WINDING DOWN
			


			Everything yields to its soft spot
			Cream goes sour 
			Light unravels
			Time strips down to crisped grass, 
			burned blades of old summers

			
			Music pales to the sound
			a mirror makes in an empty room  
			Words thin to whispers and hands 
			reach across pillows
			exploring empty space

			
			On a blue day among the leaves
			there's panic among small animals
			shores are thick with shells sucked
			clean and ponds choked with drowned 
			stumps where nothing swims

			
			The reds and greens of dreams evaporate
			leaving dried pools of darkness
			The season's buried under a debris
			of days and the dead shift into
			new positions underground


			
			ON THE LOOKOUT


			
			
			moss slimes the bottom of the pond
			the sun trapped in a net of willows
			the light precisely green where
			fish hang dark in shadows

			
			water flexes on its thick root
			as you drift 
			listening to the far calling of birds and
			nuances of evening

			
			this might be a slow eden
			but fears congregate like sharks scenting blood
			the dread of ending up face down
			eye to unblinking fish eye

			
			and the terror hovering 
			just below the surface
			a quick attack    
			a stripping clean
 
			
			keeps you floating in the shallows 
			close to shore
			always on the lookout
			for the approaching fin

			
			
			
			THE FOX
			


			She patrols the shadows,
			I separate sounds 
			that enter from sounds 
			that leave.

			
			Driven from the woods, she
			moves in solitary circles
			around the house
			propelled by hunger.

			
			As she devours apples,
			I wipe froth from my mouth
			and feel the pulse of wild things
			in the green night of the forest.

			
			The smallest rasp of leaf on leaf
			is signal enough to sense a victim
			to make the perfect strike
			and taste the blood's dark rush.
 
			
			When she trots off, 
			brush extended,
			amber body parting the green,    
			she turns for one last look at me.

			
			From the door, 
			half-open,
			I return that look,
			staring the wilderness down.

			
			FIVE FINGER EXERCISES
			


			Her hands fumbled across
			piano keys, fingers stiffened
			with each chord, eyes ricocheted 
			between the music and the keyboard. 
			Ears ached with that recurrent theme,  
			Don't look down. Look up and read the music.

			
			In that world of ebony and ivory,
			she faced the ruled and ruling staves.
			Czerny, Hanon, Schirmer exercised and led her 
			through the daily maze of strange notation,
			moved her hands to metronomic
			beats as she slowly learned to read.

			
			Now these hands stumble across another keyboard.  
			No fine-tuned skill can guide the words
			along the page.  No well-drilled
			finger exercises move them smooth
			from line to line and there's
			no score to lead them.

			
			She means to unlearn 
			all the knowing she was forced
			to know and get back wisdom  
			of not knowing, back 
			to when she was a child 
			reaching out to undiscovered things.

			            
			CHILD'S PLAY
			


			I sit in my cave
			waiting for the world to arrive
			a transfusion of children
			boys in green suspension
			birthday candles that never blow out.

			
			I could grow old and safe among the ghosts
			where the past reaches to kiss the present
			like the hands of a child
			I could live in a quiet room with a window
			a bed for sleeping
			a toothed moon
			a crust of sun
			and a rush of flowers.

			
			I could dream backwards
			to a fold of earth
			a shadow
			a seed not yet begun
			but the air is sweet with the rot of spring
			days fanning out like wings
			and sinuous nights.
   
			
			Still under childhood's spell, I'm
			making the whole world up 
			because it's mine, still taking 
			all the time there is to fill my head 
			with wild imaginings that conjure up 
			and then....and then.... and then....