Fear, loss; "Attention Drivers
        the white curb is for..."
        I made up the rest of the sentence
        in my blue underwear at midnight,

        A leaf colored barrette is camouflaged in the live-oak leaves, fallen.
        But
        someone's head is not down there. Someone's hair is not being held
        back

    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be the master—that is all."
    --Lewis Carroll

        Now, again
        The snow begins to fall.
        I call to you,
        But you do not answer me.
        Soldiers fall.
        Was it worth it?

        I hate the sun, hate how it follows me
        throughout the day. From dawn's first steely light
        till it sets behind the hills, I'm not free
        while I hide in my room, shunning its spite
        and one-eyed glaze. When I am called to land

        The swell of mid-atlantic waves is not
        an indication of the love I found
        out of your reach on the the last pier facing
        the annihilating surf. El Morro
        still rises like a barnacled scuba diver

            The last dance on Bayita Lane
            was like the fading night
            blooming cerus' memory, like
            the hothouse uprooted, replaced
            by cheap cane furniture

Out here in the midwest, in the Great Lake states, summer is tranquil and lush: there are so many lightning bugs on the lawn, there are hints and whispers of night birds chasing one another over thick corn fields and alfalfa fields. Among this season's certainties, the Gipper is dead, laid low by Alzheimer's, sent from us in a fitting Presidential tribute. He was a man who became larger-than-life for the sake of all of us reading these pages. The death of Ronald Wilson Reagan passed like a beacon-comet for those of us who grew up in the 80's.

        Brown breast-feathers link
        a burnished chain of office,
        circle his neck

        It's easy now to read about them-distanced
        In time and place and mind through almost four
        Long-dead centuries, when one brown, thin-
        Wrapped bulb might buy a house, a ship, or more;