Elmer Fudd and Friends

- for my mother who taught me to write

It was an Elmer Fudd coloring book,
and my mother and I were lying
on the living room floor,
coloring on opposite pages.

The thing I can't remember is
being that young and lying so close
to my mother, comfortable and quiet
coloring Elmer Fudd and friends.

It was a long time ago.

I asked why her pictures looked
so much better than any of mine.
Mom kept coloring, softly, within
the lines and told me that I was fine.

But how do you do that? I asked,
wanting so badly to understand.
She kept her eyes on the page,
and said quietly, Just keep going.

And so I have.

I hold my crayons softly now
instead of grinding them into the page,
I stay inside most of the the lines,
and choose my colors carefully.

Still, I have so many questions
but we so seldom lie quietly together
to make something together as mother
and son in the quiet of an afternoon.

For Mother's Day,

I should buy a newsprint coloring book
filled with Elmer Fudd and the way
my mother and I used to be.
We could color opposite pages

hoping to one day figure out how
to make Elmer Fudd and friends
turn out just so, to make things look
and feel the way they really ought to.

The Campfire By the River

As a child, I would sit listening to
the parents, the older kids telling
their stories, making each other
and me laugh through the night
while the campfire burned and burned.

I rolled stories over in my mind
like stones in the river flowing by
all of us out there in the darkness
beyond the ring of fire and story,
nodding heads and easy laughter.

As the next story was told, I listened
to the rhythm of it, the tones the teller
would take in order to take us all
to the places we all wanted to go
but didn't yet know until the last words.

I formed their stories in my mind
with my voice telling them, waiting for
my turn to have them all listen to me
as I told them one word after another
in just the ways that they all could.

There were always moments of silence
between the stories when we would stare
into the campfire waiting for the next story
to rise out of us like flame out of the wood,
to flow from the last story and into the next
like the quiet dark river flowing past in the night.

The Warmest Day of the Spring, So Far

I'm looking around for something to catch on
long enough for me to write a poem about it.
There is this: the warmest day of the Spring so far.
I worry that I'm too much in love with the day
and my love poems have never compared well
with the things and people I have loved.
But the warmth of this day after such a hard winter
is so caught up in everything I feel and hear that
the bud of the poem forms and begins to grow.

It begins with the sound of laughter as
a woman visits my crippled neighbor;
I wonder what poem they are writing today.
And I wonder too whether birds have come
to live in the abandoned nest over our front door
if there are eggs in it even now waiting to become.
Or perhaps the cat scared them away as
he stretches languidly just inside the door
in the first landuid sunshine of the Spring.

The silent absence of my family begins
the next verse and leads to an image of me
sitting alone on the steps writing this poem,
and turning my face up into the blue sky,
feeling the white sunshine through
the promises kept in each bud on the trees.
The stanza closes on the still cool earth,
and the tangle of last year's leaves in
the branches torn down by last night's storm.

If I end the poem just right, the way you like,
you will fall into this moment, sit by my side
in this sunshine, and say, I read your poem.
I've thought those same words. Do I know you?
No, we've only just met, but sit here with me
in the sunshine and warmth of this Spring day.
Stay until evening when one of us must fade
into the darkened final stanza of the poem,
"The Warmest Day of the Spring, So Far."