Cheating at Scrabble

he doesn’t know how to spell very well
so she corrects his misspellings and
when he’s stuck, looks up words
in the Scrabble dictionary
so he can place a word, as long
it’s not too many points.
What she doesn’t tell him is that she
secretly browses for words
for herself, adding an “it”
to “pew” that she placed two
turns ago, and scoring triple
points on a cheat, landing over 300
points in one game, soundly beating
him by over 30 points.
Success is not so sweet when stolen
but sometimes confessions salve
the pain, revealed as such in late
poems such as this.

Photo of pewit courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/32187676@N05/3138401904/

Memories of a Full Moon

walking outside in the full moon
with a bird on my shoulder,
watching his silhouette climb against
this luminescent orb in deep winter,
settling into a dark tree branch,
his golden breast shimmering in
a frosty night, knowing that death
would soon overtake him, his small
corpse would fall to the earth
shattering into many small pieces,
feathers lofting skyward under the moon
just as my life would fall from its precarious
perch where only by the sheer will of
imagination had it been secured;
the cold breath of winter would take it
all away.

Making a Pie with Maria Part I: Mixing the Dough

Maria called out the ingredients for
me to write down as she put them
into the food processor.
Her back was to me, her voice muffled;
I leaned over to see her peering into
the food processor, adding flour from what appeared
to be one of those “multiple of one-third” measuring
cups no one ever uses.
She crisply called out “two cups”.
Puzzled, I returned to the table and
dutifully wrote down two cups Hungarian
unbleached high altitude flour.
One half teaspoon salt was the next
ingredient she called out. Again, I
peaked around her to see that she had
poured salt into the palm of her hand;
we made her pour the salt into a measuring spoon
to prove her skill at measurement;
it was annoyingly accurate.
Eleven tablespoons of butter was easy
with the paper wrapper on the sticks that
we could all see.
The steel blades of the food processor
blended the flour, salt and butter together
until Maria pronounced the mix “just right”
by the “sound of it”, and only then slowly
poured in exactly ¼ cup of chilled water
she pulled from the freezer.
If we had any doubts about the imperfection
of Maria’s methods, they were quickly dispelled
as the crumbly mixture transformed into a
a perfect twirling cylinder of pie dough.

Postcard

The postcard arrived on Thursday;
I remember the day because I had forgotten to
put out the garbage the day before,
which was Wednesday.
The mailman handed me the packet of
mail and smiled as he told me that it looked
like I had a postcard today.
It’s a remarkable day to have a postcard,
or anything written by the human hand, from a place
that you can picture in your mind, not
a nameless postal center in a Midwestern town
that offered a tax break to a distribution center,
or a piece of mail that has no return address.
The handwriting, so forcefully familiar, the
carefully formed letters describing
her perfectly typical day so many miles
from here in a place where clouds
dare to hover so tenaciously.
Two colors of ink, one bleeding into the
other and I imagine her tossing the pen
which gave up into the trash bin with
a dismissive snort; she tells me she has come
to appreciate my love of pens.
The other side of the card is a reproduction
of a gardener tending his seedlings, each
of them holding a small fountain pen.

Dad and Rusty

We scattered to the winds
when we saw him drive up;
two boys out the back gate on bikes,
two sisters disappeared into the
play house in the back yard.
No one was left in the living room
when he walked in for his visitation rights,
except the dog.
Rusty wagged his tail furiously
and jumped up to greet Father,
completely oblivious to the stern look
on his face, the disapproving look at
school bags strewn onto the furniture,
his muttering about the loose discipline
in this house, the lack of order,
the absence of his children who
should be there waiting for him.
Rusty wagged his tail regardless
of all that; many years later I heard
the pain in his voice as he described
how it felt that only Rusty was
happy to see him .

photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/pavlicko/2811411884/

Smell of Snow

sky smells grey and white,
my nostrils cold with smoke
and ice, mountains draped
in hovering clouds, hidden
leaves drooping in the weight
of snow.

Smuggled Goods

i smuggled the goods into her house
wrapped in a towel so no one else
could see the steam still rising off
off its still warm crust or smell
the luscious aroma of just baked
bread. we have our secrets, the
passing back and forth of foods that
should be illegal, we hear our front
doors breathe in their next hit
of orgasmic pastries, a faint click as
the door closes again, and I hear
the gate swing open as she leaves
behind a slice of peach pie, still warm
and disappears into the night.