All right … Can any fellow poets tell me how to override the WordPress tendency to double space after each hard return? (And am I phrasing this correctly?) The only workaround I found is to manually add spaces so the text wraps to the next line. Pretty tedious. Oops — it’s worse than I thought. It’s not WYSIWYG, apparently, and so my poems went all crazy and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r-like. I am not e.e. cummings. I am a WordPress dunce … If you know how to get around this formatting, please comment! For now, I had to go with the blasted double spaces. Grrr.

Day 8: Outdoor Poem

Egg Hunt

My mother-in-law’s dog

is retrieverish, but he points

to each plastic egg. My daughter

is sharp enough to pick up on it.

My son blunders in wet grass,

gets as many as he can

without any interspecies help.

This is the day we leave,

gray and cold, like so many

Ohio Easters of my youth.

Concrete Buddha on his tree stump

watches as we do this, all in our

pajamas, before we dress, load up

the rented car, slowly go back to

who we were before this morning,

before this search in the damp.

Day 7: Color Poem

Orange

Double hot

sparks a flame

nothing can

cool off; orange

knows its own

particular ways,

does not mind

that few people

love it, does not

wish to be loved.

It carries, after all,

its own warmth.

True color of

the leaves once

all the green is

drained away.

Once the sun-

food cells

switch off,

the leaf can

dance, show

what it was

always made

of, the secret

we never knew

until, one day,

orange told us.

Day 6: Animal Poem

Bonobo

You confuse us.

Are you a chimpanzee

that looks like a gorilla?

Vice versa? Neither?

A sign at the zoo

calls you

the “forgotten ape.”

Your rear end is hard to

forget, your genitalia

comically swollen,

on display, always

ready for action.

You are the cousin

we seldom visit, the one

who believes sex can solve

anything. You try to show us;

we watch but never learn,

never can get it right.