ABUNDANT LIFE

Children huddled over fresh linoleum motionless as miniatures

on the corner shelf faculty staff freaked

outside the classroom running shouting

 ‘active shooter’.  The third-grade teacher grips

scissors pressed to her chest behind the battle door of

innocence against the world coming to call.

Such dark distributed learning police

medics, Alcohol, Tobacco, and

Firearms in sight of the Office of Abundant Life.

Mimed weekly in classroom simulations

school leaders would forearm learners

against insensible reality not

invisible root wounds of the soul

that never can

stop

bleeding out.

CHINA STORY

He recalls the midsummer night’s lush thunderlight

Anhui Province soldier and pals patrolling

a fire tower an earthquake

pitching the old brick station trapped

in the dread rubble dark friends

consorting with death before he broke

free. Years later

he lives blood quickened by revenants’

hushed lament in twilight’s red dust settling

longs to leave for Kansas because he must

live free from airless brick-laid spaces

stubbled fields of grass he needs

broad enough for ghosts to breathe.

NAMESAKE

My grandfather whose cognomen I wear

through the world I am told percolated coffee

for all of a week. He felt each grain

part of ancestral Cracow

soil to hold dearly and so he did.

We called him dziadzi, silent

figure in a stone white bed smelling of

camphor, a piece of dried bread

between the sheets. Where coffee brews now

across the years from newer grounds I sip

muddied flavor of a Polish town.

DREAM’S BODY SPEAKS

I stumble under June moonshine over

salal shrubs rabbit brush clustered racemes

catch a verdant hand of forest moss padding

the damp branch of a hemlock peel

strips of bark for a small fire  

liquorish fern feint breath of blackberry afloat

on the smoke. I drift inside

dream’s body bereft of daylight

wisdom of nothing less than everything –

specters of high strangeness deep obfuscation

argot of the soul. Try to understand

I’m showing you

something

of my life.