Starling
Couple
After the lawn
watering
a couple of
starlings
swoop in to
find
what goodies they can
find.
Pink pavers and railroad
ties
might hold hidden
seeds
from now-stored bird
feeders.
One starling steps on a
wet, dead leaf
which sticks to its
foot.
It high steps and
shakes
its foot to rid the
sticky leaf
like someone wearing one
snowshoe
floundering around in
snow.
Finally, it reaches down
with its beak,
plucks the leaf off its
foot
and looks at its partner,
Yuck!
Faith
I sit atop the slide
--
a lifeguard
guardian
watching.
Watching for
Grandpas car
I know is
coming;
today the green car
turns
into the driveway where I
wait.
The telephone
rings;
my aunt calls
because I am the caller
ID
before anyone knows what
that is.
My mother paints the
ceiling
with a bucket of paint in
one hand
and jokes shell
drop the paint on me,
but I know shell
tip it all over herself,
and I watch her clean up
the mess.
Judy tells me if I
walk
with a dead
grasshopper
in my hands behind my
back,
it will
disappear.
To prove it, she
walks
and shows me her empty
hands,
but when I
try,
the grasshopper
remains.
Fog
Overflow
Fog overflows the canyon
banks
and floods the rim
road.
A car snorkels through
foam;
headlights feeble against
the tide.
Black cows drift by like
dislodged boulders;
white cows snag the fog
against hides
in barely visible
grazing
heightening danger of one
lying on the road.
The road curves around
the canyon
now a fog beach beckoning
a wade,
a wade from road to
lands end
I Am A
Ruler
I never measure
up,
not over twelve
inches.
Good for regular
snowfalls,
but super storms Im
buried
never capable of
exactitude.
Each inch records 1/16
depths
of growth
along
my rigid foot
length.
Foot-long
hotdogs,
foot-long
sandwiches,
a human foot
never a foot.
I am a ruler
of my twelve-inch
domain
measured by
short,
long lines, inch by
inch
a perfect ruler.
For
Real
People stare at the
blurred
reflection of the
woman
in the mud puddle
lying
on the sidewalk
cement.
They squint in an
attempt
to see clearer but
all
a muddle of shape
and
color smeared in
abstract.
Never knowing
if they look
up
she stands
separate
and focused for
real.