The struggling sun well risen looks at me like a glum lover tired of grinding through the smoke and grit of another sky in the grim infinity of possible skies of August. Through the trees, we exchange glances, the sun seeming insubstantial compared to my solidity, my own air-conditioned skin feeling the faint beginning of the summer's smoldering end.

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Hanging fire like an old suit in the closet of high heaven, the sunrise takes its sweet time blinding the eyes of morning while breakfast's thoughts of lunch get run over on the road. The silhouettes of lampposts line the highway, some surveilling with mounted cameras the dawn while paltry hopes and slim fears compel the coming storms to hasten from the ocean. Meanwhile, up above, the blue and the green of the ancient sky convey a broad and serene truth difficult to comprehend but nonetheless present in the escaping feeling of aimless anxiety beginning to fetch a glimpse of the raw buoyancy of tires on lined and mangled asphalt, repaired and re-repaired dozens of times in the sun.

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The morning clouds came and went, came and went, and the breezes pink made mauve-gold dimples where green grass bent. The night was empty for having spent its last gold coin on a deep drink of morning clouds where they went across the ripples that lent the surface of the river's ink these mauve-gold dimples where green grass bent like the glassy eyes of an old gent staring out and starting to think about clouds that came and went, came and went into the tent of the day that was on the brink of mauve-gold dimples where green grass bent. Wherever my father went, I can only recall and blink, it was where the morning clouds were sent, where mauve-gold dimples and green grass bent.

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****** Click above to listen to a replay from the jopomojo poetry podcast, 2023 ^

Three poems from Tulips for Elsie, pp. 110-112 (Korrektiv Press, 2021).

* Note the correction in the last line of Sonnet #8

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savannah of sky / sweetening the view / lightening the weight of day // my coffee cup half empty / my morning half full / of the joy to come

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