32 Views from the Hammock
- Solstice, and still the maples are flaunting their green tresses.
- The smoky gossip of burning trash.
- A mug of yesterday’s tepid jasmine tea.
- What passes as shade: the drifting jibber-jabber of clouds.
- A hammock and a man are one.
- A hammock and a man and his wife’s shoulders are one.
- Not her actual shoulders, which are in Cincinnati this week.
- But his freckled memory of them.
- Next door, a trampoline launches a boy into the blue.
- Not on my watch, says gravity.
- Visit again real soon, says the air.
- Closer to earth, a fountain pleasures itself and gathers bees.
- A mantis interviews a cricket, one bite at a time.
- Sheets snapping in lavender praise.
- The crime is not Bartok or the piano or little girl hands.
- Blame the window, that busybody open window.
- Poor ant: trundling home a moth as big as a sail boat.
- Like much in life, wings are metaphor.
- So many leaves, so many shivery prayers.
- Free sky miles, says the sky—use them.
- Distant thunder, like God re-shelving books.
- Will this pile of gravel ever become a path?
- Do some angles of repose double as tipping points?
- Whose tragedy does that dying siren usher in?
- You call this a nap?
- Questions like these—they wear me out.
- Fit man, hammock, and longing into one sentence—never.
- Why not? His beloved’s shoulders won’t hold still.
- Do guardian angels choose whom they haunt?
- Rain, some say, is an aphrodisiac.
- Teach me, teach me tonight.
- Inside, the tea pot whistles, as if gathering our lost ones home.