Get what you really want now and then

You don’t have to read this ramble before you read my little fast food tale. You don’t have to read it after, either. And maybe, for all that, you won’t like my story, ‘Fast Food Ad Infinitum.’ But someone will. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that people crave stories as much as they crave food.

Now people will eat mediocre food. People will eat junk. And people will waste their time on stories that leave them hungry for something better. There are great cooks out there. And there are great writers that you can read for nothing more than your time and attention. But I’m the only writer exactly like me and I can tell a pretty good story. Only I, in fact, can tell you the story you may never have heard before, told in precisely the way I tell it. Maybe it’s the one you’re hungry for when you read it. Maybe not. But that is partly what this piece of writing is all about.

I like food. My parents brought me up that way. For our birthday, we kids got to choose our meal. Mine, for awhile, was mashed potatoes, hamburger gravy, and corn. Mom probably rounded it out a bit. Always pie. I’d lay odds it was coconut cream. Five in our family. I ate a fifth of that cream pie – coconut in the pudding, browned coconut on top of the merengue. No one has ever made coconut cream pie precisely the way my Mom did. I might have had better. I’ve certainly had worse. But having learned to pay attention to food, I knew when I was satisfied. And there was no one else quite like my mom.

You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before and I promise I won’t go all maudlin on you. I mean to go big. The universe is a vast and complicated place. Most of us are one-of-a-kind. My point is that it doesn’t have to be your birthday for you to choose what you will eat. And it’s surprisingly easy for you to figure out what you want. It also can be surprisingly hard to find exactly what you want.

That’s where fast food and other franchises think they’ve got an angle. They think they’ve figured food out down to a formula. If it’s not a one-size-fits-all food thing, it’s at least close enough to what people think that they want to sell billions and they will advertise you to death to convince you that they will satisfy you. And it’s not that they can’t - if you want their package. But I just don’t go looking in their direction for their formula food very often anymore.

As much as I crave food, I crave people and places that make me feel as if I would rather be no place else on this big earth for a little while than where I am sitting and eating someone else’s cooking. A place that’s not just anywhere. People being themselves. I won’t kid you. The food matters to me. And with one-of-a-kind places, the food will vary a little depending on the people making it. It makes me happy just to say that.

I could start by telling you about the egg crème that they make at Aimee’s, but I won’t. If I was going to, I’d tell you something about the people that make those egg crèmes. They’re not clones, or a corporation’s idea of your friendly food server. They’re better than that. But I’ll skip on.

The lentil soup at Aladdin’s down the street is the best I have ever eaten. And I could tell you about the time my wife and I sat out in their sidewalk cafe area and watched a parade of Dog Days runners running and jogging and walking slowly past our table. I bet I ordered the gyro and the soup.

                              

I could go on to say that Rudy’s Pizzeria a few blocks farther makes the best pizza sauce for my money – they say there’s a little wine in it – but maybe I merely prefer it because I was raised on my mom’s hamburger gravy and I just keep going back because I liked Rudy’s sauce the first time I tasted it.

But this is not supposed to be about what I like, although I will recommend the chicken fried steak at this joint in Tonganoxie, and the bun with chopped egg rolls at the Little Saigon Café on 23^rd street. And if you like pork like I like pork, try the birria at MexQuizito. Or there’s the Vindaloo I make at our house. Good food is good food – even if not everyone can agree which is which.

And it’s not really about the ambiance, although I like the burnt-orange walls at Rudy’s and the comfortable way I feel stepping down into their half-basement - sometimes the light, sometimes the dark, coming in through the windows over our heads as we sit in a booth along the old limestone wall.

Or take Cutter’s out near Eudora - just a roadhouse if that’s what you want. But I had sweet potato fries and listened to a friend’s band play old Beetles and Byrds tunes over there. The ribs are good too. I rocked a little. I didn’t stumble out of there and I didn’t need no pea-pickin’ happy meal. I got satisfaction.

Are you getting my drift, yet? Cause I could go on for pages. Places and people and food. Some I’ve gone to and some I’ve met and some things I ate only once. Some I go back for. It’s not always the best I’ve had in my life. But I give myself that chance every time I go into a café like Aimee’s or some other one-of-a-kind restaurant I’ve never been in before.

