FRIENDSHIP THAT DOES NOT WAVER

for Margaret Maron

Sitting in lightsome shine with country daylight,

A comforting, non-judgmental treasure,

I feel Thank-you shaking me:  a wish surrounds my mind:

Publish your poems.

Feeling talk-back lips more than any errors,

I float loyalty into your scene with timely

Shouts of mystery not of my own writing.

                                                I feel like a barking Corgi puppy.

Sold on remembrances, mindful, searching,

Doggone it, yes!  I want to read your slave-lines

Which assess the family story from its past.

It calls like a crow’s caw,

So that infused by longing to venerate,

Without jokes or importunate flourish,

I ground the pages leading me to your novels.

I find you, therefore, we are.

Lonely now,  questing, I see you, school girl, sitting,

Thirteen, fourteen, forward-leaning toward our teacher, Miss Fisher.

Hearing the lesson-plan, you move your full face, shortly,

spelled “silence.”

We are cousins; I see you turn the pages,

Keeping the moment for yourself, or your part of it.

Loveliness, still a burdensome relation,

yields soft turns in your school-desk.

Traveling homeward, you socialize with darkness,

Spread-eagle with those that fly the field-lights,

Prompting a query:  Where’s the  poem

                                                wanting has touched me.

Fiddledeedee has been scattered on the road in

Your Willow Springs:  it salutes your writing,

Yielding to readers rushing to read our welcoming laughter.

I leave you with good intentions.

Just let days not tangle; hand the friend the poems,

Row along willows what your words you feel are,

Calling with no put off:   how can a friend captain

Mortality’s Protocol?

Time’s a sea-crawl, whereat I am dreaming

I should be still and leave your many poems.

Seeing my work you splurge at sharing

close as my name.

Query from Willow showers in the spaces,

Townships, alone, where once we wrote our longings:

Evil and good have set us onto letters

                                                whose shapes confab.