I just returned from a visit with my sweet new grandson and his wonderful parents and then a quick trip to Midway (new baby llama and in Skinner's pasture--miniature goats added to the donkeys). Then home to a garden gone mad with flowers--all in all, the last three weeks have been a giant medley of my favorite things. I guess both of these two pieces--the totem and the poem--are my version of "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes...."

a Totem of my favorite foods

                   Weatherstripping


It's the sing song childhood rhyme
          bubbling up through layered years
                    while you wait at the stoplight.
It's the hymn learned at your grandma's elbow--
          the one she sang in her crinkled, tissue thin soprano--
That with first light
                    wafts through the tail end of your dream.

It's children's recess laughter,
The music of rain-birds on hot grass.

It's the electric thrill of a summer kiss
The smell of bacon rising in the green of morning,
          or the jasmin heavy blue
                    coming through the screen at twilight.
Or that first whiff of ocean when you crest the hill.

It's your shelf of books,
          their spines like kind faces,
Or the return to familiar rooms--
          walls soaked with your own dailiness--
                    the keys on the counter, 
                              the glass in the sink.

It's that startling first taste of a mandarin orange,
          or the brine of sea water.

It's when God spoke to only you
          in a particular arrangement of stars,
                    or in a dizzy spiral of squirrel romance,
Or in the love look in your dog's eye.

All these for dark days.
All these for menace gathering.
All these for bitter winds.

All these to swell and fill the cracks 
                              of your small courage--
          for chinks against bad weather.