PASSAGEWAYS

Crowded corridors funnel herds,

Queue the roguish and the errant,

Transition the docile, and steer wayfarers.

Narrow hallways, dark alleys, and

Subterranean tunnels echo

Times marked by wanderlust and

The aimless search for rooms or exits.

Passageways, random

Sequels of blank walls, rails,

Or roadside brush

Hooked together with a single thread,

Looped around rooms,

Carried onto the

Next stairway or fire escape,

Onto the next foot path

Through briars and trees

Towards imagined ponds.

Each day is spent more in passage

Than in reflection or contemplation.

Rooms and destinations are obstacles that

Bend, reflect, or absorb the thread

Dragged along wherever footprints have

Fallen and been erased by others corralled

Into the same meat packer’s pen.

© cmheuer, 2017

  

FREEZING RAIN

Wind gusts from the northwest cut around the eaves,

Split open sleeping eyelids, and

Cast a ghost light over canopies of branches

Weighted down to the height of the windows.

Pear blossoms are sheathed in glaze ice;

Blasts of air arch the top-heavy, loblolly trunks;

Tuffs of ice-coated, green needles fall and

Scatter like pine cones at the base of the trees;

Ice scraps pelt the ground;

Supercooled raindrops freeze

At the touch of a blade of grass.

There is mystery in mid-March winter storms,

Ill-timed for spring’s first buds and petals.

Unforeseen interruptions in lines of thought and sight

Become cloaked fragments,

Frozen and suspended in mid-air,

Transformed and generated into icy apparitions that

Break from their boughs, melt and disappear.

©  cmheuer, March, 2017