Driver

The mind returns to one of five
or seven frequencies, like stations preset.

As the hood mirrors the summer sunset

and the power lines arching in step

through glass so clean it disappears,

I think of you, now, in a file drawer

with my other little failures.

Block on block of pre-tract houses slide away;

black on black, merging in the rear-view.

Sprinklers water lawns as father grope for weeds

or words and sons roar away raising hell.

Mothers are not figured in this equation.

The engine hums, the oleanders sway,

and the scent is overpowering.

Calmly falling

This midwinter heat wave forces open the windows.

Little girls compete in screaming

under bare elms fingering the last faint magenta

on the crabgrass growing damp with dew.

Distant cheers erupt in the stadium

(there, where you see the silver glow)

when the home team makes the conversion.

Rummaging through the bureau,

you find those wire-rimmed glasses

you save year after year.  For what

The chance your eyes improve?

The license plate colors have changed again.

A man bolts the new ones to his car

in front of a house gutted by fire.

This makes you think of quitting.

But what's one more but,

when you add up all the ands and ifs?

You fear death but long for sleep

like everyone else.  Of course.

One is known, the other isn't.

Either way, you're falling.

Apartment complex

The shutters do not shut. 

The sun's declension makes fuzzy shadows of utility poles

climb the otherwise bare walls.

Standpipes, like Easter Island figures on their angled ground,

catch the last rays below shredded cirrostratus

blowing smoke rings toward a higher altitude.

This is my first two-story.                     

The view is unlike my others.

Darkness only falls as far as the carbon-vapor arc lamps

goosenecking over the narrow streets to protect the innocent,

but failing.  Children dart from between parked cars

while their parents beat the dogs that keep me up at night.

This is my last true story,

now that I see the point of deception.

The sky is brown with smoke and the rising sun is red.

I know instinctively how long the driers take,

and step from car to gutter, where the arid wind

blows dust and ash around the anxious sparrows.

The shirts crackle and wave their arms while I hang them.

 

 Double vision

I see everything twice.  More or less.

The bathroom mirror is crazed with age,

and there I am, talking to myself in the morning sun,

overexposed, all detail lost in the glare.

We cautiously walk through our years

as though barefoot and avoiding broken glass

shattered on the kitchen floor,

our ordered lives at least as fragile.

I desperately hope that time

will accept my lame excuses for all my little failures

in consideration of all the good I’ve done.

Surely, God or no god, there must be some accounting.

Deux ex machina 


 I see everything twice; that’s the catch: 

my curse, stemming from the order of my birth.

Last light limns the fence slats in gold

while I wait, hoping you reconsider your position.

The rose in the sky dwindles, reflected in the perfect finish of the hood.

Blue neon flickers to life under the steeple of the corner church--

“JESUS SAVES.”  Saves whom? I’d like to know.

You, lost daughter?  Surely not me.

The lemon-twist moon is framed in the double-paned window

above my overlapped reflections.

You can tell what’s inside and what’s outside

by the ghost beside the image, or its absence.