THE LIBRARY

AT HOME WITH FRIENDS

Another high wire week with a stint in the clown car

And a time-out with the elephants

Which sounds ‘wowsa’ til you get to the smell.

Sitting in the Betty L. Johnson Library listening to a soft

Southern accent explain:

By turns, placatory: scolding, expressive

In counterpoint to the piping voices of response

Pointing chick-beaks to the parent of the nest

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, there’s nothing else after all,

Nothing to learn after you’ve met me!

Sitting in the library where I just bought three books

Me, who has not bought a book in years

Settling in enough to find my own, needing bookends

But buying books instead: Settling in to

A comfy chair named Henry

And reading, legs slung over one arm.

But I digress: outside, a cautious rain, a tin roof

A subtle drumming

Uneven, small, tentative in full sun.

I sit: my bare feet on the table, lost in laptop dreams.

IN SEARCH OF WORDS

I wander … I follow that verbal slipstream

Where to tell a story is to worship

To find the perfect verb equal to world peace.

Outside cars cross bridges,

A live oak grows sidewise, disdaining the sky

For embracing the field

Roots wrap the trunk

The corrugated bark resembles feathers

Resembles shapes, its cut-limb nodes

Now familiar scars – the human’s warning:

Don’t grow this way.

Twisted roots of something once alive

On its bark, stark & twined, ropy

& looped – cautious in downgrowth

As it never was in up.

A red kiosk in the distance, a cluster of

Yellow signs facing it

A color war

Who will see which first?

BY A WINDOW, REFLECTING

The computer says “text predictions off”

That’s good: I don’t want any AI telling me what to say!

Or how to say it unless I ask for help.

At home in the familiar

The rows of known names comforting

In midst of so many left to read.

Whole shelves with one name as author,

Storytellers with so many stories

Unrestricted by things like

Not being able to make up endings.

This is my Saturday naptime, when I am usually

Curling into the cool fan, a secondary purpose

Served by its hum. But I am at the library

So I settle for a string of yawns & keep typing.

THE FENCE IN THE YARD

Is a Dispute Scene:

The neighbors say ‘t’was the hurricane did your fence’

The landlord says ‘not my fence now’

A Solomonic twist

To what remains a tree unrolled to planks

Torn from bonded comfort

Shrugged into its neighbor,

To swan back in the sun,

A fall interrupted,

Gravity held in abeyance.

ONLY A WRITER

Would hold so still for the mosquitoes while

The words trip over themselves onto the keyboard

While … while words settle on my skin with longer legs

And hungrier proboscis.

Ah well, I’ll have itching crème

To go with my poem.

For me, this is still an exotic

This lush state, green as Ireland gone tropic

Never have I seen such growth

I need this energy all around

I love to drive by trees

Caught in motion … I know as I move along

They change position

I have caught them midway.

A branch at an impossible angle

Looking like an arm upraised for balance.

The live oaks are a gymnasium of possible

Were I a climber of even small chancing.

Yet firmly rooted, I remain. Eating that which will weigh

Me in even more.

My climbing boots are stashed. I need to break out the wings.