Another Christmas Flight
(Back to Key West …

The child has wings again!
Now the butterfly-mottled shadows
on the water.

Soon the circling tour
of pink and white and burnt orange houses.

This is my present,
and just watch it

unwrapping itself!

**

Flying, Home
A Key West poem

You never seem young when you are.
But now you thirst for youth, age’s recognition
slaking in like raindrops through the jalousies.
Growing older with every whip
Of the plane’s propellers toward Key West,
hands of a clock furiously beating
to stay aloft.

But aging is its own blessing, and you
are never too old to gasp again
at the pink-and-white splendor
stuccoed on this island, each time
you see this crazy-quilt masterpiece
from the air. It is youth and surcease.

You come here like a pilgrim
bearing profound thanksgiving.
The sun shines differently here, and people
walk in wonder, lungfish just learning their legs.
The people, the island are so deep
in your belly you can feel it,
the sunshine so deep in the lungs
you can breathe it, keep it

as we are supposed to keep Christmas,
in our hearts, year ’round.

**

Grounded in Key West, Christmas Eve
For Steve and Sarah at the El Patio

I can’t back off the tricky slick slope
the airport fog has filled with snails,
sticky tracks damp and cramping visibility.
I swallow half-hatched plans, the whole
egg of a giftless Christmas. My bride

crawls the lugubrious night with me,
hitching our fortunes to a cell phone star,
and the ring is a Noel, there is a room
at the inn, the mist that fetched us
from our mortal plans drops us into

enough luck to find four fog-shrouded walls
and a magic sturdy bike to cut the thick night
and find provisions in its scar. We have salvaged
something and this love is our portable home.
Near dawn she rests, Key West roosters crow

and I fret, encumbered with the slow,
amber-trapped task of escape, bursting
from the blessed warm walls that saved us,
straining yet yearning to fly half-exhausted
toward something cold but clear, fogless

and unmistakably home.