Spiders

Watched him and his children play
on bikes in wet streets--
a father in his twenties,
everything new and achievable.
A wide world and invulnerable.
That's me,
years past and ahead.
Trying to steady every memory
balanced like a baby in my hand
just so I don't forget.

Moments flow past
like rain slicked across oil on those rainy streets,
those hills by the park where I played baseball each year,
where snow hardly fell but when it did we
stood by the woodstove later with soaked jeans
and makeshift sleds, red fingers and hands.

These thoughts crowd my mind,
rising like an insurgence that must be quelled
and filed orderly into cells,
where generations later they can be
recalled skeletal,
like a young boy's remains
finally found in the desert.

Because they hurt they are so filled with love,
and life is swift and unmediating,
and sometimes we're carried up in the immediacy of
it all, every year, then it's just a blurred stream
and all i want is the swallowing hug of a five-year old girl,
all i want is to tousle sunbleached hair
and explain the curiosities of spiders.

--- ---

These thoughts and more occurred to me early a recent morning. When I get less sleep I'm actually more artistically inspired.

Like a flock of dying birds

The crane obscures the skyline, looming, like
the handle of some blade plunged into the land.
Capital letters blocked out:
C
A
M
C
O
C
O
N
S
T

Its tower rises, beam by straight steel beam, each day
edging out the Wells Fargo and Marriott buildings,
occupying space where oldfashioned street-level stores once stood.

This lattice of rust-colored, slotted metal
coagulates skyward--
a mounting illness, redeemed only
by the wooden walkway bypass below,
draped in ephemeral idealist artwork.

The hook at the crane's end like a
lost shipwreck anchor sways oblivious
in the dead night air,
oblivious to we who walk below, we who'd rather not
look above and stare

except to watch the clouds gathering
over the little city
like a flock of dying birds.

--- ---