Skip to main content

Rascals



What if the finches drop straight down through
the branches like perky, agile acrobats?
Such cat burglars.

What if that duet of invasive squirrels stop
when they spot me watching them trying to move in, and
run back

into their hiding place behind the folding screen
on the porch where my daughter’s photograph is plastered

larger than life and she’s wearing the christening gown
that we all wore. Five generations of holy water.
What if the sound

in the night of a stainless steel
serving tray tumbling to the cement wakes us?

We will know that the rascals are at it again
tipping to raid the seed bin, and the birds will need to make
more noise to hold on to their sky climbing stick country.

The tree’s arms scratching the roof for as long
as I can remember. My daughter frightened by the sound
in her bedroom as the natural movement carves the dark.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent                                                 mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes     from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew   She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow     (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender)   (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present     (anyone’s mother)    aging    when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin                         captures the sunrise light like   anticipation’s shower   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Protozoa

  When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that    rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember    the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside   to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified   protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat  - what I believe tadpoles   beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek   the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father   who may never button up his favorite green shirt again  with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk    out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife  and we either joke or pretend we will take him   to the beach when we ...
Post a Comment
Read more