A Marked Peculiarity

Rough Rockiness sometimes an edgy cragginess leans into me first thing in the morning first waking, presses its scarpment into my soft semi-drowse until, mountain-tired, I press down a first swirl of coffee, sainted rush beginning shortly and during radio music nibbling at breakfast the push of cliff side eases becomes to my inner eye visible and as the day progresses through tooth brushing dressing reading etc it becomes solid even majestic. Near Flight Each morning in the height of summer the oak leaf hydrangea arranges the hands at the ends of its many arms small cacophanies of patterned petals like geese flocks of miniature white butterflies winging into the eastern sun. Fun, Food, Spirits II You don't want to work the graveyard shift at this bar no sir especially not after listening to Zombie this Vampire rock band and assorted cohorts playing such as theme from Dead Man Walking and maybe for the old very old crowd A Tree in the Meadow with its great end "By that tree in the meadow My thoughts always lie, And carved upon that tree I see, 'I love you till I die’." No sir and seeing the gents and ladies having a killing old time feasting on the likes of cow chicken and pig corpse swilling killer drinks being killed by the local comic dying of laughter sloshing out words like these is killer wings this is killer beer I'm gonna go home drop into bed and die no sir what fun they think but me I've got to clean up lock up then all alone look through the window at them grey gravestones next door standing real attentive-like now it's dark looking at me looking at them spirits in there rising the real spirits I mean no fun this especially cause some nincompoop left playing on the jukebox The Grateful Dead. In Beaver Meadows The course of our day we planned, Nancy and I, to have as its major part a hiking trek through paths of nature sanctuary. The sky was almost pure blue, hardly a flek of cloud as we disembarked upon a deck over marshy ground whose moisture seemed to seep up into our warming skin: a check on speed and gumption, but a place we deemed more than worth our while: past unschemed splintered pieces of swamp driftwood forming a scattered palimpsest that waved and gleamed on the almost indefinable lip where swarming gnats, horseflies further obscured the blending of slough into fen and needled forest floor, past the sprung vagaries of burst pods of milkweed, suddenly recalled as an ending of early childhood, when I stopped believing that their pear shapes, if soaked in water till soggy, would turn into fish, a miracle of the gods. I, Proteus Moving through a difficult meander of path-lined pines into welcoming light I find myself grit fingernail clinging to the steel-rolled edge of the loading dock of the warm warehouse I so fervently seek. Grimy rescuing hands land me on solid concrete platform. I start to rise to my feet, the same hands shove, seize, box me down into a shipping container. Sound of turning wheels under me hustling me quickly to where I have desired to be. As other hands start to drive massive nails into the lid I trickle out like water quick as quicksilver my ever faster current flows between around among through every piece of splintery scatter littering the floor through, out, under the metal side door across a small road dodging truck wheels into ranks of fervently-scented rose-filled marveldom. Traps Why does wind this day of snow wander unquietly like white, blind hysterical peacocks into the blue veins of my mind the bright birds snarling themselves endlessly, endlessly in the subtle wires that seem to spring up erratically in all arteries of travel catching them more unaware the faster they blow? Each day they wait, the wires in my mind for sound of blowing wind, pinging softly with each flutter and shake of the blind flock hurrying home. Ice Floes down the Niagara River Stone-visaged, stone ensculptured, determined, the hard ash-white warriors in their phalanxes of pale bone-granite ice ships force forward: a massive, grim armada, its irregular lines dense from shore to shore, unstoppable as if it must sweep all before it. As the river incline increases roiling waters around, over choppier rapids give a more strudent roar unheard by the ghost-white flotilla as it grits stern, steady, rushing onward into the waiting thunder. Silent Sibilance In the fall when my rake sinks its determined teeth into strata of dry leaves, sun, currents of air adding wind pressure to the layering, with what quiet shock each year I sense, from the sudden scatter of smallest beings in all directions away from the center of rake-tooth destruction, a thus-far imperceptible country, an inter-penetration: worm, grub, red ant, beetle tribes all somehow strangely united for the duration of warm weather until my unwelcome disturbance from their above-world at the very time when cold is just around the corner ready to place its seasonal coup de grace on their crumbling confederation.