From
The Ladder Of Memory:

Dickerson’s Grocery Store

We would walk together, my brother and I,
Too small to ride bikes or go alone,
The three blocks from our house
To Dickerson’s,
The only grocery store in town,
A block from the only café.

Dickerson’s, with the big
Plate glass window out front,
Letting most of the light there was
Into that dim canyon of cans.

Dickerson’s, to us,
The biggest room around,
Except for the church and high school,
Bigger than the post office next door,
Or Charlie Gardner’s soda parlor
Across the street, or Lonnie Hamm’s
Barber shop with the one, high chair,
In the room built on the front of his house.
Not bigger, I remember now, than the bank,
But we may have been there only once.

Whereas Dickerson’s was
The pantry of our home.
Any morning or afternoon,
Mother might send us there
For a can of Campbell’s soup,
Or some good yellow American cheese,
That Mr. Hirschel Dickerson himself
Would pull from beside a gigantic
Red tube of baloney
And cut slices miraculously thin,
With the whirling silver wheel-knife
That made us pull in our fingers.

Where Hirschel got all that food
We never thought to want to know,
But trudged with our fine, brown, smooth
Paper bag home through the sun or snow,
Doing the slow two-step dance
All children blessed with two feet do,
In time to the simple tin-can rhythm
Of their hearts’ double-ended roll.

Our parade of two proudly passed
The reviewing stand,
Perhaps of a uniformed red cardinal
On a branch, festooned with
Orange berry pom poms,
In the white bunting snow.

From
Green Whistle

Not Yet A Part

When I was young,
I fell in love
With a blond farm girl.
I had just started grade school,
And she came in from the country
On a bus.

I lived in Catlin, Illinois,
With my parents
Just arrived from Vienna, Austria,
Driven out
For having dark hair and skin.
My twin brother,
For some reason, was fair,
And my father loved him
For his golden chance to fit in.

In this new land of yellow corn
I worshiped Karen Cord,
She fit in everywhere, and every day,
Cloudy or clear,
Like the sun in the fields,
Like my brother in my father’s fears,
Whereas I hovered in lunar shadow,
Waiting for someone
To reflect light on me.

And Karen of the fair skin
Did love me
For a while,
My black curls were a rarity
In her yellow world.
On the playground,
I would line up with her,
And shine when she laughed.

Until one day
The yellow bus
Brought a new boy to our school,
He could do all the things I could do,
He could run fast,
And when he ran, his light brown hair
Flowed fine as corn silk.

Then Karen Cord sent a message,
She loved him more than me,
And suddenly
The merry-go-round stopped gliding
Like waves of corn in the wind,

It began to make me sea-sick,
Like an immigrant’s freight boat,
Over-crowded with memories and dark,
Not a part of the world it came from

Or the world it came to,
Not yet a part.

From
The Spiral Staircase

Frog Poet

The life
Of a poet
Is
A fairy tale-

The frog is
Transformed
Into a prince,
By a kiss
Of the muse,
After spending
Much time
In a dungeon.

Better to start
As a frog,
He thinks,
And become
A prince,
Than always
To have been one—

Extremely
Grateful
To gaze amazed,
Into the mirror
Of paper—
And see
A prince caper.

From
Butterfly

Lucky Gambler

I am
A born gambler,
Have gambled
All my life
That I could change
My luck,
First as a caterpillar,
Just a fancy worm,
I wagered
My luck would turn
And it did,
Then I entered
The gambling palace

Of the chrysalis,
Here I spun
The roulette wheel
Of fate,
And up came
My lucky number,
I escaped,
I hit the jackpot
Of a large fortune,
And found I had become
A butterfly,
A darling of creation—
I wagered, and won.