(not so) Daily Ramble #11

Sometimes I try so hard to write,
but nothing comes to mind
that I can write about.

There are some crumbs of food or rot
casting shadows, lying
on the kitchen floor.

I could sweep them up and put
my mind at ease or I could just sit staring.

Daily Ramble #10

As I looked out at the newly fallen snow,
I thought that, to a bird
looking down from the crisp expanse of sky above,
this dying city might look like a wife,
tenderly wrapped in  a winding-sheet
by her grieving husband.

Daily Ramble #9

I once saw, as I sat
before the window,
a mother bird searching
for food for her young.

One of her chicks, while her
back was turned, crept to
the edge of the tiny nest,
then fell to the hot,
black asphalt below, where
he wandered around
for an hour or so
while his mother chirped
chirps of encouragement.

He died as the sun
died its ritual death,
and the mother bird
stayed there and sang by the
side of his small, broken
body, feeling guilty,
I’m sure, for her short
lapse in attention to
her small, fragile son.

Daily Ramble #8

This one will definitely be revised at a later date. It doesn’t flow as well as I would like it, and the tenses seem awkward in places.

I wash your hair the way
I imagine my father washed mine
back in 1984,

twenty-two years before
you were born in a hospital
just blocks away from another

where he worked for as long
as I can remember. On Fridays,
my brother and I would wake

early and, in the cold
morning dark, wait for the car
to chase away cold and start,

and my dad would drive us
back to town. And when we arrived at
my mom’s house, my brother and

I would crunch through the frost
that covered her lawn as my dad drove
away to the hospital,

where he toiled all day,
then returned to pick up my brother
and I in the afternoon

so we could spend weekends
getting to know our dad– the anger
he fought not to display;

the deep sadness he hid
behind constant laughter and a beard
and a mustache and a joke

about the state of things;
and the love that he shared  by explaining
to me how to sink posts

into hard-packed red-dirt,
and how to hang fence to keep cows in,
and how to cut away fence

from around a small deer
that got trapped in the wire we stretched
and then tortured all night by our dogs.

So, while I wash your hair,
I wonder if, when my dad washed my hair,
he held my head as gently

as he held that deer’s head,
and I wonder if you will remember
how gently I’m holding yours.

Hanging Lights

I don’t think there is anything else in the suburban family man’s world that proves his worthiness (or confirms his own opinions on the subject) as succinctly as hanging Christmas lights outside. But maybe I’m wrong; it is pretty far past my bed-time.

As the sun rises up over the fence
my fingers, numb from the cold in the air,
indelicately shove plastic hangers
between weathered boards and broken promises
to keep the place tidy. When I step back,
the sun is there waiting, consistently
proving its superiority and
demanding worship by forcing me down
into a bent-backed shuffle before it.
But tonight, when I plug in the lights and
chase away dark with green, yellow, blue, red,
even the sun will have to admit that,
at least until dawn,
I make the decisions ’round here.