The leaf’s shadow flutters

on the bark while the leaf

remains inches away

tending the sore, tired

trunk like reiki.

Heat emerges from the aged

circles deep within the tall tree

standing sentinel in the

desert. The heat touches the

sun’s rays and they play

like an invisible Peter Pan

and Tinker Bell in the sky.

From the long, cold winter,

the visitor is finally away,

but he hasn’t come to the

desert to play. He reclines

by the pool fully dressed in

black down to his wingtips.

Through his shirt and pants

and shoes, the sun descends

and silently caresses his cold

winter blood and bones. He

looks up at the fluttering shad-

ow and feels the zephyr breeze

on his cheek as he slips off to

sleep. The heat from deep with-

in the skin rises to meet the sun’s rays

and they play like an invisible

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell.

A chime sounds from a balcony

in the desert on a quiet Sunday

afternoon.

She crosses her arms

and pats her shoulders

as she stands at

the podium having

written about the horror

of female

mutilation, the joys of

straight, bisexual and

lesbian love and the

stark reality of

black male violence

against women and

children out of

utter frustration in

a lily-white super

violent world of

slavery that has lasted

now into Congress and in

all the euphemistic

stuff which translates

into crass, banal, devious,

just under the surface

Emmett Till reality

and such may be the

story of suffering –

here, there,

everywhere and she

pats her shoulders in a

sign of deep

appreciation for

people honoring

her expose

of utter, otherwise,

inexpressible humiliations

and horrors and in

those exposes is heard,

just in the naming, the

sweet sound of

hope.

The scarlet/emerald headed

humming-

bird

buzzed my head today

when I went on the

balcony

to hang my

wet clothes. The belligerent bird

told me to stay

away

from the delicious

one part sugar

to four parts water

breakfast, lunch and

dinner.

I gathered the bird is unaware

that my buzzed head

is the one that told

the not quite bitten

hand

to feed the incredibly

gorgeous but

particularly

unappreciative

bird. I had to forgive him

given his fairly

significant sugar fueled,

fluttering wings

ADHD which in some

measure is my

fault, I think, but I know

that he won’t bother with

it in any other ratio

than four to one.

The headline in the morning paper

shouted across the top of the

front page, “Worst day for Dow

in months.” It was an Arizona

paper, but the man reading the

headline was a Michigander

and he wondered if something

had gone wrong at a Dow

Chemical plant like maybe heavy

snow caused a roof to cave in

upon a gazillion barrels of left

over agent orange causing them

instantaneously and simultaneously

to blow painting the town of Mid-

land a shade short of red but cayenne

pepper hot which then melted all

the snow and caused extensive

flooding throughout mid-Michigan.

Then he thought about a friendly

fellow named D. Dow, a member at

a church to which the man used

to belong. The man knew from

seeing the weather reports that

the winter was particularly long

and bitterly cold with wind chill

sometimes down around minus

five thousand along the eastern

shore of Lake Michigan where

Mr. Dow lived and the man

wondered if D. Dow caught a

cold and lost his wondrously deep

bass voice and couldn’t sing in

church for a few Sundays.

But after reading a line or two

the man realized that the story

was about the Dow-Jones

Industrials. Dow-Jones the man

wondered. Why not report on

something that really reflects the

market, like the S and P, except

then the man might wonder if a

big hurricane had hit the banks

of Louisiana again and all the

electricity had been lost heating

up the coolers and spoiling the

seafood in the S and P food

markets. You just never know

about the weather anymore, he

concluded as he turned to the

back page to see if any volcanoes

had erupted recently in the Upper

Peninsula.

He sat thinking about self-indulgent, childish, pampered

celebrities

reflecting the worst of our shallow, self-absorbed,

hedonistic, lonely, isolated society.  A society whose

most memorable words are

“Not a problem,” when there really isn’t a

problem and “Whatever”

when there really is.

