Two poems

On Feburary days,
winter wants itself back
having been outgrown.

Cold rain falls
into empty woods
where trees stand
leaf-less.

From snow,
stones and trails
reveal themselves.

Tiny creeks come back to life.

A happy memory, once forgotten, returns to thought.

All things dead
hollow logs
lie in their form
peacefully.

__________________


As if a story has been left behind,
in a deserted field,
a scene is created: deserted,
but where people were once
walking and talking

colored tents stood
littered about.
in a sunny breeze,
flags shook on poles.

fortunes were read
through palms.

night came over the bizarre.
stars lit an unlimited sky.

morning came.
fires still burned
burning out and smoking.

Wheat Fields

Wind-shield wipers
going back and forth
parting water
that falls in intervals of seconds.

onto cars driving past drowning
fields of wheat.

On the surface, all is well.

Peace
like silent lightning
touching down
a deserted field;

Quietness inside the cars;

A darkness along the road
as dark as the bottom of a stone well;

An innocence proven;

Slowly, water reaches
throats of the wheat.

Old Friends

With morning, still night,
early traffic
on dark roads
miles and miles long.

The banality of morning reporters;
an orange, plastic wrapped newspaper
still cold from winter's touch.

Old coffee grounds
dumped out.

The pouring of coffee;
The filling up of a cup.

A car running
warming up
in a driveway
almost ready.

Gears shifting, to a pause,
of a garbage truck
continuing on.

The emergence of a bright orange sun.

Hundreds of mornings
still dark
take light
and then people run
into one another, old friends.

His Other Self

Fear came that morning, with a winter's snow,
awake and aware.

Never did the sun peak and burst through the pale sky.
It snowed on and on all day.
It turned night.

He lost himself-- his Ego left him,
and he was forced to decide,
(he, forgetful of the origin of his fear)
whether to rejected himself,
(a self fickle to silemce)
or stay.

Now, as the separate, Third Person,
unreal and spoken toward
so continually invented,
sought an individual happiness.

But it had been snowing on and on.
The blue and orange fire
in the hearth was dead.
The remaining logs burnt black.
Under the grate,
piles of ash.

Incomplete Poem

Before her isolation became a sickness,
like the weather, a Thing
seen and talked-out-loud about,
she survived on not taking,
and her existence became
a silence filled with a crowds' voice,
or a deep carving filled with light.

Her feelings shifted with her location,
and, by taking nothing, she travelled
like a river through grassy hills,
as an Emotion
handed off from one current
to the next.

Nothing, Revisited

He wanted to see himself reflected in,
see what mystery was there,
but, after beginning, it was like forgetting
an important point he wished to say.

He found nothing, and became angry.

Then, he left himself
to find peace in his anger.
Peace, then existed not within himself,
but from the world's quick first impression.

This in return, allowed him to reassemble himself,
return to himself, without boundaries,
to a silence he couldn't reinvent.

There, he fought tirelessly,
and tried to take back himself,
but, again, only found silence,
and the occasional sound of a passing car.

Reflected into himself, he looked for happiness,
for a union to grasp onto--
something to revise or revisit.

But, in unknown territory,
he didn't trust his perception,
and silence became a companion.

There, he made coffee, smoked cigarettes,
and didn't bother much with his surroundings.
He found his expectations great, so then lowered them.
There was no sound, and he was content with that.
Each thought came, and went,
like an empty gesture whose meaning isn't reflected upon.

Like this, the silence passed,
and he stuck to what he knew best: nothing.

In nothing, he revisited his anger,
and found in it a revised sadness:

like a philosopher's Great Point,
a Nothingness that repeated itself.

Before and After the Ice Storm

After the ice storm,
water drips from everything that is Nature,
and from everything that isn't.

Before, under a translucent and blue sky,
my dying car
was being worked on
by a dozen calloused hands.

Raised high on beams,
detached steel pipes
sagged underneath the car.

In the lobby, coffee percolated into a clear pot.
One repairman looked blankly out into the distance,
as the coffee raised a finger's height.

Blue sparks flew,
in a dark room,
from a drill being operated
by a thick-bearded fat man.

A tall and thin man
sauntered inside,
putting several thick stacks of paper bills
onto the counter.

Now, icicles fall
and shatter onto the ground,
over and over,
making pretty sounds.