At Aimee’s, I might not order the club sandwich and an A&W - and it is just a club sandwich, made by hands I recognize, and the A&W is just corporate root beer, but it compliments my sandwich – but at Aimee’s I’m never unhappy eating there. Sometimes I think all I want for my birthday is a gift card from Aimee’s that gives me the exclusive right to sit in the swivel chair at the high counter – the one against the wall where I can stare out over the kitchen area where the baristas are working or out of the window, watching the sun go down. Wouldn’t even need the egg crème. But I do like the egg crème they make there. Never exactly the same – if you pay attention to food the way I pay attention to food - but it’s always the egg crème I want.

But my mom taught me about sharing. So go take my seat. There are still plenty of places to eat where - if not today, then maybe tomorrow - you will get not only what you want, but what you long for in your soul. Good food, too.

Now next week I will offer you my cautionary tale. Some of the names have stayed the same because they were my friends. As for the rest, believe what you want. Today, I believe I want an egg crème at Aimee’s.

Solstice

A hearse rolled by

on the way the Oak Hill Cemetery –

no one I knew.

A young man then strolled by,

a young woman on his arm –

I recognized him.

With Christmas around the corner,

I half-expected the baby Jesus

to next toddle on by.

The stoplights just winked

red and green, red and green,

and the skies were cloudy all day.

But with the air far too warm for snow

we’ll soon start one more turn around the sun,

the earth’s trajectory and tilt barely wavering.

And as the days get longer again,

throwing off that extra warming blanket

is rarely being mentioned.

There are reasons for the seasons

and the times and days of our lives;

not every change will bring joy.

But I was glad to see the smile

on the young man’s face.

Peace on earth, goodwill to them.

Gardener

Her face appeared attractive under smudges of dirt. Her hair, coming undone from being tied back, might look silky and flowing under different light. Perhaps her shapeless T-shirt would turn later into something more slinky. But in truth, she was beautiful because of her love.

Do not be distracted by my superficial talk of appearances. It was her love of the soil, the seasons within which she worked, a lopper in one hand, a bucket full of tangled plants no longer catching anyone’s eye.

I had lopped off a couple of red dahlias myself, burned brown by frost, the stems bundled with twine for the city compost. I had dug up the tubers, soil clinging to no one’s idea of beauty, but they will back go into the earth next spring because of their spectacular red blossoms.

We humans have an eye for beauty. Young women gardeners who smile and chat with old gardeners are pretty enough sometimes. We cannot help what we are. But much as we look for beauty, it is still deeper than the smudges on that young woman’s dirty cheek.

It’s about love and life – and a measure of beauty.

Merry Christmas Milky Way

It’s not like I want anything this year,

nor does anyone I know really need anything,

but I’m bundled up and strolling up the sidewalk

with a little gladness in my heart anyway.

The Christmas lights have turned Mass Street

into a glittering Milky Way for a season.

But then the city lights wash out the Milky Way

overhead in every season.

I guess maybe I want a little darkness

here on earth.

Peace and good will, too.

And heat for my house

and power for my computer.

Oh, the climate is getting frightful,

but the storefronts are warm and delightful,

and all the lighted trees are cheery

and bright.

But how about this year we turn everything off

on New Years Eve until the New Year brightly breaks

just for the heavenly hosts on high.

Darkness and some egg nog,

and a midnight clear

is all I want for Christmas,

this year.

Good question

What do these colors mean?

I am walking along the sidewalk as I always do. Massachusetts Street. Downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The sun is lowering in the southwest. It’s a wintering sun. The red brick wall of the Journal-World is nearly the color of glowing embers, but not quite. The wall is the color of that particular red brick reflecting the fire of the angled sun.

Yet it seems that it is more than that. How can that be? The bricks are the color of clay from the earth, hardened in fire. The sun’s ray’s are reddened by the extra length they have traveled through the atmosphere. And still there’s a glowing of a color not seen at other times.

But I have no complaint about the color of that wall in the high afternoon in the middle of the hottest summer day. Or its color on a gray day with rain washing down its sides. The color of that red brick wall varies and I change as well, almost imperceptibly. So is that what the colors mean?

And yet I seem to prefer that reflecting fire color. Perhaps more because I have seen that wall in other light, in other seasons and so I can notice how it appears in this moment. But why should I care?

