THIS IS JUST TO SAY
(after William Carlos Williams)
This is just to say
that poets can be
a pain in the butt
Who else would
eat all
of the cold sweet
plums
you were
saving for breakfast
put a poem
on your plate instead
and expect not only
forgiveness
but gratitude as well
ALAS POOR…
And we in this new old land turning up
with our plow
hammer heads, and arrowheads, and sometimes
a bone or two
and if one would be an uncrushed skull it would
be no Yorick that we knew
This noun, once verb, would mock us
in its grinning
all those with whom we might converse
are laid neath Hamlet’s soil
His redder kin scattered
like his bones
ROSES IN MY REAR VIEW MIRROR
(and a few Bluebonnets too)
There’s a family always laughing
There are girls, and they’re all smiling
There’s a collie dog a roaming
chasing gophers down their holes
There’s a ranch with grass all greening
fifteen minutes after rain
Maybe you can go home again
IT WAS A DARK AND BOVINE NIGHT
Perhaps finding it warmer than the grass
a big black cow has settled down
to sleep in a rut on a gravel road
My right wheel meets her ass
at sixty miles an hour
I’m not sure who is most surprised
Wrestling the injured truck
I avoid the almost inevitable roll
and my name in the obits
She takes a few steps into the ditch
and dies
If there’s a destiny that shapes our ends
mine was shaped by a guardian angel
hers by a Firestone tire
ALL THEY SURVEY
My father
would stand for hours
just looking at his cows
Like God leaning
on a rail fence in heaven
pleased with his creation
CIRCLING BACK
All those
long days of youth
before I was a poet
lived but not noted
I go back now
guided by bent grass
and broken branches
Attaching
toe tags of meaning
to departed days and friends
A WEEK IN THE REDWOODS
Trees taller than a cell phone tower
The iPhone says
you are not getting your messages
the Redwoods say – listen
ROAD TRIP
There is a stretch
in the long loping hills of Montana
where the laws of speed and time are not enforced
Where over every hill there’s another hill
that far to the bottom
and that far up the other side
A-sail, a-sail on an earth-rocked ship
two thousand feet above an ancient sea
Wheels endlessly humming
to the radio’s timeless tunes
Suspended forever midway
between those you’re running to
and those you’re running from
DIRECTIONS TO LOS NOVIOS RANCH
for Claire and George
A hundred miles south of San Antone
Los Novios means The Sweethearts
They had Brahmas in the pasture
they had a gator in the pond
They got big Blue Indigo snakes
there to eat them pesky rattlers
Though mesquite may be as close
as you get to a sweetheart tree
The roadrunner on the woodpile
is all puffed up and singing
Hey girls, look at me
LUNCH COUNTER TRANSFERENCE
Sitting across from Robin
As lovely and graceful a dancer
as every you’d want to see
and highly over-valued
by a two-left-footer like me
What a pleasant surprise
through the golden shadows to see
that she likewise over-values
those who write poetry