PENMANSHIP

To say it is a lost art is not
exactly news. It was on it way
out sixty years ago when our
teacher had us do the loops
and curls within triple track
lines. The days of fountain
pen were long past, though
our desks had inkwell
holes that now gaped to no
purpose. "It's all in the wrist,"
she told and retold us. My
scribble scrabbles proved her
wrong. I had a wrist and used it.
Didn't matter. I was never
going to be a penman. I aspired
to use a typewriter.
Years later I did. Sixty-five
words a minute.
   

VOLUNTEER DAY AT GREENCASTLE ELEMENTARY

They file into the room
where two of us have come
to tell them about plants.

I had forgotten how fresh
as roses third graders are,
their faces bright with

eagerness for anything different,
their hands ready to shoot up
to the simplest of questions:

"How many of you like ice cream?"
"What do plants need to grow?"
except one who slouches

in the back row, gaze turned
window ward, brow troubled.
We pass around ferns, pine cones,

lichen-covered limbs, to grasping
hands till they reach him.
He shakes his head, refuses

to take or touch.
The session ends. He shuffles out.
I catch the only thing

he's said, making sure we hear:
"This was boring."
O child, how your heart must hurt.

MYRA AND DAVE

They would have been in her late forties
then or early fifties the summers
I worked on their farm.
It wasn't my idea;
Dad made the arrangements.
You start on Monday
he said and that was that.
Then he said:
they had a son who fell
off the tractor his dad was driving.
Killed. I think
you ought to know that.

They were sitting on the porch
when I got there.
He rose and shook my hand.
Good morning he said
this is my wife.
Her smile was warm.
We're glad you're here
she said. I believed her.

Once when he and I were hoeing corn
he said: my wife
can outwork any man I've ever
known. I saw that he was
proud of her for that.
The two of us worked side by side,
fixing fence, topping tobacco stalks.
We talked some, mostly sports.
He followed the Phillies.

Sometimes I worked just with her,
in her garden mostly --
beans, sweet corn, strawberries.
She told me about their daughters
and the grandchildren.
A time or two she said the name
of their boy . . . Let's see, yes,
we bought the car
two years before Sammy died . . .
I wanted to ask how it happened,
what field, and where in the field,
if he died right away or lingered,
where his grave was,
how old he was,
if he was fun-loving or serious,
if he liked baseball,
what kind of books he read.
She would have told me, gladly,
if I had asked,
all that and more, I'm sure.

I did not ask.
I did not know enough about grief
and therefore feared it.
But I knew she carried their loss
more easily than he did,
that she never blamed him,
and he loved her for that.
I knew it was what saved him.

ANNUNCIATION

Up north here April
is swell time when the bergenia
begins to burgeon, the redbud
blossoms into pink.

This is seed time season.
No fool my father whose
deadline for peas in his garden
was the month's first day.

Spring is sing time.
To true and would-be believers,
the Virgin breaks into Magnificat,
precursor to an angel chorus.

Come and walk a time with me
in the woods where bloodroot
flowers announce that earth

is still a quickened womb.