I walk along these storefronts nearly every day. I see the sidewalks empty and full of people. The earth moves and the sun appears to move, from east to west, higher in the sky and lower with the seasons. Clouds or not. All these things appear in front of my eyes. Why should the colors matter?

And all the days and hours and minutes that I walk past that wall and the others, if coincidence occurs, a shadow line appears - the line from the edge of the storefronts on the western side of the street divides the wall across the way into the glowing upper portion from the darker lower one. 

And all these other colors as well, up and down the street, are interesting in their own way.

This is all a commonplace. Often I barely fail to notice all these colors in their profusion, the sky also appearing above in its shades of blue and gray and white and sometime blazes of fiery colors spread out like a flame. Or is it the other way around? And yet sometimes I see some of these many colors in their patterns and textures and in a certain light, and sometimes it seems to matter very much to me.

Evolutionary biology explains a great deal for me, but this is not what my ancestors saw walking along the savannah. What manner of species have we humans become that the colors I see walking along Mass Street mean something to me sometimes?

I’m looking for an answer but not one you might give me. I’m searching for an answer I might find for myself. It’s sometimes something to do as I walk along. This is after all only my small, occasional question, not even a preoccupation. But as the sun appears to go down behind the curve of this earth, I’m beginning to suspect I may not find all of the answers to what all of the colors mean.

I do like to see that one fire-reflecting-from-red-brick color, and several other colors as well. It has been something to see.

Only more leaves

If the night is dark,

the clouds obscuring the moon and the stars,

the streetlights distant at either end of the block,

and leaves have fallen,

and rain has fallen,

and more leaves have fallen,

you will feel and hear the difference.

Unless, of course,

you never felt anything

when fall came before,

the leaves crisp and crackling,

kicking up like fallen leaves,

not quite finished with their game,

or rattling unseen down the street

before the wind can corner them,

or crunching underfoot

perhaps like boxes of bran flakes with no milk.

It matters not,

the leaves are on their way to compost,

and one day merely making more leaves.

I leaned in

I leaned over the sink

and was struck

full in the face,

really, it was more

a glancing blow,

no really,

a warm caress,

so unexpected

that I nearly ducked

my head,

well, I dodged,

and then I leaned in.

It was only the winter sun,

looking in,

only to touch my face,

only to remind me

of its concern.

I left the dishes

and ran off with the sun.

Really, we walked together,

silent, warm against the cold,

remembering old times.

Engaged

The river hurries down the channel,

weekend rain

made urgent.

The sea will be waiting

all the same.

But today she shall not dally,

full she spreads the fabric of her gown,

and she hastens,

not once looking back.

Her train of sticks,

drifting in curls

along the edges

will come along in time.

The river hurries down the channel

to meet the sea in New Orleans

where they will surely be wed

under a new moon.

Dreary Day

Who would have thought?

I overlooked what you were saying to me.

I walked as I often do,

pausing to look, to capture colors and shapes.

And then, much later, I overhear

what the passing wind 

in the colored leaves

is repeating to no one,

and although I am walking alone,

you are near.

And after a long mile,

the river was as gray as it ever could be,

the reflected sky dull and dreary.

I stopped at the Gaslight for a cold beer

and for warmth.

And this is what I wrote:

Robert Frost wrote that some say the world 

will end in fire

some say in ice,

But who would have thought it would end like this? 

Dreary skies, brilliant colors,

remnants only and letting go. 

I remembered you every step of the way,

soggy leaves underfoot and reflected tail lights.

Nothing to look forward to

but trackless white.

Might we still make angels together,

bury our faces in ice and pray for fire?

Might love tilt toward a lengthening day 

again?

I sipped again and paused to listen

to faces as they spoke,

such colors and shapes I could not hope

to capture,

brilliant remnants of other lives.

And this is what I wrote:

Robert Frost wrote that some say the world 

will end in fire

some say in ice,

But who would have thought it would end like this?

Each step closer to the last,

the sky dreary, pavement wet,

brilliant color, here and there,

but the remnants only of life

and falling fast.

I thought of you,

how could I not,

but it was drizzle spitting on my cheeks.

Wrapped deep in cloud,

the sun never looked, 

never thought to return.

Why should it?

I had squandered my youth,

my middle age, and now I am old.

It’s not so very bitter,

but now I look forward

to trackless white.

