Sifting my chances
like so many grains of sand,
like flour for baking.
I find cockle shells and tea leaves
telling a tale,
mixed with birthday cake crumbs
at the bottom of the sieve.
If I go to the forest to make this decision
will it be more honest?
Will the desert bring out the best landscapes
if I can paint the air between this easel
and all that golden sand?
How the sky fell
in our first summer rain.
A deluge of drops
till the grass turned bright
and the puddles filled up
and the birdbath splashed over its sides.
I sat indoors
hiding from the lightning
but I wish I had stepped out;
felt the warmth pouring,
drenching through my clothes,
heard my shoes squeaking
from being soaked through
to their rubber soles.
We did it without distraction,
no wine we could swirl in a glass
as we take our time to think,
no smoke to look away
and light for a second,
no dinner, no movie;
the things that would have kept me away,
or vaguely there, and looking elsewhere.
We did it without a board game,
the arcade, or ping pong.
I hear thunder following the June full moon.
Hold my hand and make a wish.
Don’t tell me what it is.
I hope we can fly, surf, sail above the clouds,
Oceans of snowflakes
piling up into dunes;
waves of white morphing,
warping into drifts so large
it can take all day to carve through them.
In these darker times
we are wringing out stingy sunshine
from an almost always opaque sky;
creamy today
as so many spots fly by horizontally.
The snow is a blur of falling pieces,
each flake tracing a convoluted line