I grew too old and unmotivated

To write the Great American Novel

Much other pulp has long been inflated

Some rightly worth the cerebral shovel

Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451

And that Catch number earn declaration

And Player Piano though critics shun

To clutch pretenders with adulation

Hemingway should have waved farewell to arms

Salinger swilled rye and let Holden roll             

F. Scottgilt Egg shells to sell as two charms

Even Grapes were sour if pinched from the Bowl

So I decided to sonnet instead

To slip so leisurely into your head

But wait I am not nearly over done

I schemed and barded with Shakespeare my way

No not dressing with armor or bacon

Just entertaining like the man might play

So feel free to count ten and look for rhyme                                                        

And fourteen lines as is English custom

I scripted iambic in proper time

Accidental since I uniambed some

Embrace the corruption since there is more

Most problems have few solutions to bed

World chaos shames the latter and therefore

Cast blooms at my feet or stones at my head

Either way read this verse I do entreat

Let novels like flesh sleep in this conceit

Par for the Course

A red-tailed hawk sits on a pole line wired—

amber-eyed, pupil-dilated, sharp-beaked,

cinnamon-feathered, white-flecked, hunger-fired—

scanning across a two-lane blacktop streaked

with maple and oak and hemlock and pine.

She launches: swift, strong wingbeats in hushed chord,  

angling untouched through limbs stretched byzantine,

pitching a controlled dive to open sward.

Her outstretched legs talon-pin easy prey,

a vole, writhing in breathless surrender.

She thrusts and tears as white spheres stay in play

until warned by cart-caddied, drunk laughter.

The raptor with game retraces her flight

to feed distant from other appetite.

Back to the Garden

They nurtured life as two who became one

through work and children and common passion

and one late death plague fought in unison, 

her breast and his lung in matching fashion.

They buried the disease with shared pursuit,

their prized garden a plot from infection.

On the morning of fifty years in root,

he glassed blue hydrangeas for devotion.

But then did he note his wedding ring gone,

slipped off a finger thin from beaten blight.

After fruitless search, he confessed withdrawn,

she now awake and pleased with blossomed sight.

She smiled sweetly and showed slight, ringless hands.

They gardened that day to raise two gold bands.

First Congregational Church

The architecture is in juxtapose,

elevated high in brick yellow brown, 

its neighbors vacant and boarded in rows,

footed by cracked, broken sidewalks weighed down

with a random detritus that repaves 

in needles and plastic and paper scraps.

One by one they reel to the cross that saves,

some pushing food carts or wagons with flaps.

The line builds slab by slab around the block,

the fortunate firsts at the locked oak doors.

Opened, they reach for bags of valued stock,

moving unmoved to resume their own wars,

sad congregants playing hide and go seek,

fated to return again the next week.

Preserved

It would not surprise me if you had King

Louis the XIV’s heart or Einstein’s brain.

Maybe Mozart’s skull with which you can sing.

I can toss Ted Williams in your domain,

either his or Oliver Cromwell’s head.

Perhaps Thomas Paine’s scattered skeleton

or the bad blood that Mussolini bled.

Wait, souls in small pieces bring you such fun.

Galileo’s two fingers? Vertebrae

from John Wilkes Booth? Saint Francis’s left hand?

Well, half of it, but you’re no saint to pray.

Beethoven’s lock of hair if you demand.

No, I bet Chaplin’s body you possess

since you own mine once I fell powerless.