Venetian Nights
 It's like living in a Booth Tarkington
novel--Saturday night, and the whole town
turns out for the Venetian Nights parade
of brightly lit boats, drifting down the Root
River at dusk. A sheriff's boat leads, sound-
ing its siren in comic wails, answered
by horns from boats in shoreline marinas.
A local hospital's president is
grand marshall this year and rides the first boat.
Next are a boat of "dignitaries" (but
unnamed ones) and one with the commodores
of the three yacht clubs, these portly leaders
contrasting with the next boat's Miss Racine
(the daughter of the soprano who sang
at the symphony pops concert last night).
Only then come the floats we came for, not
many, perhaps a dozen, floating lights
water dragons, neon flowers, at least
two on Green Bay's Super Bowl victories,
a fire boat like a fountain with its spray.
All too soon another sheriff's boat marks
the end. Not much, but our grandson makes
it special with 3D lenses which blur
the lights from boats and, later, the harbor
fireworks show. Through cardboard glasses we stare
and see kaleidoscopes of falling stars

.

Sacred Heart Festival

Gray now, and half retired, Frenchy Bouton
still croons old songs in the smooth baritone
that filled piano bars around town

though today he sings for free in a tent
at the Sacred Heart church's summer fest-
ival, while ladies of the church bartend
My son and his wife always used to go
hear him play when they'd visit, and come home
laughing, so today we sit and sip coke
watching kids dance on the grass, while bored, tired
grandchildren debate whether any ride
in the carnival is worth the long lines
We are outsiders here, have always stood
apart, amused or perhaps just wistful
but when we go inside today to look
at arts and crafts in the gymnasium
a girl in the sash and gown of Mrs.
Wisconsin recognizes and hugs us

Gifted Grandchild
When school certified Shawn, he ran about
the house shouting, "I'm gifted." Gifted, but
he is too young to realize, I said,
the law of compensations's darker side--
for each deaf person with keener vision,
there's a rich man losing his only son--
each blind man hearing butterfly flutters
is balanced by a beauty's heartbreak tears--
the gifted child may still not win the race,
and some gifts come at much too high a price.

Country Road
When the fog attacks the road from the woods
I slow the car, unsure where I'm going
The rear window will not show where I've been
But there is nothing new here on this road
I've met this fog before in poems I've read
And what we know is there can make us blind
I drive, while the sky and I are graying
Trying to see fog through a haze of words

[Last posted 9/16/97.
See also Other Decasyllabics and Notes in Passing ]