April Flowers

There’s such an abundance
of leaves now!
So many directions
a white butterfly
flits at the same time!
It’s no wonder the cat
gives it up and
curls on a chair,
half asleep, half pretending
to sleep,
like old age in his
chaise longue, ruminating
while anticipating
lunch.
Where should we go
for adventure?
Is our everyday life
adventureable?
Must we travel far to get
somewhere?
What were the modes of
transportation we learned
in third grade between
reading comic books and repeating
a girl’s name in our heads
walking home?
Home was
up the stairs, a small key
for the mailbox stuffed
with surprises.
Are there surprises left?
That tan-, rather than red-
breasted robin in the tree
seems so at ease
with all these
explosions!

Yearning

The sand between tufts of grass
could be a beach
if not for the cinderblock walls and
houses,
and streets that cross and
continue downtown
noisy with cars taking people
to offices
without windows overlooking
the ocean,
that is a long day’s drive away.

The locust tree with boughs drooping
to the ground could be a bower
with trellised gazebo to
read in
while sipping iced tea and listening
to the rain
that hardly ever
falls here
in the desert.

The wind chimes tinkle
oriental melodies
faintly
whenever disturbances in the air
sail into the back yard
and through it
on their endless
circumnavigation.

Dream

At 1725 Hamiel Drive
in Las Cruces, there’s a door
with my name on it.
I turn the key in the dark, and,
when my eyes have adjusted,
see the spines of
paperbacks in a bookcase.
I walk up to
Esther Waters and fondle
her leaves smelling of mold
and old age, pass by
the couch and around the partition
to where the refrigerator
is humming. It lights up
when I open its door.
Hulking boughs quivering slightly
gleam through the glass panels
of the back door.
Whether any cats, or which
generation of them, will appear if I
unbolt the door to the yard,
I can’t surmise,
any more than I know
how I got here,
from where,
why Jill isn’t with me,
and who this person is that
still goes by my name.

Birds

A powerful, yellow bird of
medium size I’ve never
seen
disappears
into the locust boughs,
the morning breezes animating
leaves and leaf shadows
speckling the back yard.
There’s quiet kids’
summer talk
behind the picket fence
that conceals them, as a single-engine
drones by.
Because he, or they, couldn’t afford twin
engines, maybe, and thus
the debacle—a projection
in a mind dwelling too easily
on gloom, although the sky
couldn’t be clearer,
the day more perfectly
serene—a freight train’s
howl, the whistling
of a dove, or a grackle, and the
more common
coo-coo.
And now a red-faced, red-throat,
red-breast finch
flies in the last standing yucca where
sparrows and thrashers
also nest,
the top-heavy, tree-tall
yucca
already tilting left, soon also
to topple, to be hacked with
ax and saw and left at curbside
for the grappler.
But where’s
the social side, one asks, the human
interest?
Ah, here comes that
yellow & black striped bird,
Jill,
in a long-sleeved t-shirt,
with laundry in a basket
for the laundry line.

--Joe Somoza