Life Story XXI

A waiting period, a transition, steeping.

Warm December

Sunlight flowers in winter:
one morning you brought them to me
so I could breathe
forsythia.

Yellow salve in the sky
on Christmas Eve. (The next day gray,
we suffocated in its
congested color,

longed for yesterday.)
As if sun tea on the deck,
clear cold steeps ripe red
and yesterdays become

wept pools of snow
feeding the early forsythia.

RT476

on my lap
over yesterday's Times
I pour,
from a silver
magic thermos
bullet container,
tea.

eighty
miles-per-hour
forty
sips-per-minute
photosynthesized &
dried leaves delivering
a fix.

two hours in a
car, the bead seat
cover becomes you,
& I forget where
I am going
if the audio book
is good.

all driving
distances
should be diluted--
a scoop of sugar
& stirred with
crème--a voice
reading to me

old bedtime stories,
a tale of a whale
the highway washing
headlights & redlights
as landfalls
in crystal blue
eyes.

Class Notes: A Communication Model

Ring around
the rim
a tea-stained
history

waking up & putting the
water on to boil

coffee instead of tea

finding an escape from lines of houses

going to sleep past your bedtime

scooped with tea, while waiting for channels to change

a new paragraph

the tree on the hill drops ¶
that roll down & gather by
my back door.

A yellow bird lives
in the tree & sings

¶ ¶¶ ¶ ¶ ¶

in the morning, the tea
¶ out of the kettle ¶
spilling into autumn
air ¶

changes the weather

¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶

clouds that part at lunchtime.

¶ to open Campbell’s tomato soup

the can crunched & reused into ¶

Inventory 21 Sept.

tea time two

This is what the poem tea time eventually became.




thanks again to cherylin.

SecondNight

the cardboard is packed
(not stacked or absorbing the sounds
of a television
downstairs.)

so this is what my
computer is like.

it took two hours
of looking at all labels
(no meat &
the cheapest goods)
to save twenty-four
dollars.

tomorrow maybe
a haircut.

tea for two to start
the day (waking up
to dick
who came to remove
the hot tub.)

green walls no longer
blue

i can go to bed with
the Gilmore girls
& a bed stuffed
with animals.

(comments included with
placement of TV.)

conversations
across
the room.
half in computer,
half spoken.

we can forge
a new family
in the space between.

tea time

back broken by the lifting of lumber, jack could
do nothing but rest & wait for the return of po-
sterity through a slumbering regiment; sticky p-
otato chip hands, hot dogs eaten raw from the f-
reezer, falling asleep in his brown arm chair,
jack, white wrapped in long john coveralls, dri-
ed in the heat of the electronic hearth glowing
three’s company & draining battery lives till no
remote could change the arid airwaves—like sand
through an hourglass so passed the days of jack’
s life—just watching the same channel over & ov-
er & over again till it all was rerun & he could
predict the future & control time in thirty min-
ute intervals & in a symphony of board, hammer,
nail, jack was foreman once more molding from m-
emory a true HOME for the next generation, the
next lonely lovers to live in peace & comfort c-
oming together in a room of brady bunch sinceri-
ty, making the world a tv land once more.