Bull Dozed

Tear Down

Look for signs

At your own risk if you ask me

Disappointment at the very least

You could be courting

Eyes to the sky

Ear to the ground or cupped

Listening for the sound of trumpets

Played with Divine embouchure

Will leave you open to the tart

Tongues of neighborhood wags

Dogs being the safer bet

Three turns before bedding down

On the braided rug but a quaint vestige

Robins better still

Glowing embers torching lawns

Burning the filthy hem of winter in flight

Take the tear down on Altadena 

Yard and driveway  

Tagged blue and yellow  

Trees amputated at the ankle

Stumps worn down with market logic

Curbside breadline of black plastic bags

Three legged chair with a stiff upper lip

A one eyed teddy bear

Pink as sin

Among bus stop rabble

Waiting for a lift to the landfill

A keen eyed observer

He saw this coming long ago

While you were busy

Knee to knee with gypsies

Divining delicate bones of flightless birds.

The poem "Cemetery Beautiful, Avenue Love, Row Paradise" appears in the Fall 2014 issue of the Madison Review.  

http://english.wisc.edu/madisonreview/ 

sitting around the kitchen table

Still Life With Apples

Cezanne would ignore the grain

Omit the quarter moon

Flute burned quarter inch deep

Would pay only scant

Attention to your recollection  

Of the barn in Armada

Rinsed to a rumor of red

Listen politely

As you paint for him

A picture of the man who ran

The orphanage

Bedsteads and wardrobes and sideboards

Roll top desks

Stirring at the groan of the hasp

The report of the bolt

Blinking awake in morning light

Steal glances

At his watch while you play both parts

In a retelling of epic horse trading

His eyebrows frantic to escape gravity

Your own straining

To lift off and boomerang around

The circumference of the table

Lighting on the ordinal points of countless dinners

Apples

In the mind’s eye of the artist already

Flocking like birds

To defy gravity

On the dizzy oval of oak.   

Seen this play before

Edgewood Elementary Spring Review

Richard Bryant played The Boy

With me in the role of The Father

Inspired casting in the months following

The March On Washington

For Jobs And Freedom

and

The 16^th Street Baptist Church

bombing in Birmingham

I remember Mr. Conti

Or was it Mrs. McKinney?

Directing us to remain silent for one full minute

Before speaking

Richard who lived

North of the plastics factory

In the colored section

Near Collis Harris and Richard Jenkins

Lacy Webb and Dennis Ross

Played the inquisitive child

To my detached adult

Asking questions like

“Why is the sky blue?” and “Which came first the chicken

Or the egg?”

My character

Puffing on a prop pipe

Hiding behind The Detroit Free Press

Had only to repeat the line

“I don’t know, son.”

I remember the audience laughing

When we delivered

The set up and the punch line

Perhaps the playwright either

Mrs. McKinney or Mr. Conti

Would have revised their script

Had they any inkling of the uprising

That would burn the city in three years or

Written new dialogue fifty years later

The grave father

Telling the wide eyed son

About survival in an age of enlightenment.