The dog calls us
to be our best dog self
or invent one if we don’t have it.

The dog sighs
into ham at the table,
believes that now
there will always be ham —
the growl and the whine
having made it so.

The dog wishes
for all doors to remain open,
all beds a field of glory
and pushing
head end or butt end
against some part of human.

The cat person resists, then
invents a dog self again,
seeks to know, again,

who the good boy is.

You and I need to chuck all this
cranberry sauce and leftover boxes
sometime, join the Merchant Marine,
learn to sail and swear like tigers,
pace out the ring for a really good
sword fight, swing from all the ropes
and back again, through any open window
we happen to find, on any coast,
whether spice-scented or ordinary,
colored exactly like our own.

I pick it up, your name
written in tea leaves
(but who am I kidding?
I always use teabags).

Your fingerprints
across my neck, how
the raindrops raced
down the car window

when I was a child
and so were you,
someplace equivalent
but elsewhere.

Hello.
A one-time terrific expense
would be
to box up all your sadnesses
and not make new ones,
push them down a hill, into a river,
not go and retrieve them later
where they are crying
inside the box,
sharp as any kittens.

What if I told you
you could have everything you wanted
as easily as icicles
falling off the gutters
of your grandparents’ screened-in porch?
And all it took was
a walk along the privet hedge
smelling privets
and dust, a sun that wasn’t your sun
because you weren’t in your town then?
What if I told you about electric blankets
and pianos, bananas and Cheerios, Paul Harvey
and the rest of the story? What if I told you
it’s all still there, somewhere,
if only you could get to it?

I’m a woman in possession of her life,
and sometimes that’s enough
in the flash of Christmas lights
and police lights, bells ringing
everywhere. Coming out of the store
on this night before Thanksgiving,
I’m momentarily puzzled over
wet pavement, mist on my face,
as if, in the interstice between
my city exploding and the sick joke
of  ill-timed holidays, rain should not fit.

Hello …You might notice that things look a little different around here. That’s me at the top, for one thing. For another, I got rid of the clunky “editor and poet” business, and the last vestiges of my harebrained scheme to use this blog as any sort of moneymaking venture. This blog is, and has been for some time, the online home for my poetry and occasional updates or thoughts about such.

Also, I finally got up off that $18 so I can have the more simple domain name rather than the .wordpress.com one. After resisting for years, it was easy and painless to give in at last.

There are probably more changes to come. A long-time, terrific follower of this blog has suggested that it really ought to be better organized. I agree — it’s one of those projects that keeps getting kicked down the road. It sounds like a good winter task, especially now that every last monarch has finally left our dining room.

A new theme might be in order, too. I like my current one, Ryu, just fine — or more than fine — but there’s no harm in trying something new. If you have any suggestions of themes you think work especially well for poetry blogs, I’d love to hear them.

What you see here is transitional, but I hope you’ll agree that I’ve taken some steps in the right direction. As always, thanks for visiting!

In the supermarket, you can find
all the answers you left behind
when you imagined pastel mints
with a haze of white nonpareils,
fine as ladies in Sunday gloves,
and you thought this was the world
you’d always belong in, but then
the world changed around you,
and you changed worlds, too,
so that now, in the supermarket,
if you happened to find those
pastel mints with nonpareil haze,
you would think of those ladies
and wonder what ever happened
to ladies, their gloves, Sundays.

Stay sane, my friends,
and do not let your wisdom go
in bucket lines advancing before
a storm that never comes, or a snow
across your window screen,
accumulating nothing

but its shadow self,
a dust of clouds
that whispers
its melting.

In another world,
I’m still in the pool
and you and I have not
had words
everything is normal
there is no taste
of ashes in my mouth
and I can still write poems
about arguments