Airport run

Meeting Your Plane

The night nurse plane that ferried you home

Pulled covers of high desert blue over 

The unmade bed of the day, careless meringue

In the rearview mirror, sanctification ahead

Drifting in the back pew of the cellphone lot

Dancing embers of arrivals and departures

From some distant bonfire where we'll huddle

Beneath a harvest moon, stars and planets

Skating holding patterns on a black ice pond.   

God save us

A White Man’s Prayer

Lord send me a champion

inarticulate as a mouthful

of hot filé gumbo, smart

as two left shoes, windier

than a kettle of Uncle

Larry’s chili, who talks

tough around the silver

spoon in his mouth

someone sane

as an organ grinders monkey 

a Yankee Doodle Dandy

plenty handy with the girls

honest as the day is long

in Lapland in December

an hombre who knows

how it feels to be top rail

at breakfast, bottom rail

by bedtime, big hearted

to his legions of lessors

his betters nothing more

than ugly rumor, Lord

knows my first choice

Foghorn Leghorn

is only a cartoon.     

East of West Branch

Free Range

Insurrection or some dereliction

a latch left dangling or machinations

long in the works, The Salt Lick Plot

perhaps, freed you from bondage

tyranny of the teat cup, cold

hand of Big Ag, you were left

ambling wild eyed and stricken

by the world’s delights and horrors

delivered wholesale at a stroke. 

Watching you in the rearview

engulfed in my dust, enameled eyes

white as roadside diner crockery

I had a moment of envy green

as new mown hay that evaporated 

with the mighty pull of the barn

headlong return to your contented

ways, well-worn confines for me

the path back a song I know by heart.