It’s now snowing

Atlanta to Detroit
My name on a sign:
WHITMAN
In the black limo I look:
his name on the I.D. card.
Olip Somethingoranother.
His eyes in the rear view mirror.
“So, you’re a Russian Jew.”
Stated, not asked.
“How did you know?”
“Whitman! What else?”
My father’s father escaped the Czarist draft.
That’s all I know of Russian Whitmans
and a steamer ticket out of Hamburg:
Moses and Helena Wittman.
Leaving Detroit Metro
it’s now snowing
dead of winter.

**

Taking Leave: Last Sunday

After 27 years in Utah
time to go. Bittersweet
to take leave from this home.

There was snow Saturday.
Summer was not over.
Autumn had not turned.

Today we head up Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Aspens still green are framed in white/
Ess curves take us to 8730 feet.

We walk the snow-packed path
the encircles Silver Lake
at the Brighton Loop.

At the observation deck
a female mallard paddles by
and leaves behind a white tail feather

floating to shore.

**

Blizzard Postpones Golf while Poet Leaves Town

you can count on it
every February
Pebble Beach Golf on TV
you can count on it
lots of Dead Time
when not much of anything is happening
you can count on it
canned video
golf lore and history
you can count on it
a 45 second silent movie strip
“White Out at the old Crosby Pro-Am”
you can count on it
no mention in same snow storm
a poet died that day, January 20, 1962
he counted on it
Jeffers built his stone home in 1919
put a bed downstairs for a good death bed
he counted on it
as we say “Woke up dead”
the sea daemon took him out to sea
we can count on it
our “Stone Mason of Tor House”
born in a snowstorm back East and left us in one