A Wonderful Christmas Florida Trip!

Archie Carr Refuge--Stay off the Dunes : )

French Fry Break by the Water!

Good Habits Make Good Habitat

Rain won't stop our memorial

Hunchback Whale

Manatee search--with more love!

Part of Mom's beautiful garden

A view of the wetlands' wildlife

Deck the Halls

Deck the Halls

A red Escort hatchback

broken

on an icy hill

lined with reindeer lights

the last dog-eaten

motel room in Barboursville

a bedroll between

a brittle blinking

Technicolor

spruce

and a bubbling

neon saltwater fish tank

a Yule log wheel

kindled

with holly

on a bonfire

kept alive

while suns stand still.

a tartan wreath

woven with dream catchers

and dried heather

gold snowflake ornaments

on a cracked lamp

a red good luck knot

for a new year.

The Swamp

The Swamp

A town

mud in the mountains

animals trapped and dying

a life paralyzing

eking out in the foul and putrid air.

Drunken adults sit motionless

around a stagnant swimming pool

oxen stuck in deep mud.

A woman falls collecting wine glasses.

The others watch

holding goblets like guns

sultry heat sedating

like La Mandragora

the human rooted mandrake

nightshade.

The almost constant thunder

announces a fall

a storm.  

“I didn’t see anything,” she says.

On Viewing Marsh’s “Hauptmann Must Die” at the Indianapolis Art Museum

In a train station two women sit on tall-backed benches in dim light

shadowing all but a trapezoid on the floor behind their seat.

Three suitcases pile between them,

square brown and round purple under rusty red.

One woman stares through her left eye, the right hidden by cast shadow and a hat.

Only white-gloved hands show light. One holds a brown purse

sitting stiffly on a lap. Tatty fur drapes angularred

blue and white and short crossed booties, the left hidden by a case.

The other woman holds a newspaper at arm’s length,

a bold headline—Guilty—on both front and back page.

With nearly-closed eyes, she reads, gray-blonde hair

matching a face broken only by burnt orange lips.

The newspaper looks yellow beside white gloves sitting

on charcoal under a dark purse. Thick ankles look like boots

where they meet the top of  ribboned heeled shoes. 

A tarnished umbrella leans on a leg, setting off a beige bag 

nearly hidden in the dark echo of bench and dress.

The guide talks of modernist isolation in an increasingly mechanized world.

But you disagree

“You can tell they’re together by the suitcases.”