Finding my own voice

 i'm not sure if he frowned inside

 at the Capital Letters, the lack of form

each margin at the right hand side,

seeming friendly enough, but the Librarian 

T-shirt tipped me off in the end, the 

"knowing how to do this" but maybe

that's not it, he may not have said inside

    but i cannot know, maybe it's my own

frown inside because i have never studied

after all, never read the books or wrote the 

    prescribed poems from my past, no need

        to dig earlier than a few moments ago

a beetle hitchhiked on my shoulder into this very room

    life is so exciting.

The ABC's of a baby's life

A

Baby

Carried in his mother's arms

Decided that the grass looked much greener over there

Excited to Explore, to

Frolic, to 

Grasp each blade of Grass

Happy to be free of parental restraint

In the delirium of the expansive mind

Jolted alive by new experiences and feelings, flying like a 

Kite into the stratosphere, 

Leaving us, the elders 

Minding our small concerns

Not even noticing the miracle of the ladybug

Or the spider's web 

Possibly not even our own amazing humanity, our

Quivering hearts, only in capturing the wonder in his eyes do we

Remember that we, too, are alive

Suspended in this universe of glory and stars,

Traveling through the Milky Way, while 

Undulating waves of grain can still be

Visited in the Great Plains, a

World which may seem so distant

eXcept in these baby's eyes,

You can see the world reflected, 

Zooming in and out, the world is his oyster.  

Learning a language

we learn a language to understand another way

       of what and why do we care

if we can communicate with someone who lives across the sea

        in a place where trains run on time

                and politicians care about their people

no such places exist yet the lure of language persists

        as if in learning, we’ll open our hearts to some 

unknown place that yearns to be discovered

        between the conditional and subjunctive for

in between knowing and confusion we search for 

         some version of the truth 

the writing coach

 he greeted me with a generous smile in spite

of my tardy arrival, rushing in from the heat

my poems tucked under my armpit

as if to hide them from his critical eye

my tardiness swept aside, he inquired 

so gently what i hoped to accomplish here

with him, and the security guard sitting so close

did I have to tell him, too

he was not there to pick apart the words, themes, rhythms

and so i responded

very carefully, whispering the question

whether 

these poems tucked under the armpit

will breathe better once released. 

Suspended in space

I dare not wash my hands out of  respect for the spider 

Suspended in her web in my washbasin. 

Is she wondering, like me, what that next step will be, the entry

Into an unknown which may lead to better horizons, or not,

For her,  the freshness of the outdoors, for me, more time inside pondering words,

Syntax and shape, capitalization and story telling.

When night falls and I mount the stairs to brush my teeth,

Will she be there to accompany me on our journeys

Or shall I travel alone.

 

Look closely

Stop.

Look closely now that you are home

In the quiet, far removed from the vibrancy and drama

Of the big city, the sounds and smells, the landscape that penetrated 

Every sense, every cell the moment you stepped outside.

Stop.

Look closely now at the details of the seed head, the dandelion

That insisted on growing in the garden, unwanted, but persistent.

She has so much beauty in her radiating delicacy, each seed waiting

For the perfect lofting breeze to send her skyward, towards

Other gardens waiting for her perfection, even in their not-knowing,

Stop.

Look closely at the clover and the violas dispersed amongst the 

Grass, so carefully tended for the grandchildren who care only

To feel the cool, wet green between their toes.  

 

My Friend, Billy

How could I have known that this lanky boy with a big smile

Would end up as an artist, his imaginings transforming into the crazy folding

Of paper forms decorated by the randomly falling ink droplets emitted

To the timing of humming motors and interlocking gears.

How could I have imagined that this lanky boy would reappear in my life

As a grown man, someone I would want to spend the whole day and more

Wandering past giant-sized photographs the American worker dwarfed within

The bowels of a jet engine, or leaning over silicon wafers in a semiconductor fab.

And loving it all, every minute.

I could never have imagined this as the train clacked its way down from Boston to NYC,

The thing about imagination - anything is possible, we must

Only show up for it when it does.