Our house at 2128 Marlindale Road, Cleveland OH 44118 - Mother's Day Poem - A Stroll Around the House

$140,000

3 BR, 2.5 baths

My Uncle Donny slept in the top most dormer, where it was freezing in the winter and hot in the summer. 

He was just a kid who wound up going to college at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio.

Great sense of humor. His widow, Mary, never remarried. They fought over whether she should have her own career. 

Women were home-makers back then. 

Don had some sort of paddle which read Zeta Beta Tau. 

These objects disappear with time.

I just finished watching and sleeping to an excellent film called SAPPHIRE on YouTube. Who killed her? 

She found she could pass as white.

It was just a question, said the cop, of putting the pieces together.

I was drinking Taster's Choice, which I found in my cupboard.

Five yrs old, but quite tasty.

The sound of buzzing outside as folks mow their lawns.

Out back, tho, I watched wasps and bumble bees pollinate a huge azalea bush.

Today, a real spring day. 

FINALLY 

It seemed to rain for thirty days and thirty nights

Glumsville, I'd call it

Tromping around in my shoes

squooshy from the rain

Now I celebrate

my pink bleeding hearts

have arisen, like He did,

tiny sparrows twitter from

the painted pink birdhouse

The sky covers us with a

great show of elegance

perhaps our sins are forgiven. 

This poem came out differently than I had planned.

*

AFTER THE BIG DINNER

After the big dinner on Mother's Day

I took to the sidewalks to walk off the

charbroiled hamburger with tomatoes and blue cheese dressing

sandwiched between white bread

and long stalks of dainty asparagus

when a tuft of grasses lifted themselves from the sidewalk

to greet me like an old friend.

Every single one of these blocks had its own story.

Big paw prints were laid deep like one of those

Saint Bernards carrying Jack Daniels home for the family

to sit by the fire and imbibe slowly, some reading short stories

or turning the pages of magazines.

Holes in every single sidewalk, coming up like little maple trees,

or oaks with leaves that look like big hands, the hands of

the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. More trees, weeds - but what is

a weed anyway, but something you don't want - and parts of those

infernal plastic bags that fly like kites and land smooth like

geese on the water.

*
A STROLL AROUND THE HOUSE

Elinor's hurricane lamp is a stunning
chinaberry blue, though Elinor is no more

And feathers in all the sacred spaces

The dining room window sill
The living room sill

What is it with feathers?
The urge to escape?
To fly like Icarus, poor soul,
soaring beyond the ken of humankind

And that silly clock for working at the Intell
for five great years - impossible to read the time.


A new lamp I bought at a rummage sale
Pull the red drawstring for a feeling
finer than petting the silky ears of a


baby pig, Wilbur?