Author's note: The first poem, "Back to School," I wrote using a form I've been having fun with lately, called the Golden Shovel.  The last word in each line of the poem matches, word for word, a line from a selected poem. 


Back to School
           While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey
           I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
                                   from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” by William Butler Yeats

I fret over fast-funneling time, while
mourning doves ease me into these last days. I
know school is coming and I can’t stand
the way I brood on what-ifs and dwell on
this and that, and especially dread the 
staff meetings.  Gone, my blue bicycle roadways,
walks on the beach in rosy dawn or
in late evening with waves playing moon notes on
the slow pulse of lakeside.  I’ve quieted to the
leafy sun-float woods, far from the pavements
that will whisk me to work, with its grey
bell schedule and the state-mandated tests I
buckle under, and the ubiquitous cell phones I hear
binging and pinging in sly electronic glow. It
wears me down to a jittery nub.  And the students in
trouble from lack of cash, ideas, or hope.  I try to show the
ways in which knowledge can heal in a deep
star-bone kind of way, and that our hearts
are in it together.  That this is the core.





August to November


Together
we frame the season
a reach of fingertips
from verdant
to vermillion
my satisfied sigh
eases itself
beyond all reason
into riotous cascade
of color

you
with barren branches  
softly gleaming 
in afternoon’s low angled sun
and deep crimson berries
give voice
to the glittering frost 
between us


-First published in An Ariel Anthology (2015)