Seeing Blues

  Dressed in short sleeve blue work shirt and darker blue shorts

  a scruffy man who looks like he has probably seen better days

  lopes forward, his shanks an awkward inverted v, dragging

  what looks like a stripped tree branch that is taller than him.

  With a tattered American flag fastened near its top, he keeps 

  this makeshift pole upright beside him.  A breeze bellies the flag's 

  upper blue ground and its white stars out above his right shoulder,

  but in the area below the red and white stripes are merest shreds.

  Like the man, the space he walks through looks disordered.

  Above, puffy white clouds hang framed with varied shades of blue.

  Behind him, on the left, a blue frame house with white eaves

  leans left as it sinks slowly down into the Choupique Bayou.

  This poem, a concerned witness, wants him to be someplace else soon.

  Somewhere life is good, the winds are calm, and hurricanes never come.