The Trip

     In October, my grandmother is taking a bus trip to Branson, Missouri with a few other women from her small town. Over a dinner of braised beef I shared with her the other night, she told me of the scheduled events that she was looking forward to, which included the hours-long trip with the other women. 

     "A bunch of widows talkin' about the good ole days - that's all it'll amount to," she said, wiping her glasses. "But you know what? I kind of enjoy that." 

     Since then, the idea for this poem has been on my mind, so I decided to give it some legs this afternoon. I imagine it will go something like this.

The Trip

Along Route 24 in Kansas.

A cool October morning.

Light the color of a peacock’s plumes

skips off Perry Lake

and into the windows of a

silver vacation bus

eastbound for Branson.

Near the middle, gray-headed and gabby,

two widows.

The power poles he used to climb

leap from sight on the right,

and the cars he used to drive

slide by on the left.

And now, bustling toward the Missouri line,

they are, one puts it,

taking the trip he’d always said they

couldn’t afford.

Couldn’t afford the time,

the money.

There had always been trousers to iron

for the next day’s work,

too much to be done

at work and at home.

Even so, those days had been good ones,

the other says, because even with

the dishpans, vacuums, laundry, and meals,

there also had been always a man

to kiss goodbye each morning,

and always time to anticipate,

much like they do now,

a reunion with him

at the end of

the day

Yes, the first says.

Yes, those were fine days.

And the creases

in the corners of her eyes

are not the only reminders.

My Story

My Story

A man in a damp, wood-gray coat

walks onto the first page of my autobiography.

He climbs onto the year of my birth,

plops down, and lights a cigar.

The wind of my youth flutters

the legs of his baggy pants

and lifts an ash from the end of his cigar,

carrying it onto the page

on which I have recorded

the events of this afternoon –

lying asleep in a green field

next to a pile of dry maple leaves,

which are now smoldering and

beginning to curl at the edges.

A Bone-Shaking Image

Once in a while, we read something that seems so common to us but has a new sense of power or a renewed image. It happens when we come across a description or a statement that is is pretty ordinary, but strikes us this time with a different potency. Just such a thing happened to me the other day when I read for the whoknowshowmany-th time about the lake of fire. This time, the image of a physical body of flames struck me and created a powerful image in my mind, and it inspired this poem.

The Lake of Fire

Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. 

- Revelation 20:15

I imagine someone standing on a boat,

gently rocking the soft tide,

when the palm of a hand strikes them

between the shoulder blades – in

that place they can never quite scratch.

They fall forward, unexpectedly tumbling

face first into the lake, gulping a mouthful

of sulfur and ash upon impact,

white coals and soot as black as a smokestack

filling all the crevices of their face.

They flounder silently in the flames

as the engine flickers to life

and moves the vessel forward,

leaving only loveless waves

lapping at their screaming soul.

Huddled

A true poem of self-expression, and a necessary one right now.

Huddled

I once heard that a tree

doesn’t know it’s a tree,

doesn’t see its leaves of lies

floating down,
littering the ground

with its deception.

It doesn’t see its poisonous bark

sucking the life from the innocent

woodland creatures which feed on it,

or the upheaval and destruction

created by the prying,

far-reaching fingers of its roots.

And as the rain begins to fall harder,

the tree reaches out its arms

to shelter the plants beneath,

but they only shrink back

and venture out into the storm,

alone, but together.

(T)reading their path

Here's a teaching-inspired poem from my untidy stack of writings. I hope you find it encouraging.

The View from the Front

I took the classroom clock down last week,

because the students and I could no longer

handle its incessant ticking.

Its thin second hand had become a brick,

repeatedly flinging itself at

our thick pane of silence.

But now, as the students focus

back on their books,

I peer over mine

to see what has caused such a stillness –

to find out what can possibly have happened

to bring twenty four teenagers to tranquility.

The flutter of a page, then another,

a clearing of the throat, a sniffle –

not much is happening here, or so it would seem.

But behind the spines clasped tightly

in the students’ hands,

a world is being rolled out

like a new carpet, cut perfectly to fit

into a bedroom full of light.

These kids may not often leave their bedrooms,

their home state, or their profile pages.

Their eyes now, though, have opened wide

to Alaska’s white wilderness,

and their bodies have felt the power

of the Ganges against them.

Each opening of a cover

shoves them forward into a village,

or a living room,

or a club car on a train railing toward Italy,

and they keep turning,

trailing behind the words on the page

that are beginning to look

like a line of ants hiking across a sidewalk

and on through a field,

then into a cavern where a low flame

throws a glow against the dusty walls.

To do list?

You know those times when you have a dozen things to do and some free time to actually get them done? That's when I look outside and see a poem sneaking by the window, reaching for the doorknob.

It's those times when I know I should be doing something that ultimately has little importance; that's when I find poetry to be a welcome excuse, a stealer of time for whom I conveniently leave the gate unlatched. Here’s my latest little thief.

The Breakup

In the grass under this bench

lies only the lead-tip end

of a broken pencil.

The eraser end is nowhere to be found.

What happened, I wonder,

to split such an indivisible pair?

Did an angry author force their divorce?

Or was it a mutual breakup?

Or perhaps, the lead had gotten sick

of its partner’s second guessing,

back-stepping behavior.

Maybe the lead had finally had enough.

I’ll bet it slammed the door

with its backpack slung across its shoulder

and set off to live a new life –

a life free of the eraser’s constant regret.

I’m sure that somewhere the eraser

is sitting alone, curled up on a wooly patchwork sofa,

longing for the company of its ex –

the pencil lead who is now bounding through

the tall blades of grass beneath this park bench.

Our Fiction in Wordles

I had my students paste the text of one of their stories into Wordle. Wordle is a web application that creates a word cloud of a passage, and the words that appear most often show up as the largest words on the word cloud. It helped them see which words they overuse in their fiction. Below are some samples.