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Grandfather
You
were laying there, shoulders covered
In a thick fleece,
shivering and cold
When you saw into the ceiling,
And
peered a nothing made of smoke.
Once you said you were a
cowboy,
Wore boots of leather strapped and spurred,
And
rode your horse till midnight,
Wrangling a stubborn herd to
some sprawl
In the middle of nowhere, marked by stones
Piled
on top of one another in crude formation,
Settled deep in a
rich, red loam.
You told me once of how you sat
Alone by a
campfire, which danced
With red blossoms crackling
Amidst
a field of rocky warts.
And then of how you woke wrapped in a
fog
Creeping over the lands, wild and weeping
Folded along
their seams—
Pastures stitched to a thousand things.
It
never seemed to rise,
The desert morning’s
whisper
Floating at the lips of the sky,
Pouring its haze
into the dawn’s light.
That fleece, that blanket—
The
wool pulled over
Over all the chaffed and rugged faces
While
the world worked and the sheep grazed.
It was the same gentle
grayness
Which surged softly in your stare,
When the ghost
you named came calling
Back to the fire.
Sun-Washed
Wheat
Sometime ago, a shirtless man in
overalls green,
In a field of sun-washed wheat,
Leaned back
on his pick-up stalled and rusted,
Stood still in a plain of
wind-swept bushels ripe,
And considered life.
Dust stirred
at his feet, risen from the roots.
Transfixed by the coating
on his rubber boots,
An exchange both natural and sudden,
Looking out from where he stood,
Thinking aloud amidst the
earth’s spindled-strands
“I’m only a man,”
he said.
Life is spent on wishes and woes,
A summer spent
in a winter-cold,
Wishing to be young, waiting to be old;
A
morsel of golden wheat, which
Flashes once beneath the sun in
an endless sea.
So this is where
love ends,
At the corner, in
passing,
Boarding a jet, a train,
Under the umbrella,
In
a rain pouring.
Can the world feel the weight,
The
heavier heart, the onerous soul
The pressure pushing on her
spine,
From the burdened steps,
The rigid, platonic
hips,
Moving away, away?
Does the earth turn when
you turn,
Looking back for a final time,
In the silent
movie,
With all the surrounding faces muted,
To stare
longingly in a lover’s eye,
To mouth, ‘Goodbye’?
Do
the waters of the world swell
When the waves rise in you,
When
regret storms in the stomach,
And a sadness sloshes back and
forth,
Crashing in the pit of your body,
A violent,
unsteady sea?
Were we really ready?
Ready to say
goodbye and go?
Or was there just no time in passing,
To
take it slow?
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