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The calendar on my wall might say it’s spring,

a season announced by a frightened groundhog,

six week’s ago, scurrying underground,

yet the lake’s still frozen and snow-laden,

windblown and crusty beneath my feet,

a winter desert, white against a brilliant sky.

I Remember Poetry . . .

I remember poetry before there was poetry,

when poetry was just something I read

in a book, for a class, as an assignment - graded, of course -

or maybe I tried to write it, had to write it,

struggling to rhyme it, meter it, get it right,

getting the beats to fall, rhythmic, and the words to rhyme,

awkward sounds and awkward lines, signifying nothing;

but a – b – a – b – a – b came out like the teacher wanted,

in the sing-song iambic she decreed as well.

It wasn’t like the book’s, not at all,

but she liked it, gave me an A;

I had tried, done what she asked,

and we moved on to the next unit,

poetry slipping away to the next year

and another teacher, another assignment, another grade,

another attempt to rhyme and meter words

the way poetry was supposed to;

. . . poetry before there was poetry.

A Late Winter Wind

A late winter wind rushes down my drive

and into the yard, headed toward spring,

leaving behind a swirl of blowing snow

to remind us she was there.

Hell in a Hand-basket

To hell in a hand-basket we’d go,

or so he said and told us often enough,

all of us boys, cramped together,

moving downward into the pits

of darkness we’d been warned of

many a time that 6^th grade year of our lives,

down into a hell of darkness and fire.

Yet we feared him more than the darkness itself,

we young boys in trouble and trembling,

our hands outstretched, anticipating the ruler’s rule

to strike our flattened palms, young flesh stinging

and red, as we fought the tears that would fall,

a failure of our dry-eyed attempt to be men

and endure his ire, endure his wrath at young boys

breaking the rules, going to hell in a hand-basket.

Signature

My name scrawled across the page,

like me, is old, so changed from

Mrs. Bailey’s 4^th grade cursive,

taught and practiced, over and over, rehearsed

to a neat and mastered script grown tired

these passing years, my pen too quickly

running the letters together, squeezed illegibly,

and a touch of lazy perhaps, usurped

by overuse, misuse, disuse, by the clatter

of keys handy within my fingers’ easy reach,

or a silent keyboard tapped, transferring words

to a printer’s exactness, clear and self-corrected;

my signature, now, is obsolete,  lost and unread,

an unreadable scrawl across a page, old and tired.