Is a room

surrounded by shifting walls of dark.

Answering Machine

Black leather chairs swivel

as your voice bursts

Into the room where only

the paintings smile back.

Lights are off

we are not at home--

Groggy, after midnight

we receive your gift--

affection translated

from the telephone tape turning

on the machine we

whirl and re-whirl to saturate

our senses, soak in

your sweet sound.

Your contralto lights

the air, palpitates

off the window

lilting along the

arm of the couch,

we fold our fingers

as if to touch

that familiar cadence--

Your favorite black dog

lifts his heavy ears looks to find you.

He will never

know how far

Far Eastern Russia is.

The Business of a Clean Sweep

Her address is the hollow house, innards

stacked unsteady against the far wall.

The white truck stops. Port opens. A tentacle

snakes its giant octopus arm across the lawn

humming,

up three steps into the living room It’s off to work...

to steam below the puddle of sunshine that washes

through the open door highlighting carpet

like a Sir Walter Raleigh cloak-of-light.

Revealing underfoot an Achilles’ Heel: yesterday

tromping tear stains of spilt milk.

She scans the house’s bones too late

to repair

even with this broom of moist breath.

Flicked off the tentacle crawls down three steps

across the lawn

humming a penny earned is ...

The port inhales the arm.

She closes her door

lock latch snaps

...a silk purse out of a sows ear.

The truck packs it up, cleans empty rooms

all across the city

every day. hi-ho hi-ho...

The Night House

A neighborhood mother was murdered

last month. Now it’s an issue of light.

A night light locates the budding and dying

potted plants on the kitchen bay window,

just enough illumination to assure no ogre

from my leftover childhood imagination

smolders in the corners or behind the door.

All night streetlamps glow from outside.

Drab light outside and dim inside press like page

against a page to create creepy shapes.

But sometimes the dark goes velvet. I come downstairs

barefoot and slowly, familiar but not familiar.

My nerve fumbles and I swallow.

Nothing in the dark except what is there

when it’s day. Damn dark! Hides behind,

over and under itself to twist what I believe

Into half truths. Simply an issue of light.

Hands tied behind her back, murdered

In her house in the middle

of a sun saturated morning and the police

still in the dark look for clues.

University Weather

for Sage

Thursday, the seventeenth of May.

A black and gray discomforter of clouds

and a sharp south wind threaten

raindrops hefty enough

to stomp the sweet-pea sprouts.

The storm like bursts of engine backfire

doesn’t alarm our freshman grand-

daughter until a dozen sirens shriek

below her dorm window. The window

between rock-red & roll posters,

the window of the room where

her stuffed bear, last survivor

of childhood sleeps

on a down-heaped bed.

Below the window

her music professor, crumples,

murdered, blood steaming the grass.

The shooter then shoots

himself. Rain

won’t revive them.

The weather-man explains it’s a random

storm, the temperature’s

not so hot this May.