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Found on last night’s walk,
trampled into the loose gravel
between road and field,
this screwdriver
with its battered blue handle
and its hard-earned philosophy
concerning the world’s obsession
with tightness, and battening down
anything that rattles.
Oh, the stories it could tell
if it would
of things it has bound together.
But it’s only interested in tales
of the work it loves best–
in fact, what brought it out traveling
on the road this very night—
Searching for something to loosen.

Note: Sometimes, life just tosses things at us, an odd little synchronicity like a tiny wrapped gift.  Due to some tech glitch, we’ve been without Internet access for a couple of days, so I missed the daily April prompt I’ve been using from Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  Instead,I  wrote a poem prompted by my day.  This morning, Internet restored, I checked the prompt I missed. “Write an auto poem.” Automatic? Automobile? Hmmm….here’s the poem I’d already written.

There’s an over-sized pickup truck
ahead of me-red, with lurid art
covering the back window:
Skull and crossbones, flames.

I am idly judging the driver,
thinking my thoughts,
not so much jumping to conclusions
as wandering over to them,
cozy and familiar.
Then he stops
in the middle of the block
to let little kids on bikes cross the street.

There it goes again. Life,
shaking its head,
giving me new thoughts to think.

It was an old wooden box, with no key. She found it at a yard sale in a small town fifty miles away and paid too much for it. Back home, she placed it on the kitchen table and smashed the lock off to see what the box held.

Inside were bits of paper, handwritten, full of advice, contingency plans, exit maneuvers. She sorted them into piles, dividing them by types of paper. Each kind of paper, she soon discovered, had its own flavor of advice.

There were blue squares, with  roosters in the corner, shopping lists on one side: apples, milk, roasts, white bread. On the back of the lists, in the same flowing script, motherly advice: In case of rain, unexpected company, wrinkled linens. Another stack: Blue-lined notebook paper in childish handwriting, shaky Palmer script advising her what to do in case of lost homework, bullies, bad lunches. There were index cards with neat, blocky printing and instructions on what to do in case of problems with furnaces, rain gutters, flat tires.

Finally, at the bottom of the box, a few strips of thick, cream colored paper. Some  with no words at all, only tiny sketches of trees and flowers that had never grown in this world. The advice, if there was any,  tended towards what to do in case of infestations of  fairies, how to manage elves who  came to visit  and wouldn’t go home, plans in case of dragons. The very last slip of paper said, In case you are lost….with a hand-drawn map on the back.

At last. She nearly cried with relief. Practical advice, at last.

A pregnant teenage daughter,
poem so dark
you cannot find a candle.
Wait.

Three years pass
while the next stanza
Grows.

Now, this laughing child:
All bossy charm
and sidewalk chalk,
asking five hundred questions
while she blows her small breath
at the wind chimes
announcing that when the chimes play,
Everyone should dance–
Pouring light all over this house
so thick you dance slow
just to savor the view
through the glowing windows.

She answers everything I ask
with few words,
no extra splash of detail,
nothing of how you linger
over conversation you’re enjoying,
that way people have of no longer swimming hard
towards the destination of the other shore,
the end of this talk,
but floating,
showing off handstands and somersaults,
or treading water
just to enjoy the silky feel of
words swirling around in little eddies.