BELATED RECOGNITIONS

1)

34 Years Late: "Love is just like baseball"(Michael Franks)


It was 34
years ago: We stopped to look
at Snoqualmie Falls
when you quoted Harry Lime
in The Third Man that people

were really ants, and
I asked if you believed that.
You didn't, but the
falls reminded you vaguely
of a ferris wheel whirling

that May afternoon
as we sat on a fir log
eating the picnic
lunch I had packed in an old
green tin hamper. Then you showed

me how to work the
borrowed Pentax and I made
images of your
oversized hands, your subdued
afro and you tried not to

squint against the sun.
Later, before the ball game
I teetered across
the astroturf in the old
King Dome on the same heeled mules

I wore up the trails,
freeze-framing action shots of
your warm-up pitches,
kicking off the first inning
of our battle to control

the relationship.
We had a past, you maintained:
I as the macho,
you as the oppressed wife, and
it was time to sort things out.

2)

After Almost 50 Years: A Response to Sylvia Plath's Death

Outside my window
orange trumpets explode
in fanfares high up
in a tree in my garden;
they dispute it with ravens

seeing who can make
the loudest announcement of
a new afternoon.
If I could pick a place to
die, and I think I might have:

Here, in the tropics,
where death is warm, is the spot--
where the colors write
my requiem and birds chant
its top line for my spirit.

3)

27 Years Later:  Sept. 19th

It rained hard all night,
and half the band of orange
trumpets is flattened
in the mud of my garden.
The adolescent ravens

waiting for sun to
the end-of-hurricane-
season bubble hide
in the trees, while their stale bread
dampens on my stair landing.

Forgotten coffee
steams and warbles on the stove.
On the balcony
my small french bean plants hunker
down behind the closed curtains.

We are all wating
for a change: a blast of sun,
a clap of thunder,
or even an earthquake, so
that we can have breakfast.