commute – The Coming of the Toads

Cold Car

Early still dark and the cat is up
a cup of coffee before commute
past a golden sun in woods lost
to old Firestones rubber cairns.

Commutes are like short stories
back out, turn around, take off
reach the corner slow stop turn
right down the hill to the light.

The hills loom typographically
a bold outline of italicized firs
at an intersection of squirrels
and owls a tree older than any

house on the block remembers
not who lived where but winds
and howls rains and scorching
sun a few children on swings.

Houses last longer than cars
trees longer than houses the
old man recalls his home his
cars and the tree he planted

in his front yard a year prior
to the war and it lived to see
the freeway come through
odd name that, he said,

no one on it ever seemed free
especially if you missed your
offramp had to go another
mile or two get off back on.

One picks a car like a font
default curlicue bumpers
and chrome strips along
the doors inside the bowl

cold in the counter stroke
as one enters the aperture
the temperature there not
quite human in spite of the

comfort compared to the horse
drawn buggy or the old man
with a staff stumbling toward
town his rucksack full of acorns.

The Old Commute

Retired from structured work
where one comes in time
to a sense of worthiness
awake but dewy-eyed

we often rode together but
arrived to chalk and cheese
shifts you taught me
to go easy to go around

and the rain fell down
petrichor filled the hooptie
and I long now for those days
when we used to commute.

Sitting in the City

Maple out spray maying ribbons of flowers twirl the girls round the pole boys pulling with bicycles festoons falling yards full of toys and fickle mud.	Sitting out warm summer evenings, distant wildfires raking up the dry brush, smoke seen by astronauts as far away as January, surf still rolling up the beaches all around the world, I think of those days and nights six months opposite and reflect on the perfection of earth time. We have “seen the travail”: “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away…That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been” (Ecclesiastes, 3:6-15, KJV). But from the time the alarm clocks call and coo across the great divide, and while some rush to it others delay with snooze, to the resetting of the alarms at night, all grow quickly and remain forever impatient with time. So time moves on: the commute doglegs left as the slow lane stops while drivers get out and pee behind the rail; cells go dead and news is lost forever; the lady in front of you in line at the coffee drive-thru is ordering lattes with lemon twists and chocolate sprinkles atop whipped cream delight – for her whole office; you stop for a jam filled doughnut, already late, and you don’t give a damn about the new diet. Walking to the front door from the parking lot you wonder if you’ve worn the right clothes for the day. You forgot your sack lunch. The café is serving mac and cheese. You promise a nice salad for dinner. Someone has tossed a cigarette butt in your path – how rude is that! By the time you leave the office, it’s dark out and you’ve forgotten the doughnut and the salad.
July table in the shade under the apple tree: pickles, potato salad, baked beans, deviled eggs, bottles of beer, water balloon toss, evening of pops, night of dust.
By the end of August, the sun slipping south at an alarming speed, the activists suggest a presidential decree: a declaration of a state of emergency, plan parades in glee.
Winter whistles restlessly, inflows of wet and dry cold, floods and long lines at the flu counter, impeccable timing, seasons on earth, neither hurried nor harried, quit nor balked.