A Poem or Two

Gathering

Gathering words, like flowers, takes gloves,
knee pads and a spade.
You dig but they stick in the ground,
roots deep, definitions gnarled and worm-eaten.
Sticky meaning irritates the eyes.
Good words sprout in Spring,
illuminating mind, and producing clarity of weather, or not.
In winter words are cold and buried in frozen ground,
only the woodpeckers or aye aye can peck or poke them out.
This gardener needs an ice pick.



Stumped (a dream)

Armless riders rumble down a windy gray street,
Someone offers me a bike and a prosthesis,
I am armless, truncated, stumped.
They blow by, ink streaming behind them.