A Sunday Sketch

My success lies in Sundays,
when the sun lays its rays
warmly on me reclined,

while my body hums a
eucharistic hymn and my soul
remembers how to sing.

Bread and wine linger in
my flesh and memory and
I wonder if what could be
did in fact happen to me.

I take stock of myself and
all there is while the breeze
breathes and my collars lap
like waves upon the shore.

Blessings are measured in
grateful sips—a mug lifted to lips.
I spill ink and I will think
of how richly he arrays my days

and when the sun's light dyes
the buildings rose and gold
I know the eve is not far

with which he dazzles the eyes
today as in those times of old
with many a precious star.

When A Tree Falls in the Woods

I am a once-great tree
that has fallen relieved
in your welcome woods.

I held within myself many
homes and hidings for others
while I leaned upon empty air.

I stood for many years
tall and mighty, and alone
until your love felled me.

The answer, by the way, is

no, I never made a sound;

that is, until you where here.

I am poor today, but break my bark
and tap the sap that surges sweetly
from rarely open and broken me.

My branches bounty, my rent roots,
have held for far too long what I have
never tasted, though it's mine to share.

I don't care what becomes of me—
if I sink and rot or am cut and burned:
to house and to sweeten was enough.

For, as I fell before your eyes
with my trunk cracked, exposed,
you can see my fragile matter.

All my rings sing as though
they were pages of countless letters
tightly bound around my core,

all addressed to you,
your woods, and

even your axe.

Grammar and the Beasts

English teachers must not understand that
grammar is what separates us from the dogs,
who are oblivious to the fact that subjects
verb adjectival objects in, out, and through
prepositional phrases, occasionally adverbally.

Most of their students tune in and out unless tone,
like the promise of a bone, rouses them with a
buzzword or phrase to which they have something
to say, though what came before remains unheard.

When philology is forgotten we no longer gnaw
our words in euphony, working etymologically
to the marrow of their meaning.  We simply lie
lazily until it is our chance to respond or to bark.

But somedays we fall below the hounds bellow,
are shamed by the bird's delightful and aimless tune,
and cannot keep still with the lap-cat's silent and
content life of silent observation and satisfied purrs.

When we forget that words were also wrought to woo,
our courtship will recall the obnoxious quaking of ducks,
whose copulation involves more coercion than consent—
though, there are really very few troubadours among beasts.

When has the pursuant squirrel ceased tree trunk chases
long enough to leave a sonnet in the cache, so that Spring
might yield romance along with acorns?  For that matter,
has the lonesome owl ever recited Neruda under the still
stars of a given evening?  For that matter, when have we?

Perhaps, someday soon, poetry and grammar will give
us the courage to speak ourselves and each other
above the cacophony of the crow's complaints, over
the lion's angry roars, and sad lonely songs of whales.