Finding Skill
Parking lot pennies and shells on the beach,
Gaining the image and where you should seek.
Whales in the ocean and planes in the skies,
Wanting to find it and moving the eyes.
Deer in the forest and shelves full of shoes,
A lifetime of practice with no mouse to use.
Follow-Up
Quite early in that first grade year
a teacher said about one boy
that you could write his name in ink
above a city jail cell door.
Now we all hoped it wasn’t true,
and tried each day to give to him,
and all the other kids, the kinds of skills
they’d need to keep them from that fate.
This happened forty years ago.
And still each week I read the list
the paper prints of people booked
into that city jail, and when
I see my students there, I find
I’m not surprised by who they are,
and tell myself that those not named
are living lives of great success.
Fishing In Confusion
She reels me in and casts me back.
Her hook is snelled and quells my speech.
The thought of slough stays on my tongue.
Upon her voice I’m pierced and dazed.
I taste her tone. It
floods my eyes.
She takes me down beside the tide.
She angles with a velvet lure.
A lurid idea comes with her hook.
An ouzel bobs approval.
It
may change my mind. She
casts a stone
upon the flow. Ironwood
it is,
but on the surface it does skip.
Hers is a heart-shaped stone of love.
My heart does skips. I
walk on water.
Precious she is. She deeply
sinks
in reflection, to rise allured
by weighty promise: a promise that’s
a barbed hook for castaways
joined on an ever winding reel.
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