AMSTERDAM AIRPORT

I’ve never been in Amsterdam

Laid out Playmobil town

A primary color wheel with plastic tables, plastic chairs

Clean cut river through a clean cut field

House like my friend’s prize Playmobil

Welcome Starbucks, flat white in hand

Blonde baristo with a beautiful accent

Plastic tables plastic chairs

Laid out like a primary color wheel

Chops like potato, cubes of Dutch dairy

I’ve never been in Amsterdam before:

Hear I am in the primary color wheel

I’d rather live in the real world

I thought was plastic but this is it:

That’s life: the opening, the closing

Coming, departing

Hear the airplanes.

WICKER'S WORLD

Gilt mirror and

Letters on the wall:

Eat, Drink, Relax

Your coffee, your bun

Log in, drift out

Old couples in and out

Biddies at their tea

Me at my laptop

Just outside under boats

Docked in the fishboat bay

North Sea hits Atlantic.

SINK OR SWIM

Sick on the interstate

I pondered the thought of not here

Driven so far off the road I could

Never, sinking in oceans.

Off-water and across the roadless

This land is a place too:

They ask if I drowned on the way

I’m swimming where I want to be.

LEAVING EDEN

Leaving Eden

Was the hardest thing I've ever done
nest of perfection
to wander the world like an albatross

You plus me
to a land of marbles
Trying to touch but unable to stay.

DEBORAH

It was a screen-play break-up
When I contrived a reason to fight

I resorted to names
You conjured hurt dignity 

You agreed you were the sore loser
Who wouldn't hit the ball pitched

We surpassed our own stereotypes
In a way hitherto unsurmised

I called it The Deluge
I was really Deborah.

GENESIS 23

Across the ancient lands 
Like watercolor dashes 
On the first map of the world 
Ever made.

Sarah's years wrote a telegraph
Until they were full
Stop.

He laid her to rest in a cave 
in a field full of trees
to contain his great grief

But she learned early on 
Home is the tent 
Where God speaks.

CHANGE

Everybody grows
The oak trees grow the longest
It's the weathered tree
in memory's eye
that appears the most beautiful-
the one that has lived the longest
and weathered the most
twisted, rough-edged,
grown.