Mirror Sunset--On Seeing a Shuttle Launch

Mirror Sunset (March 15, 2009)

Seven forty-eight
and the waitstaff steps out
onto the porch and patrons
cram up against the eastside windows
to watch the bright contrail
against the dark eastern sky.

Exhaled hush of a cool evening
and everyone returns to work
for a short time soaring.

Recalling Keokuk

Recalling Keokuk


The rolling hills of Keokuk--
I thought, hills in Iowa?--
as down the sweeping streets
that strayed over bluff-tops
that defined the river, I saw brick
and wood houses, in age and whiteness
the pride of generational holders.
The Mississippi at a decades long
ebb stranded barges filled with sand
and gravel at the gates of the river,
and we five men looked down into
the muddy wash, posed as
though at urinals for some sassy
camera's flash.


That is not the now Iowa,
the Mississippi that flows
past the brooding past--masked
by marble, brick, and mortar.
But that river, pinched in from
banks and flowing trickle
to trickle and puddle to puddle
lives large as long as those who stood
still see and think and share
their thoughts and ways.


THAT Iowa is alive in ways
that one I cannot see now is not
and though the shape and shade
and form and flow of memory
mocks what once was, and each
recall shifts subtly the river course,
still it is there in the richness
of memory, the raw wilderness
of thought to return and
reshape as bidden.


So the muddy puddles are forever
part of the river that roars with
mighty swells, undulates and undergoes
its remaking in mind.

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