Notes from Milwaukee

Gray clouds smudged into blue-torn sky, frost warning and the first need of gloves-- in my hands, last gleanings of our neglected garden plot: the watering can, now needless, and an armful of blossoms, cosmos, late-planted, lavender pink, easily bruised in this stiff wind, almost unbearably tender.

It's a joy I can't admit-- this marveling to find myself in season following season. Seems melodramatic, this inner grin, this quizzical shake of the head. "What are you so happy about?" grumbles a colleague as we whisk our way to the 12th floor. Oh, nothing , I can hardly reply, just surprised to be alive.

I have traced the line of our difference, acute angle growing ever more distant from inception when I was exactly half you. But lately, shouldering my bag and off to work, small cog in lumbering wheel, I guess similarity. In stretches of conscientious, contemplative soul into proscribed time constraints, I sense again the shared hinge, a way we still meet long after you are gone. On the path back I find within myself expressions of your bright interest: how does it, she, they work--processes and people? For both of us there is no such thing as not to care.

Clod dug up at trail's edge-- mud-colored, clawed and pitted, gator-tailed-- sinks small head and little eye in many folded neck, viper sharp and and able to wait forever.

Inexplicably, two pairs of Canada geese choose to nest on the Pleasant Street bridge. Topping short ornamental towers, gargoyle like, they imprecate passersby, lift slender tongues like stamens of black lilies, like blades concealed in the wrong end of an assassin's cane. I brave road rather than sidewalk, cars over proximity to each hard-eyed goose. From depths of smogged water, a great fish rises, long as my arm. At leisure, he samples air near the surface, lingers almost in reach. Fins ripple, large as my palm, furl like fabric in a gentle breeze. He basks in his world's liquid wind. We see walls, the expert said, they see canyons. We see an industrialized river, they see home. Every morning on my way to work, barn swallows snip air, sheer clean curves and precise angles, work clean as a bright pair of scissors in and out and under the bridge. Their bodies are effortless, an ebullience, iridescent and orange.

This tower was built to house a huge water pipe. I marvel at the beauty of this structure, which could seem entirely unnecessary but enriches passersby today as it has for over a hundred years. Changes of light on Lake Michigan Glimpses Eye of the Octopus Behemoth Warm and celebratory interlude Signs Marsupial Bridge City tulips and the cold spring