For the Baysville Public School Reunion

My old frame two-room schoolhouse is gone

(grades one to four downstairs, a lady teacher;

upstairs the last four grades, a man)

and the brash new brick one closed in sixty-five.

How high the hip roof loomed! Yet we would throw

hex-nuts with string streamers back and forth

over it, and those red-white-and-blue foam-rubber balls.

Here, gone. To vanish, and return.

Most of my class of eight survive

though shy, lovely Nellie Lunnen's gone,

suffering and brave under her mother's hand-me-down

Mother Hubbards, who captured my hand

for our class photo. Proud, diffident,

beaten, defiant, secret, our frozen faces

can never age or die; they snatch us back

out of time each time they catch our eye.

August 29, 2011

Shadetree Mechanic

You can read the Rockies like a book;

lifting their heavy pages

you help them crumble, fossil letters fracturing at a look.

You learn the craft of ages,

reinventing from what's broken,

bricoleur of nature's conspicuous waste;

walk the mountain path, hurry erosion,

heartsick at our disgrace -

the wild's diminishing. Yet the hard grind

against mineral heights seeps down, it feeds,

swells sweet valley bottoms. 

  Mind

you don't claim more than you need

of guilt, a kind of power:

you're not so important: one more living

witness of what's here now,

consoled in giving.

May 2, 2011