Sonnet 18 Reconsidered

When, at the end of a long and tedious day,
I blow my cool and have a temper fit
and you retreat in anger and dismay
to brood among your scorps and router bits,
when I have scrubbed and buffed until floors shine,
the curtains starched, the windows all undimmed,
and you must save the eggplant from decline
in a salvaged plastic bucket, red, mud-trimmed,
because you cannot stand to see it fade
and lose its half-formed fruit, what do we owe
those thirty-year-old marriage vows we made,
but laughter at these life-long fights we know
will plague us until one goes to the grave
and, like this sonnet, will not be resolved?

Evening Song

This time of day the sun hangs west and low
and makes a yellow puddle on the grass
between the cedar and the Biltmore ash,
such slanting light the only God I know.

And why not God, who once could be the rain,
or else the thunder, or the lightning blow
that topped that ash tree twenty years ago?
The shrapnel broke the kitchen window pane.

I want a quiet, undemanding God,
a yellow light, not one that blinds, to see
the things I have to see when I’m alone:

Mother now has lost the will to read,
asking only to lie warm and free
from pain. The old cat curls around its bones.