But if you would come with me,

make angels together,

bury our faces in ice

and pray for fire,

perhaps our love would rise

again.

I zippered up and recrossed the bridge,

dusk slowly settling in.

A meter maid whose face I knew

reminded me that I would get wet.

Drizzle, light,

but not too far to home,

the night nearly arrived.

I toweled my head

and went into the kitchen to cut

an onion for the frying pan.

But it’s all so obvious, words and pictures,

hardly worth mentioning.

But there were moments

of joy in the dying 

and lingering moments,

and my wife and I had our supper

and I had my heart and soul.

And the Thai braised chicken needed

a little more chili pepper.

All photos but the last taken one dreary day in November. The writing, mostly of a piece. Words and pictures are really separate strands but they are from the same walk.
Click on a photo for a larger-sized slide show.

Mr. Harley or Mr. Davidson, I presume

Astride the engine,

he rounded the corner,

the putt-putt just enough

to keep it turning over.

Squinting into the sun,

a cigarette gripped in tight smile

and a rag tied round his scalp,

he held out his hand

in a half-wave,

recognizing his audience

as he passed by.

Pedestrian, I,

the jangle of keys

against thigh,

loose pocket,

every step just far enough forward

to keep from falling over.

Squinting into the sun,

my graying head uncovered,

I returned a half-smile.

Strangers but for this,

we are two of a kind.

He rides on wheels,

I on the soles of my shoes.

Too old to be boys,

too young to stay still.

But when we go,

we will go easy.

A bit about the bookend poems

The truth is, I make stuff up. Well, not really. Much of what I write about is real enough. I mean, I see people and places – moments happen near enough to my attention that the stuff of life is hard for me to miss if I am watching at all. But when I try to get some of all of that stuff down, well that’s when something else happens – a little selecting and shaping.

So here’s a bit about the bookends. I’ll assume this interests you, although the likelihood is that many of you would be more interested in a piano falling from a great height. But what do I know? I haven’t said what I want to say yet. Read on if you want to.

I wrote the first poem mostly because I was sitting on a bench making notes about something or other. It was a beautiful day as beautiful days go. The sun was in my line of sight. Buildings were their shapes and colors. People walked past on the sidewalk. And then a friend came out of the door in front of me. It had not occurred to me that that might happen, although I knew she worked up at the top of those stairs. But it was relatively early in the afternoon. And so on. And then, as it says in the poem, a couple of days later I made a poem out of some of my recollections.

Then, the evening after mostly finishing the first poem, I was walking downtown. Again the weather was a certain kind of perfection – a very mild mid-October. Two friends were having dinner outside on the patio of what is now Merchants. I got invited around for dessert and we were having a perfectly fine evening talking and laughing, when the realization that tomorrow would come crossed into our awareness. The young woman with the rosemary scented hair mentioned in the poem walked by. Somebody pointed out the crescent moon that was about to set behind the very buildings which only I had realized had been the very setting for the moment that occurred earlier in the week that had become important enough to me so that I had written something about it.

So now I hope some clarity comes of all this – assuming you have also read the two poems which have emerged into the universe with my help from within the space of a quarter block and  within the time of about three or four days. Why not say that they are bookend poems?

But here’s the question. How much of this meaning did I create and how much did I simply reveal? And here’s the big one: is there any meaning that emerges from these poems for any readers – for people who were not in those times and places? How does that work?

I recently finished a book by a writer named David George Haskell called ‘The Unseen Forest.’ He described his experiences and the thoughts that came out of his practice of going to the same spot in an old growth forest in Tennessee over the course of a year. He succeeding in putting what mattered to him into words and thereby he managed to transmit some of his meaning to me. Many, many writers have done that for me. Might I have done the same?

Woops, there comes my bus. Must leave these questions to dangle.

The bookend poems

are the two previous  posts,

if you missed the fb introductions.

I wanted to say you looked nice

I wanted to say

you looked nice

when I saw you, me

sitting on the bench

in a patch of sunlight

with a straight line of shadow

for an armrest,

but I didn’t think

of it until

Wednesday

and now

all I can remember

is the look on your face

as I sat there,

scribbling something else

and maybe I just imagined that look.

Or was it a faded

turquoise skirt you wore

with large white polka dots;

the sunlight plays tricks

with your eyes

but I don’t mind.

