sonntag's gebet

thy kingdom come, let me be its ambassador.
give me eyes to see what breaks your heart and into which slots i'm meant to slip.
open my eyes to my purpose here; let me not only find a path but walk it well.
send me an odysseus, my grey eyes are roving, madcap minds matched.
one of him or droves of them, and remind me that they are mortal.
let me know you like lucy and her lion... be so near; forgive me my deaf ears and grasping hands.
tune my heart, tune it daily. teach me to sing your songs.
i would be a parrot for you.
don't let me be spread so thin that i disappear.
save me from myself and my vices; the more i am bored, the duller my world becomes.
i can never get near enough; i am my own stumbling stone.
give me a desire to do everything with integrity, and a respect for my duties.
even the inane, give me the joy that was once mine.
help me show people i love them, even when i can't choose them all.
and help me peel back the layers of those i choose.
guide my hands and heart.
help me be wise with my money without being fearful,
please provide when i choose what i know my heart and family's hearts need.
i am sorely tempted to forsake them for security's sake and i am sorely tempted
toward anger with them for giving me stability with one hand
and taking it away with the other.
let me find the beauty i seek, make and find.
use me for what i was made to do,
use me as who i was made to be.
i love thee. draw me close.

just the weather

the mist rolls across the mountaintop, creeping up the sides and somersaulting across the peak, drifting in our window, tiptoeing down the hall and

swinging over the sill at the other end.
it's a parade,
olympian and gentle,
vaulting,
catching in my hair
like cottonwood clinging to the curtains
and lining the sidewalks.

hovering
drifting

ivan stoiljkovic

something in the water is making the croatian boys magnetic.

soon lion tamers and clowns will be shuttling them

into cages, all in a row, planted like

teeth

tiny ivory spades

lined in a ruby gum,

burrowing and trapped,

pointed like the tip of the big-top,
or an indian's head.
things of the past, tan and rich red.

the croatian boys stumble about the garden,

clinking with cutlery like an owl ruffling its feathers.

magic drawing boards

like those magic boards we had as kids, the ones with the magnet pens sweeping across the chain-link surface and all the iron shavings leaping up to form a line,
clustering,
clumping,
watch those heads turn

i'm not clever enough in the morning to flirt.

fish hungry for some sand, drowning

parched.

the stain-glassed greeks in the chapel

china roses on my shirt,
lilacs in my eyes,
i'm all abloom.
cosseted, and hidden from
view, dainty ladies obscured
by petticoats and eyelids,
pulled down low,
blinds in the evening.
i'm shrouded in a garden.
underneath, the roots
grow in a man.
behold, an achilles who
wishes he had the leisure
to sport breasts.

two weeks notice

the way birdseed takes root in a tissue, frail tendrilled roots, tiptoeing through the papers folds, grasping, calcifying and tight.

the way an oak takes root, choosing a spot and smashing through the sidewalk until cement yields and takes shape.

the way a pumpkin patch grows, sending out a long vine toward the sun, another toward the arctic, a third to the evening, a fourth pointing south, until its compass holds the earth that cradles it steady, like the people who hold each other's ankles and roll and roll and roll, a wheel going everywhere and nowhere

far from home.

pumpkins.
strawberries.
melons.
you and i