Poem 20

I always used to get in trouble for writing things on fogged up windows while I had to wait in the car for my mom. I smudged up many a car window with my greasy little mits, but it was for a good cause. Kids love to write and draw in the condensation on windows. I tried to write about that feeling here.
I'm not sure if this really happened as it plays out, but eventually I sacrificed accuracy in favor of what worked for the poem.

I Don't Know How to Unlock the Door

I don’t even know about months,
but here is March,
the glass and rain drops
between the tips of our fingers.

We are tracing on the inside and
outside of the window
of my mother’s Oldsmobile:
a star, a heart, a face, a fish.

Your laugh warms the driveway,
and you are on tiptoes.
I stretch a tiny hand up to the glass
to follow your finger as you spell
“Hi” and the word that means you.

Your fingertip drags pearls of water
down the curve of the glass,
making a squeaky sigh.
We are out of space here,
but the other window,
coated with fog,
needs our fingerprint pictures.

I take off my seatbelt.
It shudders back into its slot
as I crawl to the driver’s side.
Your teeth shine from the porch light,
and on my knees, I put my lips to glass
and dark, the wind.

The glass warms,
and when I open my eyes,
the keys are in the door,
and you are waving with your mom.

Poem 19

I think this poem has more to do with my longing for the "good old days" of Mariners' baseball than with my father and me. I'm kind of dreading this next season simply because it's been hard to care about the team as it stands now. I'd still like to make it out to the ballpark, though. Stupid Field of Dreams.

Watching Baseball, 1994

If you asked me the score
I could say,
two cups of ice tea,
sweating on the end tables;
two broken-in mitts and a ball,
the insides damp.

Dad’s head leans back into cushions,
and his mouth slurps air
while the Mariners hold a lead
two-nothing in the top
of the fifth with Buhner up.
I sit quietly, stealing my own breaths
under my father’s snores.
Swing and a miss; strike one.

My hands on the floral couch fabric
fidget with a small rip
then flex to grip the cup
and guide the plastic to click against my teeth-
tiny sips under the televised crowd.

I’d hate to wake him,
but has he waited all week, only to drowse
through the middle innings of a Saturday?

What will I ask him when he startles at the cracking bats?
Dad knows peace, blue rest, a doze. I can-
for today- grant him that.

A request

I'm not running out of ideas (yet) but I'd like to try something new. If you check this blog and trust me well enough, send me a secret of yours via email. I'll write a poem about it without using your name. I won't ask if it's true. Your secret doesn't even need a context, but it should be fairly specific. Thanks.

Poem 18

This is my most formal poem since I refuse to rhyme or use any conventional sort of meter. Each line contains eight syllables, but it is not written in any kind of intentional tetrameter (four stressed syllables, beats, to a line). It's not the first syllabic poem I've posted here, but I won't tell you which was the other.
I like the challenge of writing in syllabics, and the form suggested some meanings that I would not have otherwise noticed.


I-90, Just outside Ritzville

The moon has set, leaving the stars
free to trickle down their cold light.
From the highway the lowly moan
of a semi-truck floats over
the sage brush, and dust to my ears.
My hand plunges deep into the
pocket of my jeans for the keys
to a time where I left your face.

Out of gas, I left you parked, dead,
on the shoulder, like an old skin.
“She’ll be here when I get back, I
just need to stretch my legs for now.”
As I walked, the dust billowed up
with every footprint I gave you;
lifeline traced in sand on the side
of a sun-scarred, black highway .

At night the wind feels closer, like
sheets around a too-warm body
and twenty minutes from home but
I’ve forgotten when I parked
and the key has somehow slipped
from my pocket into gravel.
The stars laugh because they shine, so
near each other, so far from me.