I still think you looked nice,

if you don’t mind my too lately saying so,

the sunlight was just up and over there,

near where you came out of that door

and turned the key

and turned around to face me.

It was then that I looked up and saw that you looked nice

and then, that you saw me sitting there, except now I wonder,

was it just before or just after?

Was it me looking at you or was it you looking at me?

And then you walked away into the shade

although I’m almost positive there was a swish of skirt.

That would have been on a Monday

that I thought you looked nice.

The weather, then, at least, was clear.

Again, some spacetime 

discontinuty with the photo;

there always is.

Late summer night

The moon tipped

ever so slowly

into a brown-bricked bed.

If only the night could have

gone on forever

but for the sure hastening

of that which had caused

its pale curved reflection

coming round.

And so the spell was broken

or not broken

by the rosemary scent

in her hair,

she passing by,

we heading home,

the cusp slipping in

the balance,

cool mists on cheeks

softening the moon-colored

hard edges.

Photo represents a place,

not the hour, a common 
spacetime discontinuity.

The shadow of your smile

Her eyes cast down at her walking feet.

The day was fair and nearly sweet.

His saxophone played the forgotten tune.

The shadow of your smile.

She lifted her face toward me and soon

my eyes began to water,

and in my cold heart finally grew

the flower of my desolate youth.

And then I walked the other way

I had no more cause to linger,

But now I am telling you

her warming smile

was the holy truth.

for  Glen Simpson

and a young woman passing by

8th and Mass St.

March 28, 2013

Simile

I don’t know why

they don’t say

diamonds sparkle

like eyes,

or that stars

twinkle like eyes,

or that buttons

are as cute

as the young woman sitting

outside of Chipotle’s

this afternoon,

her eyes smiling

into mine,

life breathing in

and out of her nostrils,

and lips she had,

and curly, short hair,

too,

and skin the color

of smooth

with a ripple or maybe a leaf

floating on the surface -

here and there,

that touch of a smile.

And I will say

her eyes were darker and rounder

than age-darkened pennies.

And I will say

they gleamed

with playful warmth.

And now I think I will stop

playing with words

like a fool on a bench

and walk around the block

on the chance she really exists

and not just in these lines

and might look up at me

as if I do, too.

Circles

It must have been a fish,

I really didn’t see.

It must have said,

Let there be circles -

and there were circles:

concentric circles;

circles growing ever larger;

perfect circles on the still, murky

plane of water

on the upstream side

of the Bowersock dam.

And then when the leading edges

of the circles reached the rubber

surface of the dam,

the circles bounced back into semi-circles.

And then in a few seconds more

there were no circles,

only still, murky water spread across

the exposed curvature of the planet.

I know about circles from high school,

physics and wave motions,

mathematics and measurements

in which pi factors elegantly.

What puzzles me now

has more to do with why

these circles should have caught

my notice at all.

And then upon further reflection,

that they should astonish me

so seldom.

A tall black bird –

perhaps an errant cormorant –

watching from a partly submerged rock

in the river downstream from the dam

slowly extended its wings

several times.

It did not fly.

The fractured sky

For the sake of clarity let’s say that there are two kinds of people. I’m the kind of person who likes to connect the dots. I like to make sense. I like to explain things. The other kind of people want stories. They want characters and a drama. Funny is good.

I know this because I walk a lot. My path usually takes me downtown, and among other places, I walk past Louise’s and the Harbor Lights. They’re a couple of bars, in Lawrence, Kansas. It is clear that people go into these places to sit and drink, but more than that, they’re there to talk. Looking in, I imagine that my explanations would cause most people’s eyes to glaze over. I suspect that they’re the kind of people who are more interested in a good story.

Well, the world is not the clear place that I’ve started out describing here. If nothing else, I’m more than one of those two kinds of people myself, as are everyone else, apparently. But explanations at least give us the illusion of things making sense, but ‘please, sir, could I have some more?’ – stories.

Mr. Dickens told stories. Mary Poppins understood that a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down. My instinct is to connect the dots, but in the end, I want to see the whole picture, just like you do.

So let me tell you a story.

