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36x48 inches. Oil painting on canvas. 3-month and 5-month payment plans available - inquire via email. 

Greener Pastures: a sestina 

Nestled far away in the small pocket

Of the girl’s weathered old coat lay

A measly dime entrenched between two threads

Braided together against the pocket seam like sheep hopping over a fence. 

She hung the jacket on the windowsill next to a dozen blueberry tarts

Dusted with brown sugar, and called her grandmother on the phone. 

Her milky pale cheeks, now toasted light cream from the summer sun, pressed against the phone.

“How are you?” she chirps, glancing over to the windowsill, the dime tucked in the pocket.

The grandmother rambles on about such and such, when she’ll drop off the tarts…

To her, dimes were the amuse bouche of wealth. A sidewalk treasure that lay

Untouched by passersby, an overused idiom with underappreciated luck, and over the fence

Of good luck signs, it reminded her of someone long gone, when time disentangles its threads

Into memories and mnemonic devices; the checkered red threads

On the jacket she used to wear going dancing in heels, back in the days before phones

and pictures made people think things were always greener on the other side of the fence,

That time or wealth never slipped away, and that miracles were well in one’s jean pocket.

One could always daydream of more ornate or self indulgent ways of living but joy lay 

Modestly in good music taste and home baked tarts. 

The girl replied to the old woman that she’d bring the tarts

Tomorrow or the day after, and she’d go take a dip in the river and leave the threads

Of her worries and pitfalls in the water. Without doubt slanted over her shoulder she’d lay

Merrily on the riverside, without self indulgence but insistent self assurance, sans phone

Line occupying her mind, finding good fortune and freedom in the pocket

Of leisurely sprawls about hissing grassy plains, before that fence 

Of tomorrow and beyond the travel of yesterday. Busyness usually struck her to the fence

Of irritation and she was irritably productive when not in the countryside. The tarts

Would do her some good, and some good square dancing could cure the threads

Of a sedentary lifestyle at the desk. Maybe she could call the boy next door on the phone

Who could fix the sink downstairs and ask him to stay for tea, wherever her intentions lay.

They could go dancing for less than a dime and lay

By the river later on, looking for constellations in the sky, battering eyelashes; sit by the fence

And pick up the paper on her way back home the next day, through the window throw out her phone,

maybe learn a new recipe for tarts,

Learn a new language, learn to tango, learn to sew needle and thread

More patiently instead of getting plucked by the promise of greener pastures

And to get swept back into here, a dime in her pocket

A head full of dreams and a phone line with ghosts, that overlay

Some cloudy days tucked in a pocket and beyond a fence

Of good adventures and tangy tarts, treasures and dimes in jumbles of threads.