Back Issue  Spring 2007

Smokey and the Lost Boy

Drowsy, late summer afternoon, my brother David followed

his cat Smokey into the woods behind our old white house.

He was two or three, woke early from his nap, tottered off

while my mother slept on, brook murmuring and whispering.

He followed Smokey out over stone and through the pine grove

past tall spindly grasses and into the blackberries, sometimes

wobbling, falling; sometimes crawling where prickers grabbed

at his hand-made sweater, tugged his cuff.

Above him brambles bent in long arcs, heavy with dark fruit,

and David, my brother went through them all, a little human

croquet ball, his sweater striped like the wooden post

that is your final croquet destination.

Smokey stretched out on the moss and slept, a white cat

with a grey spot on his belly, a puff of smoke,

from which his name floated, his belly a pillow, his purr

a small lullaby for a boy in the brambles.

For kids he wrote a book, Pumpkin Shivaree (Handprint Books) and his poems in Crow Milk (Oyster River Press) got read by Garrison Keillor