Co-habit

Coyotes call out
as my alarm
under the mourning doves
coo who
take shelter and shade themselves
for the sunrise says something
predictably ominous and
October or somber.

Today, together, we all rise,
pecking or rooting our way
to live through the next
far-off sounds
Encased in lives that spin
bodies that stir
the world around
in space and time.

The shadows these worlds cast
are not solid bodies and growth
gives off chemical cues
that like evaporation,
dew always dissipates
into tomorrow,
there and gone,
a scent of something passed.




Photo credit: National Park Service from USA, taken 8/2017 [Public domain].

Electra en route

The skydiver sits with legs dangling

over some hazy sepia city, where white boulders

are really single-family houses.

The words in the sky-

The only open space-

mention the management of

Trust and Risk.

From the profile

I recognize the Roman nose and swollen lower jaw,

puffed up bottom lip.

The head is tucked in a leather helmet or bonnet

and thick black gloves meant for big jobs such as 

holding on. The figure is slumped over, looks down.

I note how long it has been yet despite the gap 

easily identified as the Pioneer Amelia Earhart;

whose good fortune in men and time

required no planning of retirement,

whose fate turned ill at forty-one,

whose security was not welded to stocks or

bonded to breed,

whose figure seems compatible

in that alien atmosphere,

who was never buried

whose sealed lips, stony gaze,

Pause one to wonder what she sees

in the shadowtrees painted below,

does this sky have depth perception,

or recognize

the Miss Appropriation, the mixed media,

the teetering between jump and fall,

I tear out

the full page newspaper advertisement

and fold it back into a paper plane. 

"You haven't seen a tree until you have seen its shadow from the sky."-Amelia Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24th in 1897, she disappeared in her plane Electra and was declared dead on January 5th, 1939. 

1st photo of Amelia and her husband George Putnam taken 1931, By International News Photos (eBay front back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

2nd photo By San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives [No restrictions or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.