I have a piece of art on the wall in my dining room – a mosaic made of broken bits of pottery. The dominant color is a midnight blue reflecting light over some greens and browns. The grout is light-colored, the effect is a crackling, as if the universe is fragmented. But when you step back and I tell you that this work of art is called ‘Night Sky over the Flint Hills’ it all makes more sense.

I see the whole, and more than that, these pieces of glazed clay fire the places in my mind that have where I have recorded fragments of a place that is real. I remember a place on a dark stretch of country highway, my wife and I had pulled off the blacktop onto a gravel stretch of the square-mile grid and turned off the car lights. We were on our way back from visiting my parents – they are both gone, now. Highway 150, crossing the Flint Hills is a short stretch of road –77 cuts across to the west and in thirteen straight miles east, 50 angles across.

We stepped out of the car into a quiet open space. There was virtually no other traffic at that hour of the night. Even without waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark, we could see the band of spilled milk across the sky. Above our light-polluted skies in the city at every unaware moment the whole universe spreads out, stars speeding apart, and yet out there at night they were thick to our upturned eyes – one, a million, a billion, each behind the next, and then the next -  each individual star’s light shining through space into our eyes. They spread out across the sky.

Lora, the artist, pulled that image from her memory, and with a band of speckled dark blue pottery recreated that Milky Way. She was not with my wife and me on that lonely piece of highway but she represented what I saw – and not only that night, but other nights. Is all that mostly unseen up there there, that night sky, that universe – is it all mere background to my presence?

The stories of my life overlap, they become thick as I look through them, blending together into a glory that my words only hint at. But they are particular – of a single piece at a time, but falling into place at times in as real of a kind of sense as I can know. I first saw this work of art at a show set in a hair salon on a singular evening.  A point in space-time, as we now say after Einstein. There were cookies and also other mosaics hanging on the walls. Lora was there. My wife and I were there. We were the stars of this little drama, I suppose.

Of course, it appears that I’m just playing with words, although I’m not convinced that that is not what we are doing all the time when we talk to each other. We are imagining our lives – amidst a whole universe as solid and burning as a billion billion stars. Of course, we want to make sense of it all, or only a part of it, if that’s what we can manage.

It took some intervening time, but I made an arrangement with the artist to have the ‘Night Sky over the Flint Hills’ hang in my dining room. She and her husband and son dropped by one evening and we hung it on a hook. My wife had made an almond cake, and we sat around the table talking mostly of other things. My parents, for one. Up through our ceiling, our roof, up through the urban haze - the Milky Way blazed.

Maybe this isn’t enough drama for you, and I won’t pretend that I care much if you turn away and get another drink. This is my story. And whatever you think about art or me, the art that I care about connects me to the stories of my life – the people I’ve known and the places I’ve been. Besides the whole glorious universe, what else is there?

Rudabagas are red, blueberries are juicy

No one ever confuses me for a poet.

No one ever says I’m even half the poet Wendell Berry is.

No one suggests that every high school student in Lawrence 

should compare my poems to Robert Frost’s – 

certainly not to a summer’s eve.

No one has ever called me the bard of New Hampshire Street.

I’m more like a Mr. Smith –

a Mr. Word Smith –

Go ahead and call me a crafter of words –

it will suit me nicely.

But I know what I am.

I am something of a poet if nothing else.

How much of a poet, you ask?

Maybe you should read some and consider for yourself.

But don’t start with this bit of half-baked word casserole.

Even T.S. Eliot had his grocery lists and his notes to self

to pick up the dry cleaning.

Only if I were Billy Collins 

might you actually consider this poetry.

Of course these days, most people wouldn’t recognize a poet

if they read one – 

let alone saw them moving their lips while mowing their lawn,

or editing their grocery list while waiting in line with an empty basket.

And I never said I wasn’t confused.

But I think there was a poet lurking among the sweet potatoes

at the farmer’s market on Thursday,

poking at their eyes and rubbing their brownish skins

with the soft of an extended little finger.

I stood watching among the scattered raindrops,

too dumb to come inside but not to write poetry.

I yam what I yam.

A little shower and blackberries by the box

It was only just sprinkling, drops

sporadic, what they call

a chance, you might get rain

at the farmer’s market.  Produce

and baked goods dry under

square tents which shed

rain by the collar full

if you happen to be standing

under the edge when the rain

sheds from the fabric.

