Three Weeks After Christmas in York Nebraska

Three Weeks After Christmas in York Nebraska

Morning,

I watch the sun slowly lift over the soccer practice-field,

turning each brown blade into a single flame that burns the

black night to pale ash.

A single bare oak stretches toward

a blue sky where wings

heave in unison to weight its arms like plump,

black winter-fruit.

The most recent snow lies heavy along the sides

of the streets, ready to dissolve into the first hint of a

south wind.

Hulitt Hall stands at the corner of the college campus

with all its eyes empty, the mortar

of its porous bricks tentative as it looks beyond the

houses to harvested fields that I imagine once

swayed like a living sea with the coming of April.

My grandfather moved here from

Arkansas and huddles over steaming cups of black coffee, testing the

wind outside with misty eyes. I believe he sees mostly things that

have already passed. Now he waits, doubtful of their return.

Ila Key moves slower each year

inside the house where she is forever

rearranging pictures of children, grand children and

weddings.

She knots her clumsy knuckles to knit butterfly afghans

for straighter shoulders.

Tom came back from "Desert Storm."

He and Denise will rest by a fire this evening, listening

to public radio.

Sheryl, my wife, cocoons our daughter

in warm cotton blankets. waiting to release her fragile,

pink-fingers onto a green lawn.

There is a man who wandered in off the interstate

and stayed.

He wears a trash-bag hood and no socks

and I wonder if his toes are blackening

one by one

beneath his stiff leather tennis shoes.

I don't know his name.

My house wears empty colored bulbs

clacking on thin wires, swaying against staples

in the eaves and

my town is full of dumpsters, open-mouthed with

rotting spruce and pine and broken mirrored globes.

My dreams are jarred at night by the swing that

bumps our porch rail. I sit up,

listening to the wind howl at just the right angle

to play the rain-gutter outside our window like a

bottle-top.