Is the day perfect  
if there are no birds to wake you  
but there is lemonade?  

or if you live on Lemonade Street  
but there are no birds on electric lines  
because the utilities are underground.  

no birds twittering in trees  
just the sweet sour taste  
of lemonade puckering your mouth  

the scent of bonnie braes in the air,  
standing still in a pitcher of ice water,  
tangy, acidy,  
still sweeter than most.  

My neighbor,  
who is always preening and  
chatting up the neighbors,  
makes hers with bubble gum bursts and *****,  
a lemon drop of punch drunk love.  

If I want birds and trees  
I just walk across the street  
to the older neighborhood with telephone poles—  
some line birds,  
but mostly garden gnomes and bird baths.  

My dog delights in yanking me there,  
scattering the conferences  
of cardinals and jays in mid song  
from worm feast  
to the trees.  

Here, old men and women  
in shorts and summer dresses,  
holding citron nectar  
in tall glasses with seeds, rind and pulp,  
delight in their perfect day  
filled with lemonade and birds.  

I don’t know anymore  
if they are thrilled with the trill  
or fed up with the cacophony  
of untuned bird calls,  
birds in all the trees where they belong,  
silent at night.  

Deep in the forest  
filled with leaves,  
I suppose their diamond-throated song  
is a mournful dirge  
for when a tree falls  
silently, deadly in the green.  

One day our small community saplings  
will bloom,  
and the days will be filled  
with the miracle of birdsong  
and drinking lemonade  
on Lemonade Street.

how holy it is
to be the reason someone tastes like ruin.

Orpheus Listens to the Requiem of His Own Undoing  
                (after Leonard Kress)


Orpheus hears his songs played on broken strings,  
A dirge plucked soft by an old man with blight.  
He laughs at this fiasco, cringes as it rings,  
Echoes bending, whispering through trees at night.  

Behind him, nova bass lines swell and roll.  
He imagines the dancers weaving in a line,  
The wading birds now gone—silent in their toll,  
Their scattered iambs left to beachgoers’ time.  

He turns back—loses his time, theirs too.  
He pleads; time will not rewind for beggars.  
He cries; sorrow will not soften, nor undo.  
He sets his vision on a new career—foreteller.  

He fixes his fate, throwing his guitar,  
Its keys, its chords—all song surrendered to riptide’s pulse.