Category: Poetry

After the Rain

This morning the green leaves, no

longer spring green, darker

and summer like, take up the space

where the sky showed last week.

Rain falls on the roof while I write. Outside

the open door, rain and the rustle of

leaves. There is no noise from the

swaying of tree trunks. Unless they

snap or pull up their shallow roots

and topple screaming to the ground.

Into A Book

My sister, my father and me. My bedroom window was upstairs on the left.

When I was about five,

I thought after death, you

went into the nearest book.

My mother must have been reading

us Little House in the Big Woods

because that’s the book I made sure

was nearby at night. Just in case.

Fifteen Minutes

Wave after wave of little white moths

fly out of the hibiscus, around the car

disappearing

into the overgrown yard.

A carpenter bee browses in the flowers,

until dive bombed by a second bee

aggressively bumping him. They circle,

bump, circle.

One yellow butterfly flies across the window

and a yellow cat walks down the brick

walk.

Milkman

I would watch the milk man with his

horse and wagon go down the street

in the morning from my bedroom

window. I must have been two because

when my sister was born we moved, and

my bedroom was in the back of the house,

with no window on the street. He left our

milk in a gray tin box on the back porch. That

was in Springfield. Later, when we moved to Detroit,

we had a milk chute on the side of the house.

It had a little door on the inside and a little door on the

outside so the milkman, who now drove a truck,

could put the milk in and we could get it

out. On cold winter mornings, the frozen milk

rose up over the top of the brown bottle.

For years I saved milk caps in a kitchen

drawer. Just saved them, never did anything with them.

After the heroin epidemic came, everybody sealed up

those milk chutes so no skinny thieves could

climb in the house that way.