PINK AND RED

She rests her nose on the windowpane
And fogs the glass. She is three or four.

The snow falls all around like sheets of linen
On the line in spring. The buckeye’s branches

And the walk to the house next door are white.
The neighbor’s cat is nowhere to be seen,

The baby-sitter sits in the worn brown chair
To watch The Days of our Lives and softly cries.

Her mother works all day. Her father,
All night. Her hours pass in black and white.

Who will come for her today? Aunt Betty,
Mrs. Shaffer, Aunt Jenny? She never knows.

On the radiator in the kitchen,
A covered bowl of bread dough breathes and rises,

Spilling the workday scent of heat and yeast.
Moving through the blizzard’s milky light,

The grand sum of all the lonesome colors.
What’s that splash of red?

The doorbell rings. Her Daddy’s voice:
“Does my Kitten need a ride back home?”

Daddy, pulling a brand-new PF Flyer!
The sitter stuffs her in a stiff, pink snowsuit.

They make tracks inside this globe of snow.
Through the whirl, he pulls her, pink and red, back home.

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IMPASTO: 
    READING VAN GOGH'S LETTERS AT SEA

Compared to this resplendent crash of color,
the sky is dusty ash. Who knows how many
hues God used to wash sea water blue?
I watch waves surge and shrink and catch the sun
as our ship cuts through the Caribbean.
Van Gogh devoted hours, days, his life,
to study color so that he could paint
the picture that was always on his mind,
the starry night, richer, he believed,
than day’s sunlight. With diverse tints, he shaped
a shade of hope around the moon and stars.
If he were here, which brushstrokes and which hues
would Van Gogh choose to paint these thronging
waves, the color of my deepest longing?

LOT'S WIFE

An angel drags her by the hand and warns:
         Don’t look back.
But she, a woman with no voice or name,
Stops mid-flight and tilts her chin.
        Just one glance
She tells herself as her tears run and sting,
Evaporating.
                      She staggers at the sight.
A fire-storm rains on fields and flocks,
Neighbors and progeny.
Her blood and bones, her skirt,
Her heart, right there, right then,
Turn to salt-encrusted stone.

Now a pillar stands, south of the Dead Sea,
A mineral reminder of a woman
Looking back to see
The life she wrongly loved
And couldn’t rightly let go of.

FOR HENRY, WHO DISLIKES THE MOON

When Papa and Dada say, “Henry, it’s time,”
When the afternoon sun has run out of its shine,

When the trucks are so tired they’ve fallen sleep,
When you have been tucked beneath blanket and sheet,

You’re never alone, though day’s at an end,
Take heart, Little Man, the Moon is your friend.

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