Plumb or Plum?
There, just outside my
living room window, are six
standard issue, old
school mailboxes fixed
on top of six wooden posts
and a street sign at
an intersection
that says HWY 23
and N. Plumb, each one
leaning at just a
slightly different angle,
each one pointing to
a wildly diver-
gent set of coordinates
up there, in the night
sky, looking down on
us, all the time, that are, in
turn, separated
themselves, by millions
of lightyears, and each one of
them with a planet
that’s almost like ours,
maybe… But, for some reason,
the one thing I keep
coming back to is why
would these folks name their street
Plumb instead of Plum?
Kansas Clouds
They look like Kansas clouds, she said,
raising a postcard up for my inspection
as she emerged, suddenly (smiling somewhat
triumphantly), from a forest of t-shirts,
cap-guns, trinkets and toy tomahawks:
a strip of Arizona highway, 1953,
under a towering cathedral sky crowded
with cumulus clouds like arctic caps
that someone (mischievous) had set adrift
to wander with the weather,
their shadows slowly flowing over
the arid landscape below,
most likely unnoticed
by the hitchhiker
and gas attendant.
Staring at the Ceiling
Woke up to what I
thought was the sizzle and tang
of bacon cooking
and a wandering
piano solo, coming
from somewhere, that seemed
vaguely familiar
to me though I just couldn’t
identify it,
no matter how long
I laid there, staring at the
ceiling, but instead
it was just a soft
summer rain falling on the
steaming grease trap down
in the alley that
the Thai place next door kept right
below my open
bedroom window, and
I guess the piano must
have been just a dream.
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