Pears and Apples
How noisey water can be.
Falling leaves,
stones, human
debris,
disheveled mismatching colors
as much as greetings,
parking tokens,
the greatest
more
than the least
diss a lambent aura of quietness.
Inveterate objects, queued, deepening,
holding out surplus
of ease,
nor does it matter how brief their time,
nor ours.
Concatenating scapegoats and seraphims night
fades
and still the sky intrudes.
Dandelions revisited
give graphic warrant to our grief
and some nights
there are just the stars,
nothing that could be felt.
Then who will not be taken
transformed by pears and apples
leaving behind all manner of what is best
to their own solicitous task-worn sweet selves?
Condolences in an Earthly Time
Mishmash of clouds, of fancy,
finale of eirie wind,
inconstant rain.
Earth's flat response,
a heavy spiked poignancy
and these shadowless times
and absences abounding
and pilfered sugary thoughts
and branches' dense vastness of ripe and rounded fruit -
green to yellow, brown descending.
Meeting, separating,
interlocking interludes.
Narrative's steadfast togetherness,
exchanged syncopated sub-rosa intervals.
Oh, such a gathering, talking into the evening,
upheaval and, then, laughter;
each,
in minature,
portraying the world,
its
intransigence,
its present walked through weather.
After an Afternoon's
End
The same,
even, the dry heat of sanity,
not a parched throat remains.
What was not to be remembered
was simple fact.
Forgotten coincidences,
fruit
underfoot
or is it just a squishy balance
slithering away.
One daffodil, a blue crocus
swaying in the
breeze.
Why flowers?
Or that desire somebody else belittled
or those migratory birds
vanishing
in
a deepening blue
of an afternoon's end.
The certainty that there were
friends that had not been remembered,
farewells that had not been sent.
All the hellos, the felt goodbys had now been blurred.
-- Frank Prager
