You leave for a month, first time,
and the sky, with the clear skin of a boy,
says nothing.

I sit down on the lawn
that I should be mowing.
The house, huge now and full of silence,
leans away
from bright bees and noisy flowers.

Rethinking,
I roll out flat
like a crumpled page
that a hand smoothes out,
saving anachronisms for further study,
a palimpsest pending review.

Your voice on the phone
just dropped an octave,
and soon that baritone
will drive away wishing us well
over a light spray of gravel.

For more than a dozen years
you and your mother
splashed around everyday
in the chilly lake of my life,
and I could hold you both
wild and weightless in my waves.

But now somewhere my pulse
is taking a good long walk.
And over there, across the road
some bird with a red breast,
which could be a quetzal
defending the green territory of sorrow,
repeats and repeats
what could be an aria
by some gifted composer long gone
whose art, like the pyramids,
makes its point
short on ideas,
long on material.

Cloven tracks meander the yard.
The grass is flat where some pre-dawn beast
lay down like a father with his hump,
slightly exotic in dim light, moose or xebu,
to savor its cud of garden cuttings,
ruminating on noisy flowers,
oriental poppy orange explosions,
cosmos shouting pink and white,
and more subtly, sweet William,
baby's breath, and creeping phlox.
All herds graze, I suppose, on dew
and the high, two-tone tremolo
of columbine vibrating in the morning breeze.

You'll return for awhile, of course,
and the house will fill again
with your colors and gusty music.

But for now
somewhere a chainsaw is chewing up
the afternoon, and way,
way up there, those could be clouds
on a glassy lake
floating across my eyes.

I don't move.
Not Maria Callas,
not my neighbor's round robin,
not Jessye Norman,
nor all the morning mezzos
can make me shiver now.

Creative Writing Contest

1998 Winners