Microclimate

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--where I ride my bike into
a tunnel trains once burrowed through
that sunlight never warms,

where easy hazy summer drops
away and wintry dampness grips
my neck my back my arms,

and though I pedal faster,
still the end seems farther --
that's like the stretch between

the words I didn't think they'd hear,
the message that I didn't mean,
the look in their eyes angry, wary,

and

the way that they respond to
Sorry, I'm so sorry.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Though I've never arranged bouquets, I've seen others do with flowers what I did with a bundle of ideas when I started this poem. After my draft was posted, like the arrangers who step back to look at their work, I saw lines to be trimmed for clarity's sake, which revealed opportunities to relate ideas through rhyme, which led to rearrangements to achieve some pleasing symmetry. The poem looks and sounds very different on Saturday from what I posted Tuesday.
- WSS

Self Checkout

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You like the way
you heft your items
  CABERNET @ 2 for 5
from right to left
and deftly turn
  LB BRN RICE 1.19
to where a scanner reads
reflected laser beams between
  LHT RED KID 1.99
lines thick and thin
irregularly spaced

like, among thick winter days, this
sliver of warmth to ride your bike
where unobstructed sun through pines
makes lines on your road,
each bar you achieve
a part of coded miles
you leave behind:
  AWFL AWSM
opportunities ahead if
  ETRNTY
is similarly lined.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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The first time I noticed a bar code was on the cover of MAD magazine around 1970 when Alfred E. Neuman mowed it like grass. The bar code came to mind recently during a bike ride in late November; I saw possibilities for a poem when I realized that rhymes irregularly spaced might be analogous to bars in the code. Some actual receipts from Publix helped me out.

This is my first try at a technique that I associate with Billy Collins. His poems often begin with a whimsical or ordinary observation that develops to a point where a tangent thought takes the poem off to some very unexpected place. - WSS

Interview with Box Turtle

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Come out of the cold. You'll warm beneath my dome.
For sixty years, this room has been my home.

Want mushrooms? Snails? The rain I corked in spring?
Oh yes, in my field, I've now seen everything

from the stream to the oak on the ridge -- I recall when it fell --
the bike path I've crossed twice -- the traffic was hell.

The yoga mat's for tone. No, no more races.
My books; my sketches of beloved faces

all gone or gone beyond my own square mile.
I hope that they look back, as I do, and smile.

Here I work. Retired and alone,
I still seek ways to say what I have known:

We love, we hurt, we forgive, and we're forgiven.
My faith's not just a creed; it's a story I live in.

My pleasure. I didn't see how long we'd been.
It's good to stick my neck out now and then.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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See a photo of a box turtle on the bike trail with my blogpost Alone on Two Wheels Around Atlanta. I think of the box turtle as my spirit animal. - WSS

The Kingdom of Heaven is like

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a thousand hurtling tons
of iron, rubber, glass,
and biscuits with coffee to-go
stopped

to let a dude on skateboard
thread the stripes
across six lanes,
grinning.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Writing pages of drafts, I lost the fun of the original incident. I'd felt joy at some kind of miracle -- like Elisha crossing the river on dry land -- but in all those pages, I couldn't define it. This morning, I put all the notes aside and wrote this haiku-like sentence on the back of an envelope. - WSS

Why Don't You Just Learn English?

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his voice cut through
the clink of carts, the check-out beeps,
his question an assault:

You're holding up the line.
You want our stuff, you speak our way.
Confused? That's not my fault.

Her reply, too soft to hear:

My language is my super-power,
the magic cloak of my mother
to shield my children,
strengthen their father,
fly them distant places,
times long gone;

English just my secret identity,
mild-mannered, awkward, shy.

Aloud, she may have murmured Pardon.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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In the moment described in the poem, I froze. Head down, I never even saw the ones involved. Ever since, I've wished I'd intervened like Superman or Jesus. The poem took shape only after I took myself out and let the two be heroes of their own encounter.

I draw upon some first-hand knowledge. When I lived some weeks in Francophone countries, I suffered the devaluation of my facility with English -- my super-power. - WSS

Season Premiere

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All of summer at my back
I pedaled into chance of rain
the sky clear blue with fringe of clouds
beyond the canopy, still green.

Crackling trees alerted me
when fall rolled in, a granite gray,
crushed the warmth and snapped thick branches
dropping fractured in my way.

I pushed on toward an overpass
repelled by wind as leaves in swarms
like agitated bats attacked,
and cold drops stung my arms.

"Really, guys," I laughed, "for me?
This cinematic violence?"
I reached the shelter, shivering,
an awed, delighted, audience.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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My weakness for clever rhymes sometimes seduces me into writing nonsense. So I drafted this poem without rhyme. Then, the morning I was going to post it, I read a poem by Richard Wilbur in which he rhymed just the last word, doubling the impact and making me smile -- what a pleasure! I then tinkered with my draft and found some rhymes already there; some rhymes came to mind that sharpened the lines I'd written.

So I've changed my mind. Rhyme drew me to poetry before I could read. I won't deny myself the pleasure of discovering rhyming relationships. I'm writing for pleasure, after all. - WSS

Mountaintop Experience

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He'd scaled three hundred pages of this mesa,
my open prayer book. Hesitant,
he probed the margin with antennae.

Hauling up wings and thorax long as this ---
and abdomen --- he made a dash
across the psalm like a Hebrew scholar

right to left between the lines
  O Lord I am not proud
escaping? searching?
  I have no haughty looks
Reversed, he climbed the ridge amid
  great matters and things that are too hard for me

and aimed his tiny caravan
towards a shadowy valley -- of death, if I chose
to close the book

I carried like a tray out to the deck.
With no more breath than, say, amen,
I sent him to the world in peace.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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I've not found another insect like the one I describe in this poem, neither in my home nor online. - WSS