A Tribute

Hemingway the Grocer

See him now
sorting the produce,
shifting it, feeling it--
not for him the rose-dappled
blood orange,
nor the bibb lettuce with
a tendency to red
at the edge of the leaf.
No broccoflower or pluots or
apples that taste like grapes.

No, only the hardest,
roundest, most perfectly
formed, and truest
lined up one after another
on the big black bench--
the pile of discards
far outweighing
what remains.

A Sketch Sentence

Four gleaming discs of gold, the torn image of the sun and the water-slicked hair of 3 tow-headed boys who churned and kicked the cool cupped water of this last late-summer swimming hole--a deep still pool formed by the churning of the water in an elbow of the thin crick that ran through the Southern Ohio hills--the summer stillness shattered by the splashing, screaming, and sheer joy of three good friends with nothing between them but water and bright sunlight dappled with the shade of branches that overstretched the crick.