For my da!

My Father Holds the Door for Yoko Ono

In New York City for a conference

on weed control, leaving the hotel

in a cluster of horticulturalists,

he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut,

narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips,

holds the door for the Asian woman

in a miniskirt and thigh high

white leather boots. She nods

slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture.

Neither smile, as if performing

a timeless ritual, as if anticipating

the loss of a son or a lover.

Years later, Christmas, inexplicably

he dons my mother’s auburn wig,

my brother’s wire-rimmed glasses,

and strikes a pose clowning

with my second hand acoustic guitar.

He is transformed, a working class hero

and a door whispers shut,

like cherry blossoms falling.

Christopher Chambers

Watering Trough

Let the end of all bathtubs
be this putting out to pasture
of four Victorian bowlegs
anchored in grasses.

Let all longnecked browsers
come drink from the shallows
while faucets grow rusty
and porcelain yellows.

Where once our nude forebears
soaped up in this vessel
come, cows, and come, horses.
Bring burdock and thistle,

come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the cast-iron lip that
our grandsires climbed over

and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping. 

Maxine Kumin

To prairies and the thrum of first cicadas in the sonoran desert ~

 

Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples

the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,

or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?

The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple

of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn

and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow

in all directions, the windowsills swelling

with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne

through tinted glass above the milled grains?

The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door

slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,

the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,

and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—

the rote grace of every tempered life?

Carol Light

Happy May! I am sending this one out with all my love, to my Mom, Constance, and to Micah, my beautiful son!

One Day

One day after another –

perfect.

They all fit.

Robert Creeley