He thought about pimply-faced kids mugging for mug

shots while parents wait

outside the jail ready to take them to the next party

as long as the gravy train is up

and running

and the fuel is the kiddies’ bulging bank

account. “Not a problem,” they wave to the

teeny-boppering Whatevers.

In his mind, he just waves off these small-talent phenoms

and says facetiously

to his wife, “They’ll probably be dead

before they are fifty.” Fifty? 

What about thirty? Whatever.

And then there was this one, the one four-years-short of fifty

reported dead as a door-nail

who wasn’t a free ride for the folks, wasn’t a

one-note Johnny.

No, this one was the real deal — a genius actor,

Oscar under his belt and needle in his arm

and empty dope bags on the floor.  

No problem. Whatever.

He wonders if he is to feel sorry for a character actor

apparently so short on character who

couldn’t cope with fame or

couldn’t cope with this, that or whatever,

as he sought to blow

off his loneliness,

or insecurities or perhaps

just to indulge his outsized ego – taking it to the limit? 

No problem.

The man may feel sorry for the dead actor and his family

on down the line,

but now, right now he is angry enough to say,

“Too bad he didn’t pop a ‘selfie’ in the tub with the needle

in his arm and then post it

before he died so our voyeuristic culture

could feast upon it for

Warhol’s fifteen minutes.”

Young waiters and waitresses always say,

“No problem,” when the

service requested, of course, isn’t a

problem and if brought to

their attention gather with other waiters

and waitresses and

utter “Whatever.” 

He thinks no, not “No Problem,” but problem, real problem,

big problem and no, not

“Whatever,” but ever

and ever and

ever.

Then, as a tear formed in his eye, the man

wondered why he was

so angry and, in that moment,

he felt so, so sad for the dead actor’s

family because now it’s

forever.    

He sits in the circle at the unstructured

Friends meeting breathing deeply

from the core, sitting in the Chi

posture, upright, shoulders back,

back erect, string in the center of

his head pulling him up, up, up.

Leaning slightly forward, he stares

out the huge wall of windows and

enters the tree trunk, working his

way up to the branches with each

deep breath and out to the leaves.

Sitting perfectly still he sways and

flutters with the wind. His head

becomes a leaf dog bobble-head

barking silently in the breeze and

then it grows into a coyote head

rearing up and down, backward

and forward, nostrils flaring in

and out on the outlook for smells

that spell danger. He closes his

eyes, leans back against the chair,

continues his long, slow, deep,

core breathing, opens his eyes

quickly, looks at the tree. Coyote

gone, just leaves fluttering. He

rejoices in the tree, but he would

still like to ponder the mountain

obscured by the branches and

become the mountain with people

massaging his erect shoulders

with their hiking boots as they

work their way to the top of

his head in an effort to grab

the imagined string pulling

Piestewa peak higher, higher,

higher during unstructured

worship at a Friends Meeting

House on a Sunday morning

in the desert.  

On February One he sent

an e-mail to his two children

by his late wife who died

over twenty years before

at the young and tender age

of forty-nine, at least it seems

young and tender and so

God awful premature. He didn’t

write it because he thought

they needed reminding so

much as to let them know

that he hadn’t forgotten and

to connect in that commonly

shared place of pain, sorrow,

love, memories and 

ache at the absence of 

a presence, “Today would

have been your mother’s

seventieth birthday.”  What

he didn’t write is what he

thought and he thought,

she would have been just

as pretty as ever. They

knew that. No sense writ-

ing the obvious, he thought.

“They don’t seem to know

where the center of the earth

is,” the Indian chief said

about the whites who had

just disemboweled red skin-

ned old men, women and

children. Old whites in the

desert still grasp at the Holly-

wood myth with lobster

pincers as they clumsily

poke those better suited-to-

the-sea hands into their

holsters pinching, pinching

wildly at the six-shooters,

while their horses trip blindly

over the center of the earth.