fingers work

her mind’s words into a private

Gettysburg Address

with as much irony as

 “The world will little note…” 

this note

this folding of frustration

this crease of concern

this tear of transition

“Perhaps,” I say

as edges

 seek sanctuary in boundaries

The loggers

In his hospital jonnie,  

he ,the engineer, agitated, calls for his saw.

We, the children, in the fully oxygenated world,

comprehend the words but not the meaning.

Is there a tree he needs felled?

Bushy eyebrows converge at

our lack of learning

he leans toward us and

again mouths, “ a saw, a saw…” and

I think he may offer his kingdom had we one.

We lean ears toward his lips to

gain the sound that is no sound

that which is behind each word

that  analog of imitated symbol

learned from birth now leaving 

alone in that gentle good night

disbelief, betrayal blush his face

frustration, not fury his thoughts.

Finally body takes over where mind is mute and

like twin loggers, his fingers dance in rhythm,

an invisible string of floss…

Bar Code Love

Reading in between the lines

scanners of the almost senile

don’t care to remember the pain

while holographic youth read

every space a value and

inventory deleted and/or depleted

keeping count the cost a close

distance from her heart

while he stops

counting the birch shadows

on the road

already taken