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.