We placed a pine box casket on a sawhorse table.
There weren’t but little notice, did as best we able.
I watched the flowers wilting in the heat of August.
It seemed a shameful squander given what they cost us.
She was a stoic widow, though a might diminished.
She clutched a carved wood angel, one he never finished.
Then came a stovepipe preacher, smelled of hair slick tonic.
He kept his manner formal and his speech laconic.
It was a simple service in a smoke wood setting,
Another taproot sermon I’d be soon forgetting.
He hammered nail to cross the way the Good Book reckon,
“All sinners need God’s mercy when The Judgment beckon.”
He spoke some other hoo-ha ‘bout “The Lord's forgiveness,”
And I just shucked it off to get about my business.
I might be pissin’ sawdust when it come to prayer,
But when they toss on vittles, count me first hoss there.
Categories:
stovepipe, allegory, irony,
Form: Epitaph
Where the sound of the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls and the door-sills where pots collected rain beneath a leaky roof where some drops ping-ponged on the empty soup cans resting on the kitchen counter as Autumn turned to Winter seen through white ferns painted by Jack Frost during the night on the window panes where beneath, snow fell through the cracks in the walls and lay glistening on the coat the little girl slept beneath on a cot in a house that even the coal collected from the train-tracks burning in the stove couldn't warm but could leave a trail of black soot on the wall behind the stovepipe in the place the little girl lived and called home for awhile, until the next move, and the next move, and next move, to places much the same, that she also called home, where a broken turquoise robin's egg (in a glass jar), tagged along, forever bringing beauty and joy to the little girls life.
grass and mud a nest
from such humble beginnings
yet the robin flies
____________________________________________________________
Categories:
stovepipe, childhood, life,
Form: Haibun
she liltingly spun smiling and singing
"You are my sunshine" waving for us
to join in
the pan dripped dancing tears on
the hot black stove where they sizzled and died
"My only sunshine" with a quick hug
her apron splattered with a thickening marinara -
summer's proud yield
the kitchen...was there another room?
dried curled wall paper near the stovepipe
exposed the decor carriages and princes of
yesterday Mom's childhood
"You make me happy"
the old black spaniel curled in the middle
nothing moving but eyes wary of
being tripped upon yet worth the risk
and perhaps a dropped meatball reward
"When skies are gray"
Worn linoleum exposed paths of time
the oak threshold proof
of welcomes and farewells
not really noticed by we in
our comfort of "now" not
thinking about our sunshine
being gone
"You'll never know dear how much I love you"
with a smile...always remembered
Categories:
stovepipe, memory,
Form: Free verse
1963.
I ran crying to Uncle Jim, standing by the barn door.
We hugged, and I tried to hold the smell of him,
of Vermont -- Old Spice, oatmeal, rotting leaves in crisp October air.
"Oh, kid, you and me, kid ... you and me," he said.
But the car was waiting, all packed.
My grandparents yelled one more time, to come.
He stood alone, waving goodbye, his head held
to one side, a war injury.
Perhaps that's why he drank.
Or maybe it was living so far away from us,
in a wild place, where snow is measured in feet.
On winding roads, I cried for two hours, through valleys of orange and yellow and graveyards of granite, where men with stovepipe hats and ladies with hoop skirts lay side by side underneath the green.
Through my window, I counted the steep, pitched roofs.
Cows of black and white and brown.
Was Uncle Jim, by now surely in his house watching snowy TV, crying, too?
1975.
Uncle Jim is dead, at least he told me so, as he stood by my bed one night.
Even now, when I think of Uncle Jim, and how he held me, what he said to me in 1963,
I could cry.
Categories:
stovepipe, lost love, me, nostalgia,
Form: Free verse
The world was a cold place
in the time of hats.
The past, and would be present place
a cold place.
Fedoras, Stetsons, and Stovepipe hats
Scottish Tam o’shanters, Raccoon caps
and feathered headdresses,
lay upon the pate of man.
The world was a cold place,
small critters fled from the trappers lures.
Beaver and rabbit skins made up
Chimney Pots hats for
frontiersmen and Presidents.
The West was far and wide,
the Indians, the buffalo,
and the wild mustangs
roamed the range, free.
The world was a cold place
and folks needed to cover their scalps
IF they want to keep them.
Hats are returning now
for the world is again a cold place
more than the little critters should run in fear.
Categories:
stovepipe, adventure, cowboy-western, education, history,
Form: Free verse