touch football

an old argument breaks out
on the Clay Street rush count--
three alligators or four?

goofing

lollygagging
 is the only word
  to describe

turning pedals
 down empty backstreets
   New Ulm, Minnesota

a sunlit spin of spokes
 heading in particular

nowhere


-2005

slowpoke

Cruise-control set at seventy,
She gets upset
At anyone caught-up-to,
Quickly branded "country yahoo"

-JaNet Q.

withdrawal

If you find yourself so dismayed
By the pervasive malaise
Of this mad mad world
That you step awayed
--Are you then defined by it?

enya

That minor key
Holds inside itself
The world's vast sadness,
The endless good-bye

two "found" haiku

Do Not Insert
Foreign Objects
Into Fan Blades



Never Check
     For Gas Leaks
          With An Open Flame



-from tradework

Guadalajara

The steel-wheel locomotives
Idle at their sidings
The world over
The big Case-Hellwig diesels
At low RPMs
Thrumming the summer air
With a bass vibrato
Or occasional slow rev
Flashing what horsepower:
The iron gods bide their time

the coming revolution

     Is there not a revolution coming,
     A generation of youth born into every kind of gadget & digital gimmick, a youth who will stop to ask the question, "how much information does a human being need?"  Who will recognize this sea of technology as mediation from life's sources, mediation from the wind sun rain & stars, from birds & trees, technology that delivers not the enlargement of time & space (as promised) but the amplification and underscoring of them?
     Is there not a day coming,
     When a new wave of young people will INSIST on direct contact with this earth & sky, with each other, and pronounce cybernetics for what it is-- a fascination with cleverness, an elaborate testament to the new truth that "Invention is the mother of necessity"?

a new day

...the quiet congratulation of it, to step out onto the frosty porch at the break of day, to lean on the rail and receive the subtle colors that tint those fleecy bands of cirrus sometimes with a crescent moon in them, and if you're lucky a loose frolic of starlings will swing out between the cedars and greet you with the exuberance that says Sky! Sky! Sky!

whoops

boxcar derailed
east of Langley Nevada-
desert strewn
with Tucson phonebooks

Wearing all the Hats

Being their handyman
they asked me to pull down the cheap tin woodshed
damaged by a windblown branch-
But being sixty years old
I balked,    I should have refused
yanking, sledging, cussing,
sumo-wrestling with bent green panels in oversized gloves-
But it was the first week in january
a sharp chill in the air
loose cloud fragments floated above the close pines
a job clearly made for college kids-
more than once I almost walked away
but when the trouble ended
and the shed was upended
voila!  a truck full of metal
my foot on the pedal

Daybreak

         
Last day of the year-
First light at Seven AM.
On the southern horizon,
Slight bands of ice-cloud
Are feathered pink.
High in the black dome of heaven
A crescent ten-day moon
Burns next to Venus.
In the smoke-hazed valley,
Every slanting roof glistens with a hard frost.
Then to the unwary eye it appears-
A loose wedge of snowgeese
Hardly visible a mile high,
On the wing for destinations
Unknown

            -Grass Valley