Creek Song

a little smoke and a little hair
a doll I will make a picture of

with a little smoke for the eyes
and a little moss for the hair

and a mouth made of mud
a doll I will make a picture of

with a little head for the hair
clay for the hollow hands

and a bucket full of song
a doll I will make a picture of

with a pebble on its tongue
where the creek begins to tumble

it rides down the water
it waves like a picture

then mud covers the eyes
and the hair floats like smoke

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~

Home Schooling

His science glossary does not have contrary so he fetches The Junior Book of Knowledge. He watches as I lower my Oxford to the table like a baby or a side of beef. A hunk of pages drapes my arm as if somebody fainted. "It's onion skin!" he crows, then asks, "Which would you want: A little dictionary with big words, or a big dictionary with little words?"

I pour our tea, absorbed, as he repeats his query. I fancy he and I are miners in a cave shoveling words into rail cars. "Oh the big words, I guess" I tell him, and frontal lobe relaxes, though it's a ruse: I do not love big words. I love mint, tea, cool, perhaps tongue. And pen, tap, sip, especially cup. I was never one to stock-pile big words for ammunition in resentment, love, for glory, to grovel or to find my way.

"Well," he says, "that means I get to take your big dictionary with all the little words, because I can use my magnifying glass to see them no matter how small they are."

"Oh, watch it," I warn, "You'll shake our tea" as he passes me The Junior Book of Knowledge.

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~

My Son Listens to his iPod as
I Drive Back Roads to the Bus Stop

Past a saga of fieldstone and horse
out to sultry pasture, past a cragged dogwood
with turban wound so wide
it breaks the sky's blue helmet. Did you
see that horse just genuflect - its fat hooves
press the moss? Did you see how
the unkempt Osage orange raises its arms
to the power lines?

If I take this curve slowly
we will hear the creek consulting on the fawn
that has shrunken to an acorn of thought
tossed in the roadside chicory.
-- Do you think we'll spot the black snake
I caught once by the mill race
as it issued from a stone,

a fissure in the air
a dream reeled in
as I reached for its neck . . .

Keep your eye on those boxes
nailed to split-rail all along Pleasant Hill.
You may see a bird streak over the field, shoot
through its hole like a blue gas flame.
What comfort, imagine, inside
those houses - bug smell, downy yellow heat.
Were I a bluebird I'd fight to nest
in a pinewood box

with an eyehole view
of leaf storm and cloudships scuttled on poplars
a house with a rocker rutting its porch
and a rustic mounted skull
say of that fawn. Under the arch
of its high-pitched roof, plenty of headroom
to perch inside. Under my fragile
cap of bone, I'd feed
I'd brood I'd sing.