MISSING

Yesterday our next-door neighbor
called and asked
if we had seen their cats,
two orange tabbies
missing since Sunday.
Funny thing is
she said
they don’t like each other
so they always go
their separate ways
and now they’ve both gone
missing.

They would take turns
camped beneath our bird feeder
patiently waiting
for a feathered feast
to drop to the ground.

I hope they turn up soon.
I -- but probably not the birds --
miss them.

ROLE MODEL

Mid morning is when
the artful thieves appear
at the bird feeder,
their surreptitious arrival
by way of the big oak,
gray radar tails aloft,
eyes always on the prize
that dangles from the lowest branch.

Meanwhile inside the house
where I stand watching,
our yellow mostly Lab
stands watching me.
She knows what I will do
and quivers, trembles, whimpers:
"Oh, I'm ready.
No dog has ever been readier.
Open that door, please, please.
I'll catch ‘em, chomp ‘em, crunch ‘em.
I will, I will."

I obey
and watch her fly out
to another failure.
She returns
astounded but unfazed,
"Next time for sure."

She is my daily inspiration.

IF MEMORY SERVES

If memory serves
they used to publish
an almanac called
Information Please
or was that a radio show
or maybe both.

See, that's the kind
of information you could get
from the book
or the radio show
if indeed either one
or both
existed.

The problem with memory
is that
sometimes
it doesn't
serve.

P.S. Thank God for Google.

ASH WEDNESDAY

It's called that, my mother said,
because whoever gets out of bed
last has to take them out.

Our stove presided over the kitchen
like Old King Cole, feeding on huge
helpings of wood and anthracite.

In winter we took turns standing
behind it to get dressed for school.
For half a year every year we huddled

around it. When we moved away
to a house with an oil furnace, emptying
ashes ended. Our town had no Catholic

church. It wasn't till I got to college
and saw smudged foreheads that
I knew my mother was wrong about it.

I learned to remember that I was dust.

SYMMETRY

"He has written more than sixty books"
it says in the bio section of the anthology
it says he's about my age
that comes to more than a book a year
if you count the years he was old enough to write
and yet I'd never heard of him
which is a symmetry of sorts

he's doubtless never heard of me

POETIC LICENSE

I'll tell you a story, a true story.
But don't take it too seriously
or at least not literally.
The same goes for the characters
-- their actions, motives, names.
Memory is at best a bumbling clown,
at worst, an assassin.
That's why storytellers
must carry a license.
Mine is W1H2A3T4I5F.

PEACE CIRCLE

PEACE CIRCLE

"Enlarging the circle of peace . . .
here is a vision . . . to pursue . . ."
(Donald F. Durnbaugh, Fruit of the Vine)


How do you make a circle bigger
any circle
but especially this one?

You can't do it selectively.

To keep a circle a circle
you must expand the arc
equally at all points
which means you've got to bring inside
ideas
and doctrines
and (especially) people
you'd very much like to exclude.

But hey
nobody
– not even Jesus --
-- especially not Jesus --
said it would be easy.