Dichotomy

Pigment swirling in her paint,
the custom-designer is decked out
in multi-splotched jeans,
an enormous work shirt, sleeves rolled,
and a husband's frayed Saints cap.

She tests a strip, stands back
to measure the effect against
the image floating just beyond
consciousness, the stuff of angel
schematics and the plastics

of extreme makeovers.
Color imprisons her as bristles
meet sheetrock. Her arms move
mechanically, planting the seeds
of home improvement. Polymers
of acrylic acid clutch pristine walls.

She sways to the spilling tint
losing herself in spinning neon
tangles on the conveyor belt
of hope. She flops on the floor
and stares at the perfect perfidy

of the choice she was beguiled
to make from the 13 sequential
shades the salesman offered,
his tongue grooved and clacked
as feet clicked on the polished floor.

This'll Do!

Climbing the pomegranate stairway,

searching for the key. Neon ribbons

glimmer like daisies spilling

through fingers. Gold conveyers

swirl, angels raining seeds

in a metal harvest. The velveteen

rabbit, his misshapen lumps

flopping on the couch, ponders

the difference between what is

plastic and what is real.

Saying the Beads

We count the beads of being hanging round

our necks like so many monks numbering

the knots on their ropes, fingering the nodules

of prayer. Ours are teardrops touching memories,

raw reliquaries of unresolved conflicts,

unrequited emotions, reprisals regretful

for their petty motivations. Some are globules

we've never understood, actions that we can't

quite admit or reconcile with who we have become.

Others are spheroids of incompletion, efforts

begun and aborted, evidence of our lack

of courage and resolve. Yet some are startlingly

perfect in form and symmetry. We look at them

and wonder at the way they touch the holy other.

We gaze at the reflection in their florescence,

and we bend our knees to the touch of blessing. 

Chiclets

The weight of the world

rides on our shoulders

as we slip arms into shirts

sewn by Chinese women

in Shanghai factories.

Trendy labels sit comfortably

on our necks, stitched

into collars by mothers who

work seventy-hour weeks,

ten-hour days to buy the rice

to feed their families. Three

of those hours might buy

a pack of Chiclets as we pass

Walgreen's on our way

to shop for yet another shirt.

Discards

We changed houses like others planted new gardens, stored

their wool sweaters in moth balls, and washed their curtains

and shampooed carpets. Moving from one side of the highway to another,

town to country, street to street, there was a restlessness about us.

We were birds that built fresh nests each season.  The houses blur

in memory, similarities more outstanding than differences.

Most were low to the ground, all rooms clinging to the earth,

but the trail like so many locust hulls discarded in metamorphosis

had its own anomalies, a kitchen bar here, a basement there, and a trio

of second stories.  Yet two of those second stories seemed like houses

stacked on top of each other, stairways merely openings with steps.

Only one rises in memory to catch imagination, the stairway

with a curved bannister, its rooms carefully separated for more

than function.  It was that bannister that guests saw upon entering

the front door, its curve at the bottom promising something more

than bedrooms at the top, an ascension of more than foot following foot.

Yellow

Hope is always yellow, the crispness

of daffodils blooming first,

sometimes when snow still lingers

in crevices of the ground.

Wordsworth's host dancing

and the sophomore English class

where my reluctant mind was made

to memorize his lines.

Yellow clings to the fresh straw

we placed in the boxes for chickens

to award us with the yolks beaming

from our frying pan, darkening

to the sizzle of bacon with its sturdy

brown, grease darkening in the pan.

Yellow makes my mind tingle, but

it's brown I trust, the reality that

gives hope its startling contrast.

Interdependence

Flocks of juncos in flight

like synchronized swimmers

account for space, wing tips

and beaks in perfect symmetry.

Connected but not connected,

invisible threads bring meaning

to motion, avoidance without thought.

Cooperation beyond decision,

decision beyond wonder,

the awful reality that certainty

hangs on meaning that heads

cannot comprehend. When

Robert Penn Warren's Jack Burden

bit into a persimmon, on a hot day

in Louisiana, a Tibetan tinker's teeth

were set on edge a world away.