George Amabile

Seeing Things
 
It’s Winter but the apple tree, charred
black in the dawn, has all its leaves.  Hard
to accept.  I rub my eyes but it’s no dream.
As the light comes up, they start to flutter, cow-
licked by a breeze that swirls in the snow-filled yard.
Then they all blow off at once, they just lift and stream
away, a chattering eisteddfod, a pow-wow
                        of sparrows.

Spellbound
 
All afternoon the snowflakes whirl and fall.
In the park, skaters glide on the scraped mirror
of the duck pond, redeemed from trial and error 
like figurines on track in a glass ball.

It’s a seasonal thing, an iconography
of good cheer that returns from Christmases past
when positive ideas had the power to cast
their  breathless charms against catastrophe.

Those who watch from the road are reassured
by the calm skill, the clean redundancy
of scarves in the wind, blades that carve and coast
always in circles, closed as the stone outpost
where dead men dreamed, in the nation’s infancy,
that every ill we suffer would be cured. 

Amulet

Looking at the flat, mist-filled jade
moon-stone in the light of day,
I wonder if its molecular resonance effect
technology can really protect
my bio-field from the stress of Electro
Pollutants, and I remember the way
Zen Fool successfully deflected
that swarm of noisy kids.  “Hey,
have you heard, are you not aware,
there’s free candy down at the Square.”
When they were gone, his face
lit up and he began to race
after them.  From the other side
of the road, an onlooker, quick
to pick up on the slick trick,
was puzzled.  He called out, “That was a lie
you told, Fool, in order to make them go
away, so why are you running?”  In mid-stride
the Fool shrugged, “Yes, but you never know.”

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