People look around, walk

around, look around –

they see the sweet corn

but not the potatoes,

red tomatoes, bright,
kohlrabi invisible,

carrots still good for eyesight,

unsold behind the beets.

People’s gazes glance,

eyes left and right, blank stares

in the middle. Stand still

with an umbrella in your hand,

no one will ever know

you were there. Only

a sprinkling, drops

sporadic, what they might

call a chance, you might

get rain at the farmer’s

market.

Perchance

I was walking

under a blue umbrella

when I saw

a young woman

walking under long wet hair.

I watched her

hurrying in her

short blue skirt

and pale yellow tights

and I thought to myself,

perchance,

what if it had been

the other way around –

I, walking in the rain

in my yellow skirt

and pale blue tights.

Another everyday poem

I write poems like loaves of bread.

Ordinary words, a bit of mind.

They rise.

Everyday poems.

Not meant for Kings and Queens

or cast in bronze,

certainly not twelve baskets leftover

after five thousand have eaten.

With a little butter, I’m satisfied.

You bring a bottle and we’ll make a meal of it.

Tomorrow I’ll try with different words.

These poems are not everything.

And they’re not nothing.

I make them from scratch.

Fresh. Good flavor.

This one’s finished.

The ways of geese

It was a motley

group of geese

circling over the

Kaw River Bridge.

A few high,

a few low,

a straggler,

then two.

Round and round,

a misshapen loop,

as if no one was prepared

to lead.

Then with no command

that I could hear

from down on the ground

they formed up a V

and headed upriver.

Dwight and Gabby

I often don’t see everything. I had nearly walked past the kiddie merry-go-round by the Antique Mall. Dwight – I think that’s his first name - was sitting on the sidewalk, his back against the concrete planter wall, legs splayed out, a usual spot for him. The leash for Gabby, his service dog according to the hand lettered cardboard sign beside him, was stretched across the way to where the dog lay in the shade.

Gabby is a sleek, black, short-haired dog of medium build who looks to be in the prime of her life. Dwight appears past his.

A very young boy, his hair sticking out in the back the way mine often does after a nap, sat on a stationery plastic pony, his mother standing next to him. I wasn’t really paying that much attention. I planned to walk on by as I usually did, but then Dwight scrambled to his feet, stepped over a few yards of sidewalk, and offered the woman a coin or two.

I missed most of the exchange – I imagine that she might had have time to refuse – but I just don’t know what happened. It would have been impolite of me to have stopped in my tracks or to have asked any questions later, but as I walked, I heard the music start behind me, and I then I finally turned at the barber pole, stationery against the wall as usual, to look back.

The merry-go-round was going around. The little boy was standing on the sidewalk, patting at the ponies as they trotted by. Then the mother was rummaging in her purse. In a few more short moments - life is momentary after all - mother and child walked over to where Dwight had regained his seat.

I couldn’t see him directly around the corner of the Ernst Hardware Store building, but I saw Gabby nose out, friendly. Maybe it was the words, ‘not this time,’ the mother said as she approached, laughing. The boy, a little cautious, kept his hands to his sides, almost eye to eye with that sleek black dog. After some small discussion, which I could not hear, the mother and her boy turned the other way and walked down the sidewalk.

I too, turned and continued on.

Dwight and Gabby stayed in that breezeway soaking in the sun. None of us, I suppose, ever sees everything.

***

Postscript: A little over a month after I wrote down this story, a friend of Dwight’s, a fellow veteran of the streets, informed me that Dwight’s body had been found in the Kaw near where he often camped. He presumed that a seizure had thrown Dwight into the river, but the newspaper only reported that no foul play was evident.

Dwight’s son will take Gabby home to Colorado. His mother claimed his ashes. Except for his dog, Dwight Sexton was alone when he died. He was 49.

Rachel

In between two named towns,

near a county line,

people of the Kansas Area Watershed gathered.

The night was darker than my usual dark

and the glory of the stars exceeded that of mine.

I had learned that roughly half the length of my lifetime

before the year of my birth,

a man named Hubble had seen for the first time

discernible galaxies beyond our own.

I stepped up to a fire,

the light surely not extending far,

faces I mostly did not know

glowing in reflected flickering orange.

As chance would have it,

I sought a spot out of the smoke

in a still and occasionally interrupted quiet.

