Pastoral Scene 

Such sunlit chill on country road.

Owls play their bedtime songs

And clouds drift dreamily through time.

The cold wind steeps loneliness like fine tea

And pretty children rouse crabby parents for breakfast.

White pebbles arrange themselves for the comfort

Of black tires and rubber soled boots.

They pride themselves on their crisp crunchiness

And look forward to the blanket of winter tears.

The pines tremble forth their sweet life’s blood

Into shiny new buckets on nails.

They donate for the benefit of some pancake’s heyday

But know not the murder they abet.

And the chill marks loveliness in the country.

Cold air bringing sweet cloudbursts from rosy lips.

The ponds dance with lacy crinolines of ice

And the ducks paddle to avoid their sharp edges.

Thoughts of Grandpa 

My grandfather was the kind of man who worked with his hands.  His whole

life he tilled soil and built airplanes and took care of my grandma who stopped

knowing him too young.  And my grandpa loved me because I was

so much like gram, but I never knew gram, when she was still gram, so

I never knew I was. My grandpa would take me on walks in the woods

and show me the leaves and tell me what kind of trees they were on.  Now

I ask men to tell me but they never know what he knew.  My grandpa

would dig worms early in the morning and never let me come and help

him. I later found out it was because when my mother was my age she

had been digging worms in a copperhead nest, But I didn’t know that

then.  My grandfather would tell me that I had to live up to my words,

keep my promises, and always be honorable.  He told me that duty

means more than pleasure, or even love, and I didn’t know it then but

he spoke of the years he’d spent alone taking care of grandma.  He

didn’t have love for the last two decades of his life, but I heard him

and still hear him when people tell me that I shouldn’t feel obligated to

honor my parents, after all that they’ve done to break me.  My

grandfather told me to be a lady but never to be weak. He said that real

ladies are like steel underneath and I think he would be proud of my

hardness even though my mother says it just means that I’m a bitch.  I

didn’t know it then, but now I think my grandpa was scared of what

I might become with a mother who could never grow up and a father

who misused everything he met.  And now, when I could have really

heard him if he spoke to me, he has been gone for too long for me

to remember much of what he said.  I can still catch glimpses, though, of

that so honorable man when I walk through the woods he planted and

try to remember the names of those trees.

Obsessions I pursue

(Sestina Attempt)

Days when crinoline clouds spread far across the sky

while blades of grass kiss my legs like a dream

and I am lost within an old romantic story

with delicate porcelain teacups and wild beauty.

These days I love when I’ve accumulated the time

to while away life and think deeply of him.

And I think of the smile on his face as he

watches lemony orb flying across the sky.

Of long, long ago when we held the time

to kiss in the sunset and weave unlonely dreams.

Nature would inspire our kiss with winds beautiful

until every moment seemed only to exist within our story.

Or I imagine my Baby as he purrs out a story

with curly-Q whiskers and a handful of him.

The way he never tires of gazing into the big sky

while birds chatter loudly without knowledge of time

and when he sleeps I can read clear his dreaming

of chasing those birds or catching the she-cat beauty

outside.  Or I imagine what visions my pen might think beautiful

as it thinks about the possibilities and inspires the stories

I must tell.  It is a caress in my fingers as I hear for his

whispers to reveal themselves in the glory of the setting sky.

Some lovers might come or perhaps a young maiden stuck in time

until she weeps for the coming night and sweetness of dreams.

And maybe there Pen will paint out her dreaming

until I look somewhere else for the beauty

I hope to find.  Perhaps the most beautiful stories

reside in the paint with the crimson lines of He

and azure hopes of fluff ridden skies

full of themselves and the memories of long-ago times.

When everyone could easily find all of the time

to savor the scents of the woods that smell like my dreams.

That season the world with Spanish lace and dark beauty

like every childhood night in warm arms with old stories

that gave birth to hopeful echoes I found in his

arms as he held me close and we looked into the sky.

And the sky became our every dream

telling our story with innocent beauty

and I love time and I love him.