Spinning Wheels

Here are two poems, the first one new, the second one old. Both have spinning wheels, but both have a different feel to them, for me at least. Without further ado:


What spins in place
A light spitting rain,
beneath the dusty city lights,
begins as I begin home.
It smells of clay,
a potters wheel spinning.

My wheels also spun once
stuck in the ditch
off the road, where
I couldn’t see
the curve in the road.

The mud kept me down
and I’ve been told that flying
is kept for others.
Couldn’t just ditch the car
or walk home alone.

That was up north, but down
here a different wheel spins
the dust behind my eyes.
As I move, all this moisture -
will it make mud or clay?

------------------------

The First Vineyard
A pinwheel spins at the end of the driveway
and, across the road, a vineyard runs
uphill and out of sight
before the final row.

Yet neither is moving away.
Endlessness waits in a line of emerald leaves
and a crawling space beneath,
hidden by the upward slope.

The pinwheel creaks at every moving car,
but cannot be heard in passing.

I am listening, fool though I am,
sitting on the edge of the road,
wishing I could enter the deserted vineyard:
an open land, a heart I have not touched.

I long to be welcomed beyond the fence:
to join and not steal,
to gather and not partake,
to wander and never be lost.