A woman held out her hand;

I’m almost sure I would not recognize

her on the street tomorrow,

the shadows were stronger than the light,

but her voice was most beautiful.

To be precise, it was warm and welcoming

and we exchanged names.

Her family name quickly blurred in my memory,

our gazes were mostly drawn by the fire.

I took her hand for a moment

and let it go.

We talked easily of people and places

we both knew and cared about in time.

That is, she talked of people in places

I knew of,

and I talked of similar people in places

she might have recognized.

But none of us were strangers to what

we cared about

though our words were specific and particular

to what each of us knew.

If I meet her ever again,

I imagine I will recognize her

by firelight and her voice.

I will look for her,

somewhere,

in the Milky Way.

Riding the sun

The south wind blows across the Kaw

and bounces up off the limestone levee,

an invisible ridge rising up toward the blue sky

and then towards the stars further above, unseen.

Air rises, it is easy to say,

and yet flight seems almost a miracle.

The vulture swoops down, cutting through

the clear sky, coming to rest

on the sandbar.

Two there, they stand, looking out

over the water rippling ever downstream,

and then, with a leap, one dives up

into the south wind, scooping and pulling buckets of air.

And then farther down the river,

effortlessly again, he rises up

on the weight of air.

And on the crest, the vulture

surfs the wave, a feather turns

slightly, no more, the great wings turn

circles on the south wind.

Effortlessly it all appears, but the effort

is mostly unseen. Generations

of vultures have practiced that feather

turn, and before that, fiber and bone

surfed evolving DNA.

And the south wind does not blow

out of no where, an immense fire

burns.

Where

It will have to do.

If I tell you that the answer lies within what I can no longer remember,

it will just have to do.

Two roads diverged, as Mr Frost said - so, well and good.

He so succinctly described his own experience,

but which road I have then taken is not at all clear to me.

You know who I am.

I have been by your side

for a long time,

yet I remain something of a mystery

to you – and to me.

I must not be far from here,

the one I used to be,

and – or perhaps –

far from the one I might be in the morning.

All is not lost,

only me. And then only

parts of me, and

not for nothing,

I should note that

I have likely only misplaced

an idea of myself.

The moon was nearly as new as it could be

a few nights foregone, the points

of the upward pointing cusps separated by the width

of my outstretched thumb.

Venus, gleaming a little higher

looked about to drop straight down

and splash into the perfect bowl.

The ancients would have been able to tell the time

from such small things, they knew where

in the universe they were by

extrapolating from the regular

movements and positions of these

celestial bodies.

Where - that they could say clearly – 

only guessing why,

well, in that, they were a lot like us.

Yesterday evening, the moon, not quite a quarter - 

still the time I was unsure of; it had climbed higher in a clear sky,

darkening, but still lighter than the one I remembered from

a few nights earlier.

I had been walking alone then;

this evening you were by my side.

And then a little later we slept, side by side,

for some time.

And then I was awake, unsure

of where.

Those two roads diverging,

and then two more at the end of those,

and, then at the end of those four:

so many more,

and on and on into an infinite regression.

Oh Mr. Frost, Mr. Einstein – can anyone

help me now?

I will close my eyes, and let the

spinning go spinning on. And I will imagine that in time,

in due time, in less time than you can pinch

between your thumb and your forefinger,

I will have forgotten, or rather

I will have awakened, and hopefully,

remembered enough,

and you will be there beside me.

I will not bother you with details of where

I’ve been. How could you possibly understand?

I don’t know myself.

I believe that Mr. Frost was quite aware

of the additional questions posed by his elegant asking of

this one or the other one.

He would likely have tossed aside,

like so much used bedding in a barn,

some of the ways people have made simple principles

out of his poem.

To be sure, I have taken one path or the other,

some have led to significant results. It would take a fool

not to see that  - and there are some fools around.

But looking back, some choices and results seem clear enough,

but by no means all. And now,

I have merely come again to the beginning of Mr. Frost’s poem,

two roads diverging. He hasn’t made it any easier,

but then, I’m don’t think that was his intention.

The sky is lighting. One ball has slipped below one horizon.

The other about to ascend. Maybe I will slip between the sheets

next to you and close my eyes.

In a few hours, I’m pretty sure I can find my way to the Saturday

Farmer’s Market. If only you

might hold my hand

when I cross the street.