32/60: gawumpki

In house Polish, stuffed cabbage was gawumpki.

Fat sacks bursting with hamburger and rice.

Everything smelled like cabbage 
and fried meat.

It took me decades to understand
fried meat smelled like wealth
to noses that had smelled hunger.

Old factories boarded up,
time was passing by.

A place that was opportunity, once.

The smell of cabbage lingers,
long after the meal is consumed.

All the children are gone,
no one knows the recipe anymore.

31/60: falling away (Published in Young Ravens)

It is late fall in the world.
We dangle our legs off the dock above a river somewhere.

The water is doing its moving/not moving thing 

of being here and on its way elsewhere.

Everything but the river and the dock begins to fade away:
first the things behind us become like smoke
because we are not holding them in place with our gaze,
then the trees on the far bank become hazy,
and even as they drift downriver like vapor
we look skyward and see that the blue has dissolved
leaving a starry blackness.

We are now flowing through the universe,
powered by the river's gentle current.

You lay back, feeling the wood through your t-shirt
against your shoulder blades,
and you begin to count the stars.

I look down river to where we have been -
it seems impossible to look up river
as that would be to know something before it happened,
which of course
is not possible.


see in Young Ravens

30/30: remnants

You have to write down your poems,
or ideas for poems,
or fragments of poems,

or the muse takes them back

and mixes them into the pot
of star stuff
for someone else to drink.

29/30: cold haiku

The cold settles like
a blanket, dark white and hard.
Snow squeaks under foot.