Oh, Balls! Tea Fleas!

Oh, balls! My teabag breaks releasing
a cloud of what as a child I called
"tea fleas." I pour the steaming
orange-brown liquid down the sink.

New Year's Eve: Donna and I toast each
other with dirty martini, gin and tonic.
Mother calls my cell, dressed up waiting
for us to take her out -- for Christmas.

I'll drive her to show her the "duckies"
in the A.M. Now is adult time: glitter
and gingerbread houses in the packed,
chatty restaurant at the Museum of Art.

I'm days from my sixtieth birthday.
I feel like the Australian python
who gobbled the four golf balls,
mistaking them for hen's eggs.

Christopher T. George

*****************

Spatial Concept -- Nature

With snowflakes floating down, I
escape D.C.'s frigid streets to cut

through the Hirschhorn garden and
shelter by a glossy-leaf magnolia,



a big bronze walnut on the lawn.
I try to write down its details

on an old Comcast bill; pen won't
write, makes a hole in the paper;

I stuff the bill in my pocket, see
the sculptor's name is "Fontana"

like the tricky cop in "Law and Order."

Christopher T. George




******************

Rapscallion Mood

New Year's Day, just before my sixtieth birthday:
in a frigid breeze, the red-berried holly sloughs

against yews where last February I photographed
a scatter of berries on an ice-glazed snowfield.

Oh, fortunes in berries I will never own in my life!
Wind chastises my cheeks; metal streetsign screams

its protest. As white clouds race across blue skies
beyond high rises, ice crystals glow a rainbow hue.

Christopher T. George