In Country

The conductor’s whistle,
an answering squeal as the train’s wheels
lurch, a quickening hiss
as milling, infernal crowds in the cavernous
Hauptbahnhof fall away to the dull sheens
of Frankfurt, the gray-green Main,
the cindery, static, mizzling slate
of a German sky…

Being American
is part of my baggage. Even before I greet
cabinmates with a botched
phrasebook sentence and sit, my tonsured scalp,
baby-pink GI face, draw stares or nods
of boreal politeness. I hunker,
arms locked, a deaf-mute, into my cushion.
Like a film screen,

fleeting scenery
at my shoulder offers bittersweet refuge out of
and into heaviness:
miniature, pastel, red-tile-roofed cottages,
bikers on beech lanes, pastures neat
as quilts under a skyline
of blue hills, like Tennessee’s, flash by.
What a poor guesser

the mind is!
Where is the Germany of the daydream? dirndled
villagefolk dancing
in the half-timbered Marktplatz? Horn-echoing
woodlands of Wagner, Goethe?—the generous
country of the tinted postcard
that somehow (oh, inevitable appetite
which makes the dissatisfied

put dreamage
to the proof!) enlisted a fleecy adolescent
indolence to board northeast-
erly-gusting winds and report for duty where
the Neckar feeds the Rhine? Today
I must confront
impermeable bedrock. The conductor, grunting,
punches my ticket.

On Grass

I stepped outdoors while the sun was warm
to search thin snow if something formed
could help dislodge a bedded, numb
river rock where the blood is warmed.

A robin kept fleeing my slow boot tread,
not far, re-staking each claim of ground
with quick jabs and quizzical cocks of head.
I wondered what livelihood it found.

The drab grass, strawy and rough to touch,
smelled moist, like spring, its patchy green
shiny with thaw in the windy March
day’s clashing tempers of cloud and sun.

“Winter will need to move indoors,”
I laughed aloud, misting chilly air
with cheer that nudged my heart-rock loose.
The scene didn’t notice or seem to care

about inner weathers, cheer or grief
or landscapes they carve in a human breast,
unless in the ruffled annoyance of
a bird hunting grasses for its spring nest.

Carey Jobe is a retired attorney who has published poetry over a 45-year span.  His work has recently appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, The Chained Muse, and The Society of Classical Poets.  He has authored a volume of poetry, By River or Gravel Road, and is currently working on a second collection.  He lives and writes in Crawfordville, Florida.