Images From Home

7th grade, walking home, and I
called to sullen looking Kay,
"Smile, its a beautiful day!"
Got home.  Mom said,
"Kay's dad died today.  Did you hear?"
Seems I've heard it almost
every day since.  Sorry, Kay.

The fresh spring torrents
plowed down the untilled frozen hills
pushing Fall's debris ahead
and onto the rigid deck of the Pecatonica.
The weight of tons of dirty runoff
broke the aching cover of the silent river,
and busted up pieces of water
slammed down the channel
snapping off fence poles,
jamming together at the big iron trestle,
and damming up water so it bled off into
the hungry cornfields.
It laid down a cover of fresh loamy silt,
fertilizing the world like it probably had done
for thousands of years
before that one stormy day I first saw it.

Diane was poor.  She didn't look at anyone.
I can't hardly remember her shadowy face.
I knew something about her,
but in second grade you don't have words
to name shame or emptiness or even suffering.
I wish I had given her something...anything.

The newpaper editor with wiry eyebrows
that grew way too wild and long,
published my poetry in the county paper.
He told me how it was different when he
was a paper boy, and somehow let me
know I could be as great as him someday.
Its funny, when you look back
across 50 some years, what stays with you.

Barb wasn't pregnant after all.
We would have been the second ones
in my high school class.
I thought nothing could be more frightening
than thoughts of her father attacking me.
Then I found her little brother
drunk in a puddle beside the house.
His dad took him out of my arms
and loved him so clearly I was
never afraid of him again.

The old Hungarian lady next door
fed her goats everyday,
always before I arrived.
They got oats.  I got her heart.
I don't know if she knew she
was loving me.  Probably not.
I didn't know it then either.
I wish she could see how
happy she's made my kids.

One day God bit me on the ass.
The next day I was hitchhiking
away from college,
heading out to find Him.
That was 1966.
God wasn't easy to find then.
Now She's everywhere.
Probably in this poem somewhere.
Probably in your heart somewhere.
Probably in this hope that has me write to you.

January 2006