Rescue

You leaned against the wall, feet
off the ground, propped on chairs
pushed up to the table, giggling,
chattering, continuing the giddiness
that had blessed today's breakfast, while
I buttered my toast across the kitchen,
attempting to keep up conversation, to keep up
with your good cheer. Then, 
somewhere between "Hey Google" 
and the reliable response, the switch flipped. 
A breathless, playful call for help, transformed
into a panicked, full-throated cry. 
Your balance had shifted. Everything became
precarious, unpredictable, threatening.
Google blithely rattled off the answer

to my now utterly irrelevant question, 
and I could only stand staring like a sailor
watching a sudden summer squall swamping the decks.
Those waves swept us both, powerless, overboard.
Feet safely back on the floor, you glared,
tearfully condemning me for  my betrayal:
How could I just stand there and watch,
consign you to the sea, to the depths,
and not save you? 
Survival was small consolation. 
Mutely accepting your wordless accusation,
I hoped only that I would be given another chance
the next time you need a rescue.

shut the door

I can shut the door.
Outside of that,
there's little I control,
but I can shut the door.

I can close this space
and trap myself inside.
A gentle push is all it takes.
I can shut the door.

Empty cubicles,
oppressive, bleak, and still
feel less ominous when
I can shut the door.

Feel like giving up.
Quitting. Had enough.
Closing up brings calm.
I can shut the door.

snow on the tulips

It always snows at least once on the tulips
my aunt used to say...

... at least I am told she used to say that.
I'm not sure it was something she said
more than once, and that once was to my mother,
a kind of  "welcome to Utah" moment to help mom
deal with the realities of making a home in a new,
unfamiliar state and climate. The way she remembers
that maxim year to year shows just how much
she must have appreciated having family around
to help her adjust.

What I remember Aunt Denise saying was
"Seeds! Bring me back some seeds!" her eyes
alight in the dim kitchen of her Sandy home,
just weeks before I left for Italy. She wanted
real Italian tomatoes and herbs growing
in her own windowsills, an authentic Mediterranean
garden in the middle of Utah.

It sounds like a simple request, but one
I was wholly unprepared to help with
as a clueless 19-year-old, who probably couldn't
have found out how to get seeds in my hometown,
let alone a foreign country. Her quest weighed on me,
worried me for almost two years; what would she say
when I came home empty-handed?

In the final month of my mission, on a rainy,
quiet day in Livorno, in a dark library near
the cathedral, where I checked my email each week,
I learned she was no longer waiting for them,
no longer waiting for anything, and that she would
never speak to me about the seeds—about tomatoes,
basil, oregano, or even tulips—again.

Kindergarten kisses

We could see her classmates already lined up when we arrived.
"You're not late" I exclaimed, pulling up to the curb
at the same moment her teacher opened the classroom door.
"Hurry, hurry, you can make it!" I encourage, hearing her rustle
into her backpack, half as big as she is, scooting across the seat,
hopping out, closing the door not hard enough, starting away,
stopping again, pausing just long enough to blow me a kiss, then turning
and running at full five-year-old speed down the sidewalk.

I idle by the curb and watch her slow progress, the backpack
bouncing against legs, puffy coat sleeves flailing, wisps of hair lifting
as she charges past post drop-off parents and playground aides.
She turns just once more for a glimpse of me still waiting
for her to arrive at the door, now closed, but which, we hope,
her teacher will open when she gets there.

The doors get farther away as legs lengthen.
Punctuality grows more important and teachers
less forgiving. As she faces each new challenge
my only hope is to be suffered to continue
idling by the curb, catching airborne kisses.

haunted

a steel and concrete skeleton
rises in the nearby field
wearing a partial shroud
of weathered plastic sheeting
ripped and torn but shielding still
the men whose silhouettes
I see pacing the hollow spaces
where one day desks, chairs,
cubicles, water coolers, bathrooms,
and coffee makers, will reside,
haunted by dead-eyed office workers
eking out a living in eight hour
increments, tapping out emails,
answering phone calls, marking up
copy and products, turning bricks
to gold, while today's dark figures
turn another weed-filled empty lot
that once grew grain or housed cattle,
into another steel-boned skeleton

30 days 30 poems day 16: tumbleweeds

tumbleweeds barrelling over the lawn.
heading wherever, the wind blows them on
catching on tree branches, sinking in ponds—
tumbleweeds just don't know where they belong.

tumbleweeds tumbling without any sense.
look at them pile up along every fence
soldiers, invaders killed on the offense—
tumbleweeds, some obstacles won't relent.

30 days 30 poems day 7: hair clippers

the 7-, 8-, 9-year-old who cringed from clippers
now inflicts them upon himself, upon his face,
staring himself down with steely eye to trim
beard, neck, mustache without a trace
of the dread that once caused him to shrink,
to shriek, and make a scene each time
his mother applied the machine.

Another childhood fear forsaken
as more grown-up fears awaken