COLD VOTIVES

He stands on the windless street --
a haggard frame in thinning clothes
with a scruffy beard bolding
the dirt assigned his flesh --
a cold votive burned
down to the metal plate.
A famished crow,
perhaps with peacock dreams
no one has put in his hands.
Graft of sunlight barely sticks,
not enough to grow a meal
in acres of impoverished time.
By day, he drinks the muddy rain;
by night, he sleeps in
idle boxcars on the tracks.

A well-dressed woman passes by --
her perfumed coat
a sign of Daphne owning
the season of spring and luck.
Shouldn't I do more than watch
and then record the shame in verse?
She comes from fields of lavender;
he is the scent
that interrupts what's facile
in a knotted world.
He picks the plastic hat
from a trash can,
retrieves a half-full paper tub
of cold, limp fries,
swallows hard behind the backs
of eyes rushing to close.

GALLANT FEET

"Mt. Fuji looks like a small bump from up here." (Laurel Clark, on the Space Shuttle Columbia)

When meals of death become our
drive-thru dinner hour, when morning news
on Saturdays of slate blue skies
is headlines of a requiem,
"the stricken look to you for strength."
It's been a year of salt and graves.
Of mace and terror and massacre.
Religion is busy, but where are the gods --
I heard them snore in sonic booms,
in rattled air above the Texas prairie dust.
Wreckage will be gathered up
as if it's straw from Bethlehem.
We'll pan debris for clues to where
their gallant feet stubbed a toe,
left us in a jolted daze, beards of hubris
leveled to the weeping pore.

Seven heroes sprinkle raw intrepid seeds.
From here the wildflower grows or dies
in gardens showered by grieving hail.
Tiny palms will play with shuttle look-alikes,
plan their missions in the dark,
aim at stars because these fingers
pointed at these miracles.
Muscles torn and tendons cut,
the dream will stand because it must.
I hunt beneath black funeral robes
for pastel shades of coming spring --
see a crocus in the yard
that rises on a schedule
outside the limits of my hands.

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