Rain Delay 1:39

an hour and thirty minute
rain delay
rain liberation to the garden to the
gardener who simply pops up from his
private napping bed
little finger flicks across the shorts drawer
as if heads he's nude, tails he's half
clad in sheets of mylar rain

trachea braces for the heatblast
but the opening door serves fresh air on the rocks.
cold water, forced under the threshhold,
greets toes used to baking,

I let the sheets of mylar form
Enfolding my hips while I play triage nurse
It is a good 45 minutes of trying on my mylar water wardrobes
While the opportunistic infectives, kudzu and friends, prepare to return to dust.

An hour into the rain delay,
I find that the entire garden glistens anew.
So does the naked body of the gardener,
Changed, too, is the flex of the falling mylar -
That it may be called mylar not rain
And I can be called gardening, not skinny-dipping
Can be left for the language police
The others catch me not
As I dry off - the tarp is being removed
And the seventh inning will soon begin!

echoes from pushcarts scraping

at the turn of the century
that was not a turn of the millenium
an agency formed
with nickels and dimes
and from the machers a dollar
that helped a man be a man
arming a pushcart for war in the streets
while his wife did piecework
and hoped the factory wouldn't burn

the bigger the pushcart
the better the goods
the more the profits
the greater the need
the more the loan
the more numerous the cosigners
one man per hundred bucks

in the modern room
sat the ninety year old officer
and her eighty-five year old husband
completing the sentences
completing the forms
unchanged for a century
the supplicant and his cosigners
one cosigner per thousand bucks
a cosigner asks when the agency was founded
like the scraping of the wooden wheels
of pushcarts on trolley rails and cobblestone
the old couple smiles and answers
nineteen eighty four

sprite/spirit

wood sprite clad in leaves
airborne toes claim loam, moss, bark
from your bough find me

black cloud swirling

(This poem, a shape poem, loses about 90% of its meaning without formatting. Try commenting and I'll e-mail you the proper version.)

metaphors

dark, trembling

mislead in the creek.

black cloud lives

in swell swirl pool schist sandstone rubble

a still liminal in rain and runoff street and forest fouled by teens between

wonder and restlessness solitude comity, the cloud whirls like storms flirting with glass ground edgeless

observed by barefoot doe-brown eyes which, gleefully, take cover from the heat of the car that threatens further travails

eyes which bear the gift of naming these swirling nimbus shadows river-hoppers even though this place of twisted material

fails to bear the gift of Nature but for bearing microscopic bubbles linked for a few weeks to schistsoapstonemarblesteelrod

Here in this ichtyological-amphibian womb fashioned by man, planning, careless, sixty toes rest silent in fine-milled rock glass

watched by five hundred parabolic eyes, sensed by millions of fishy synapses, for if only one toe shifts it kicks up the silt

we watch them back as their indecision causes a random walk in the Wissahickom if foe thought neutral, must go

reactions are linked as the water droplets in a rain cloud act as one

witness how these noiseless nimbus

minnuws hop into young

imagination

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