Table Bed

In my dreams are table beds.
A mystic carpenter creates them, when he forgets the forms.
The table is set for the feast.
Large crystal goblets with cubes of ice melting and freezing.
Flat ceramic plates in circles, spinning into squares and triangles.
Dancing forks, singing spoons, knives dueling and jousting.
Ladles scooping airy love to guests. Salad tongs having sex.
Coffee cups give soliloquies of silent starry walks in nature.
Beer steins boast gloried memories of youth in heat and battle.
Wine glasses jingle with the latest gossip on the go. 
The artist dreams and sleeps in centerpiece.
His open mouth is stuffed with apples.
In his table bed, they come and go.
Some craftsmen is measuring out his space in right angles.
Some judge is sentencing him for the irrational feast.
Some banker is balancing his numbers on a bed sheet.
Some philosopher has banished him for formless fun.
The bed becomes a table for him to work.
He wakes to find the imitators endlessly talking to themselves in his head.
Their language comes and goes in sprinkled gibberish and sluggish jargon.
Off he goes from bed to table, twisting and turning forms to meet desires.
He calculates, measures, and weighs the dinner set in motion.
The waking world has not set a place for him to dine,
and so he brings his bed, and cobbles together a sleeping seat,
to dream and eat and sleep.

The Clay Workshop

The bespeckled magician in suspenders educates his apprentices
around a workshop table with clay and cameras and computers.
The eye plays games with the mind. Faces turn inside out.
Creatures run in circles. Figures float in air.
Clay forms turn inches on a stage.
Their molded bodies formed with cuts and pastes.
Snapped frames in successive time.
Small dramas set to music for short movies.
A ballerina turns like a top.
A goalie misses the shot.
A juggler loses his head.
A gymnast does a somersault.
A break dancer spins and claps his legs.
A couple waltz a stage and kiss to part.
The movies stop and start.
The children come and go.
The magician starts and stops.
The workshops continue to find
figures formed for the mind,
who come and go into frame,
with games for the eye to play.
All in good time.

Peaks and Valleys

I sit and stare at mountaintops.
Green pastures in the sky.
Atop the range before me,
spin windmills, twelve propellers,
catching wind from blue skies.
The cloud wisps keep my eye for too long.
They pass just like storm clouds and thunderous drops of rain.
I dream a cabin under windmills, harnessing energy and lightning bolts,
images pulled from Mount Olympus, or trapped transcendental currents, high above my head.
My home is in the valley, though.
It is up a slope from the state road.
Cars zip by down the highway, on journeys, near and far, to and from.
Dump trucks deposit gravel in the pit next door. The engines rattle the doors.
Cyclists peddle and push to town.
Children call me back inside.
I am on the porch behind the garden patch.
My eyes settle down on ponds and houses,
places underneath windmill mountaintops.
Often, though, my eyes turn back to blue skies and green ranges,
they pull me like windmills funneling fresh air for light.
Somewhere in between I hover.
I find my cottage floating in air,
between the peaks and valleys,
before me every day. 

Chapel of Sound

People sit in silence as night descends, a summer mountain evening.
They wait in reverie for the ceremony.
The wood chapel of sound pours notes out into open space.
Pilgrims brace for performance.
Open air fills with the sound of a single instrument.
People on wood and grass, listening to the sweet chords of solo piano in shadow.
Eyes fix on the keys.
The certainty of every move.
The grace of fingertips.
The rite of style.
The blessing of music. 
Pilgrims pay their homage to the shrine with handclaps.
In solemn processional, they make their paths away,
the chapel of sound still singing far into the dark.
Minds still strumming with every strike,
of certain, balanced keys.

The Lawnmower Reverie

The line never has a ruler's edge. Cut grass always lacks precision in sunshine. The engine sputters on a hill behind the house. We stall amid the tall weeds, waiting for fuel for the restart. On we go in circles, up and down sloped hills and curved ridges. The wishing well is dry. Its bucket is broken. The barn breeds cobwebs. The house has mice. The blade is lifted over stone and root. On a sharp decline, my foot slips off the brake. The vehicle jousts a dead stump. Wheels and blades turn left, all forward progress halts. The rider is in the grass, a knight dismasted from his horse. Blades stop spinning. Engine idles into stop. The knight is just a lawn mowing man, dreaming of other summer days, other ways to cut the grass into lines. Somewhere he sees a dusk on his rump, where all the lines fade, and fantastic green shapes form like magic, in the dark. Sounds of others mowing break the reverie. He pops the clutch and turns a key. The lawnmower heads back to the garage, For more gas.

Fern Gully

Under the shade of the trees, moist droplets fall through spider webs.
Ferns rise.
Along the far end of my pond, they wait in the shade of elms and oaks.
Midsummer night.
The gully grows in the drip dark rain, untouched by hands and paws.
Treasured grove.
Silent stalks absorbing the rains for an eternity.
A planted forest unperturbed by dark patches. 
Through the cleared path, men and women walk.
They seek the forest flower of the fern in the night.
They dance and kiss and sing and pour pond water in dirt.
The water seeps into soft mushy ground,
a land of twigs and sticks and rocks.
More ferns grow, where they play and trod and drip seeds.
The gully will not be cut by mowers, like me.
My trimmings do not touch their moist dark land.
Somewhere the magic stalk awaits by the pond to flower,
always invisible, but real enough tonight for me in midsummer dusk.