Green burrs grow there,
dandelions & weeds I can't name.
Cigarette butts & candy wrappers
catch low in the chain link fence.
You have to look up 
to see what it meant
to me all those years ago.

Look up to the wide dry space,
for running, walking, daydreaming
a life of an adult you (never this one).

Look back to the line 
of live oak trees along the fence,
thick shade for boyhood
summer days

and cover for stolen embraces
on the thin flannel sheet you didn't know
she had in her trunk.

Nobody saw you that night.
Nobody sees what you saw
back there back then.

Before I grew into doubt & anger, disappointment & disgust
with the church, I prayed daily to
Virgin Mary.

She was calm & beautiful, her pain serene,
not a crown of
thorns.

Let it be done to me--disarming
service & bodily yielding, faithful, maternal & beautiful,
clothed in the stars & sky, atop the moon.
Pray for me, Mary. I will be good. 

In some ways, I've written about this part of my life before, most evident in the Virgen de Guadalupe pendant above which I have worn since I was thirteen. but never with these parameters, where each line length is dictated by digits in my phone number. 

The city restricts watering during summer, for good reason,
so the man tends the brown patches daily by hand.
Seven thirty and seven thirty at morning & at night. 
He times each session each day down to the minute.

He gets to know his lawn intimately, patch by patch, 
the narrow band right by the sidewalk nine feet long,
the yellowed oval that stretches out just behind the mailbox,
the tight corners near the turns by the lawn lights.

His fist around the hose, his thumb widens the spray,
the mist cooling the only man outside this hot night.
Sometimes cars pass him, their fingers lifted in a hello,
their palms steering them down the alley to their garages. 

On vacation, he worries about the lawn, patch by patch.
Over time all see the green return stronger than before.

Over the summer, I wrote a lot of watering-the-lawn poems. This one is kind of a sonnet, but with ten words per line rather than ten syllables.

The child enters.
"Knock knock" "Who's there?"
The father wonders at
the enduring appeal of jokes, 
the older we get
the fewer we hear.

The child grins through
the setup, knowing that it's worked
all day long
friend to friend
playground & cafeteria,
a center stage moment
he's rehearsed & honed.

The child delivers the punch.
There's more ah than ha
at first before the father
shifts from discovery to joy.
They laugh together.

Let there always be 
shared moments like this,
an assurance for each, 
a luxuriating in who's there
and why. May the doors
to their hearts always
be open to each other.

This is inspired by a writing challenge that Matthew Olzmann gave my students--write a poem that begins with a joke and ends with a prayer. Photo of Diego Rivera with his child here. 

May your feet be warm & dry
May you hear your name said with a smile today
May your nights be peaceful
May your work be meaningful
May someone you love think that you are smart & funny

May your coffee be served just right
May you see your child laughing
May you enjoy the book you're reading -- and the next one
May you feel the warmth of the setting sun

May your children be safe & happy
May they grow up to love & talk to one another
May they have dogs & beloveds that love dogs
May the clouds always inspire you

This is inspired by a three-part writing challenge that Sarah Freligh gave my students--write blessings for all people everywhere, then blessings for someone difficult to love, then for yourself. The image is by my friend Scott Lewis, from his series God & Globalization.

The wind was blowing most of my first day in town, and the snow flakes fell gently, slowly, cartwheeling to me with cartoonish clarity, like a confetti’d welcome for us alone. We were two blocks from a good bar, a decent diner, a video store, and an El stop. We were in love.

She had chosen our home well–not the hippest neighborhood but still one that felt like a city I’d never known, like a place where the rest of my [ahem] … where the rest of our life together would begin.

Instead it was an extended break, not quite vacation not quite holding pattern. I continued teaching but not well. She found a job at company called Oracle. My wife looked her up–apparently, she still works there. She set down roots; I did too, somewhere else.

The wind blows there even now as strong as ever. I saw it on TV the other day. It looks just the same as it did that January.

_{The image is from Andrew Sullivan’s View From Your Window feature. I saved it as “ChicagoIL930pm” but cannot find the original source or photographer.}

You create an account gently, and you construct
a password--a nonsense mixture made memorable,
letters, numbers, characters made special
somehow, a song lyric, a sentence you alone know.

You pull the doc from the drive, a last look
at a once-inspired miracle, a polished
inert version of the original spark, now rendered
regular, out of your hand & into gently. 

Gently receives the doc, a new screen
assuring you that the server worked.

You forget and wait, gently. Gently managing
the impersonal viewable shareable
version of you at your most artful, 
most vulnerable, most hopeful.

Three weeks later, gently a message
in your inbox. 

No. 
Thank you. 
Sincerely, 
Gently.

This is inspired by Sophia Terazawa, who gave my class the following writing prompt: Personify an adverb. I chose to personify the writing submission platform Submittable as the adverb "Gently". So above every time I originally referred to the platform, I substituted the word Gently.   

I read somewhere that G-d is merciful,
watching, judging, understanding, but still

merciful. The quality of mercy, I read
somewhere else, is not strained. It droppeth like ...

well, it's freely flowing. It isn't meted out
like some precious resource (though it is). 

It is worth much more than it costs to give. 
There is always a person to forgive

and a reason to forgive, if for no other reason
than that it gives you practice

in feeling how little it takes to bless
a person in error, in distress, deep in shame.

Even when we know that they'll just mess up 
again, in our mercy, we bring a part of heaven

to earth.

"kyrie eleison" means "Lord, have mercy." This was my last sprint write with my students on May 18, 2022, modeled after Clint Smith's "Meteor Shower". 

An orange shirt hangs in my closet. My second ever. 
It's got a sheen & a stretch altogether unnatural,
some space-age material that doesn't breathe & doesn't fade.

It's a golf shirt from another era, a stiff broad collar,
more buttons than are necessary, and a deep breast pocket.
There's a duck on the pocket also from another era. 

Summer 1988, north Austin, I'm watching my girlfriend shop
in a fabric store. We were young enough & in love enough
to do everything together then, even things I didn't want. 

I rotated one of those product kiosks, bored & annoyed. 
And there the duck was on a tiny card, a bright impulse
that I knew would make her smile. She sewed it right on

an orange t-shirt I wore probably once a week. Decades after 
we broke up, the shirt lost its snap, and I lost my taste for it. 
I threw away the shirt but kept the duck. I showed it to my wife,

who sewed it right on a new orange shirt. My second ever. 
Here in the closet, in the home we share, a bright sign of
how to adorn a simple thing, of how to keep love near your heart. 

_{Inspired by the love of two women and by this poem.}

You wear a white shirt,
grey slacks, and a plaid tie.
A uniform of academic
seriousness & middle class.

You roll your sleeves up
& unbutton your shirt
at the neck. You feel there's little 
on the surface you choose.

You are freest on your paper route,
especially Sunday mornings 
weaving slowly from curb to curb,
crossing the double yellow line.

All four lanes yours.
The city asleep.

Inspired by Erika L. Sánchez's "The Poet at Fifteen", which was inspired by Larry Levis's "The Poet at Seventeen".