USA

bcrooker@ix.netcom.com

PROMISE
This day is an open road
stretching out before you.
Roll down the windows.
Step into your life, as if it were a fast car.
Even in industrial parks,
trees are covered with white blossoms,
festive as brides, and the air is soft
as a well-washed shirt on your arms. 
The grass has turned implausibly green.
Tomorrow, the world will begin again,
another fresh start.  The blue sky stretches,
shakes out its tent of light.  Even dandelions glitter
in the lawn, a handful of golden change.
   
--The Christian Science Monitor

THE HOUR OF PEONIES
The Buddha says, "Breathing in, I know I am here in my body.
Breathing out, I smile to my body," and here I am, mid-span,
a full-figured woman who could have posed for Renoir. 
When I die, I want you to plant peonies for me, so each May,
my body will resurrect itself in these opulent blooms, one of les 
Baigneuses,
sunlight stippling their luminous breasts, rosy nipples, full bellies,
an amplitude of flesh, luxe, calme et volupté.  And so are these 
flowers,
an exuberance of cream, pink, raspberry, not a shrinking violet among 
them.
They splurge, they don't hold back, they spend it all.
When Renoir was painting at the end, he was confined to a wheelchair
with paintbrushes strapped to his arthritic hands.  Still he said,
"the limpidity of the flesh, one wants to caress it."  Even after the 
petals
have fallen, the lawn is full of snow, the last act in Swan Lake
where the corps de ballet, in their feathered tutus, kneel and kiss 
the ground, cover it in light.
   
--Poetry International

SOMETIMES, I AM STARTLED OUT OF MYSELF,
like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings.  Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer.  And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise.  Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks. 
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can. 
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.
   
--The Christian Century

GRAMMAR LESSON
The italicized line is from Jewel, by Brett Lott

I come downstairs, late, an ordinary Saturday morning,
smell coffee and bagels, step over the old dog
dozing in the middle of the floor
in a wide rectangle of sun,
and maybe my hair is freshly washed,
and catches the light like a glossy wing,
or maybe you smell the vanilla
I've rubbed here and there,
but that old language of our bodies is resurrected,
and we move our fingers over familiar hills and valleys.
I breathe in your skin, the hair on the back of your neck,
you pull me down on your lap,
and leave the pile of bills
you were working on.
Yes, the television hums
its little babble, and our son
chatters and fiddles with legos,
and yes, there's a long list
of errands to be run.
But we are conjugating familiar verbs,
decorating with adjectives,
building new sentences noun by noun.
We are remembering syntax, etymology,
why love began, the original sin.
   
--The Drunken Boat

FINCHES, LITTLE PATS OF BUTTER ON THE WING,
hang upside down at the thistle feeder
full of shiny black seeds, not from those spiny-
thorned purple tufts we see in fields, but from nyger
plants, recently respelled to avoid racial slurs.
O praise political correctness!  Once in a while,
they get it right.
 
And now, everything bursts into bloom,
the great bouquets of trees, our largest
perennials:  double ruffled cherries, purple-
leafed plum, flowering pear.  It's May, when
everything you planted flourishes, nothing leggy,
overgrown, or gone to seed.  Once in a while,
you get it right.  The lawn flows, a river
of green silk.  How did all this loveliness
spring from the dark?
   
--The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

© All Copyright, Barbara Crooker.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.