the 4:30 pm rush at logan international airport

Four minutes before the flight was scheduled to arrive from Denver, Colorado, I slipped inside the airport terminal. Stopped. Looked around. Walked up to the computer screen to check on arrival times. Except for the two high school boys working at the car rental booths to my left, I was the only person in the airport. Maybe I missed my brother's arrival? Maybe I was too early?

But, no. I was right on time.

This is what it can be like flying into Montana's biggest city from one of Western USA's biggest cities. Only five people got off the plane. After retrieving suitcases from the baggage terminal, we were advised to take our time walking out to the parking lot. Seems that Joe, the parking lot attendant, had to walk out to his toll booth so we could stop and pay him to open the exit gate.

coyote poem in camas

How to Draw an Albino Coyote

Leave your white crayon in the box.

Draw a simple forest. Brown strokes go down and up.
Upside down Vs in green make pretty lodge pole pines.

Smudge these with your thumb. This is how trees become
one forest. This is how we blur.

Leave a blank space- a place for her to hide.

For the Absaroka Wilderness, draw tips of broken stars.
Think of using purple – like the mountain song.

Save your blue crayon for when you see her eyes.
Tear the paper from your gray to slash thunder in the sky.

Scatter orange and yellow circles for flowers on the ground.
Let some of them be crushed.

Really pleased to share this poem
here. It was published in a
favorite environmental journal,
Camas, The Nature of the West in their 2010 Diversity Issue. Hope
you will check out what this journal is all about.

tender

Spreadsheets were not balancing and no one was answering the phone at work. I leaned forward to find my phone buried under stacks of ledger pages.

 "May I have the wrong number please?"asked an elderly woman with a weak, wavery voice. 

Our company has five locations, each location has five lines. Out of the twenty-five phone numbers none of them are . . . wrong. Through the smoke-glass window separating my office from the large lobby outside my office door, I watched Haney shuffle his way across the lobby floor. Katie Couric looks better on our lobby TV than on his living room set, he likes to tell us. We serve him coffee and doughnuts from the employee’s lunchroom. When he gets carried away with the volume button on the remote, we offer to take him out for lunch, dropping him home afterward.

“Wrong number?” I queried, stalling for time to understand.

**

Some years ago, my son worked his way through school serving residents in the dining room of a local retirement home. The first time he served Esther she asked him what it was she liked to drink. New to the place, he didn't know, but glanced at her upturned coffee cup and suggested coffee.

"No, no, " she replied, “it's what goes in this cup right here.” She tapped the coffee cup and added, "it's what big kids drink!"  

Discovering a connection for the first time, he smiled at her, "Oh!  I need to go into the big kid kitchen for your drink!" and came back with milk in her coffee cup, much to her pleasure.

**

Recalling this incident, I asked my caller if she was calling for Richard.

I work with four Richards.  Big Richard has worked here for 50 years, guaranteed a job forever by the owner, an old high-school friend.  Little Richard specializes in talking to farmers about John Deere tractors and when to plant their crops even though we are not in the business of farming. And then there is the Richard we call Rick and the other one we call Pete. When people call for Richard, they don't realize there are four of them.  When their call gets transferred to any available Richard, often times the caller realizes they've been transferred to the Wrong Richard. And when I've been saying Richard, what I've meant is Dick.

Perhaps, my caller had previously called for Richard, and ended up with the Wrong Richard.  I assumed it had been such a wonderful conversation, that calling a second time, she wanted to have that same "wrong" number.

Maybe that was it.

 

I transferred her call to the Wrong Dick (excuse me, I meant to say Wrong Richard). I snuck outside my office door to listen as he answered the call in another office. His delighted laugh and gentle, teasing voice told me I had guessed which wrong number was right. He remembers birth dates, the names of your five children, where you lived before you moved. How long it's been since your husband died. And how you like your coffee.

alley finds

switterbit: an aftertaste of rain


two policemen are holding hands
wild snap peas can actually grow in alleys
look -- someone wrapped Earth in fat blue cotton

others are going out for Friday perch

an alarm clock opens and closes its fist
a car door slams, someone races back:
never leave home without your color swatch

I'd hate not knowing anyone named Birdie

this one would take his banjo to a violin concerto
that one trusts in lottery cookies
if god had a soup ladle in his hand, she’d ask for a bite of meat

frog underbellys are grey

getting light all over

Snowboarding in Red Lodge, he moved through a cloud of snow.

Beneath them, the patrol was preparing for a snowboard competition.

Making snow.

**

At home, he showed us the dings on his snowboard (shh, he hit a tree),

the photos on his ipod (shh, it's like moving through the sound).

**

While looking at the shots, the flood light in the loft burned out.

Changing the bulb with her brother,

she cautioned: Don't break the light --

we don't want light to get everywhere.

*****

Photo by Will Faber. Ipod touch.

waiting for a reply

These birds of the feather flocking together -- are they patient while they wait for what they want?

Do they want? I ask my father after he emails this photo, taken from the frozen Missouri River.

My father speculates: Yes, they do want. They want a ride home.

Do they know what home feels like? I write back.

Photo by William O'Keefe

sans

Because she asked, I altered this photo for Rose Hunter, a poet who lives in Mexico every chance she gets. Beneath the surface is my photo from this blog's header. The horses come from her. Lately she's swapped photos for her words.

**

I learn that the man who signs my paychecks was once a little boy with a matchbook collection. He tells me this while showing me lost-until-now photos of his father from the 1920s. I ask, how does it make you feel to see these photos of your father for the first time? He says it made him remember his matchbook collection that blew away when the door to his family's storage trailer was left unlocked one winter years ago.

**

My cell phone rings - a friend calling  about his first night on the job managing a 24 hour call center, a job he had never wanted to accept. I'm braced to hear complaints about calming angry customers, but instead -- this: The lady from Ohio ordering a meat processor and three extra blades  at 2:35 a. m. gave birth to a baby while talking to him on the phone. He called 911 in her home town, stayed on the phone and reminded her to breathe. He got to hear the baby cry. It was a healthy baby boy.

**

A friend I've not seen for some weeks sends an email today. Did she want to talk, I query. Instead of replying she tells me about standing in a field of snow, shouting at the sky. The night was dark, the moon was gone. This is what it must feel like, she writes, to stand on the corner of 4th and Exposition  holding a cardboard sign: Anything Would Help.

handful of stones

A Handful of Stones invites us to participate this month in following a trail of small stones: polished moments of paying attention. Have a go at it, but don't force it. Everything is already there. Here. And showing up as missing.

***

Home-less  (hmls)

NOUN: (used with a pl. verb) People without homes considered as a group. Often used with the.

There, to the left -- a tiny Christmas

tree growing in the empty lot

across the street from Denny's.

Old snow drifted over. The flash

of blue parked downwind from the tree.

Someone's borrowed grocery cart

stuck in knee-deep crust.