Don't Say Hello | Fudge Ripple | Illumination | To Those Who Have Ears | A Passion for Nature
Don't Say Hello We pass each other along the walkway; you chart the course of fire-ants, as I count wings across the sky. I see you pushing through the express lane, armed with milk, raisin bran, and a magazine, against the inevitable grey-haired shopper, given to conversing with strangers. At intermission, you linger by rest rooms, waiting for no one to rejoin you. (Your single symphony season-ticket seat is two rows down from mine). In the library we share opposite ends of a maze of private space -- you study how the earth is made, and I wonder why. I know you, as you know the silence that keeps us company. Could you tell me if you feel it, the vacant ache, where God plucked the bone from your side as you slept, to complete the creation? Restless in its new flesh, this bone begs to return to its source. Yet we pass without speaking, needing to believe in the completeness of the individual, always wary of an awkward moment. I have never been good at pursuing the trivial, so please, don't even say hello.
Fudge Ripple One brick pile of dust and broken dishes begets another until the valley is littered with what the government calls housing. A home to mothers employed making future tax burdens in exchange for food stamps. The meaning of life is behind door number four, or you could buy a vowel as the world turns on the restless young. Stale sticky children fresh out of school for summer swap charity's toys for tokes on lipstick stained butts, inventing wars to claim Junk-yard King, listening for the rind-ding-ding of the ice-cream man. Professionally prepared posters appear in June announcing the first annual Summer Bible Camp, intended to free you from the bondage of poverty by introducing you to the healing and liberating power of the redemptive blood of Our Savior, which will ready your soul for the good life of the hereafter. Free lunch draws in all ages to hear of the Promise of eternal happiness. But Lamar, current reigning King of the Heap, wants to know: Do they have fudge pop-sicles in Heaven? Or do God favor the vanilla?
Illumination for G.W. I close my eyes as you re-tell the dream: "Early morning rays through mauve-curtained glass scatter across a crumpled floral comforter, dance on streaks of human gold, and warm your dreaming face. My heavy fingers trace shapeless patterns down an ivory neck, across pearl shoulders, and linger in your shallow curves." I remain unpersuaded. You worship this vapor of a never-coming future, whirling in a figure-eight of feeling. Vagrant vision, groping through interior corridors, convinced of self-sufficiency. Wipe the mud from your eyes. You prize the sacred cup because of its gold, and admire cathedrals for their structure. Go, and chase the swirling captured moment, chips of light spinning from the crystal Valentine. And when, weary, you kneel in the glow of a translucent cross, return, to show me how it burns.
To Those Who Have Ears Out of a cardboard fortress constructed against the left wing of St. Luke's rose, to catch the wind and anyone passing by, these words: I am hungry. From the sidewalk towards the words I stepped, and tossed the yellow paper bag from Sam's Deli into the opening marked "this end up." Out crawled a tall, bent man with grass-stained cheeks. He said: Pardon, Miss, but it isn't food I'm needing, and he gave me back my lunch.
A Passion For Nature The green crowned king of the forest breeze sways no more in heaven's sky -- death by compression has produced the page, a perfectly pure white unlined stage, on which the poet stands to cry an elegy, to the beauty of trees.
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