A Murder of Words

Not paint, though color is suggested.
Perhaps then mere suggestion, though
it must live somewhere to be created.
Perhaps  on a small-town street were
summer stretches in to autumn, scratches
at the hulk of winter.  A wife and children —
two — a modest mortgage and modest job,
a dog, used car and garden in the back yard —
all this on the pallet, all this waiting for
a brush.  The mumbo-jumbo must be
in the arrangement, as it is in a bouquet —
a rose here, a carnation there, such opposites,
they attract the inner eye and live.  Perhaps
it is what I bring and blend in.  I know what
makes me cry, what makes me laugh, I know
the scent of tobacco in a late-August field.
Perhaps it is nothing more than the sight of
this murder of bound words, the way the sun
catches the maple tree, the way the wind
catches in the door’s screen web, the way
a word hears the coming evening, spreads
its wings and soars, bathing in the texture of wind.