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.