The Morning Shift

There is a comfort
To the morning register shift.
The early risers come to and from their coffee
In the yawning light,
Two dollars, a dollar ten, eighty cents
Impatient in hand,
And I know they want a newspaper--
The Sentinel, or The Times, the slim Wallstreet Journal--
As quickly as possible,
Never mind the pennies.
I really have no idea what people want the rest of the time,
Just that we are running heavy
With everything we want to spend.

Parting Gifts

You returned everything
Except my goodbye.
The one thing I wanted back.
You kissed and watered it
Just a little,
Just enough
To keep it growing.
I tried to drown it,
But it proved to be
Too a thirsty young thing,
Pretty,
In its delicate, carnivorous, melancholy.
It's funny--
What looks good in a vase--
What eats you alive.

In August

In August,
Demoiselle Cranes
Stretch their slender necks
Above the dying grasses
Again, for the first time, or the last,
Preparing to throw their improbable lacework
Against the eternal teeth of the Himalayas,

The hawks, and hungry canyons,
Trembling wings, and purple storms,
Season after season,
For the distant emerald certainty
Of home.

In August,
Two hands often reach,
Hover on the uncertain breeze,
Brush palm to palm,
Fragile as paper kites
Against the long blue of the sky.

Between reading Sheila Callaghan and Erik Ehn, my brain is getting funny

Peter Counts His Darlings, he doesn't know how

Flying is just falling backwards.
I fell out of nurse's pram,
Tumbled starward,
Never never looked back,
I think?
I don't remember.

Michael has puns
That are too old for him,
They stick out through his cradle
Like too long toenails,
Wendy snips them off with doll's scissors.

John is fighting to pulse through
His own machinery,
Sometimes he is a clockwork crocodile,
But not as hungry.
Wendy complains at the steam coming out of his hat.

Wendy,makes every corner a throne,
Her eyes sparkle by needle-light,
Nothing in her face is anything I understand,
Her heart is a bird, beating against a closed window,
She tells me that flying is just falling upwards.
Mother,
I think?
I don't remember.