If I say I’ve known
a home that’s crowded,
the finches say
that’s highly doubted.
More thanks to photographer and finch landlord
S.W. Berg.
Monthly Archives: July 2020
July 26.20: Coping
Befuzzed denizens
of tiny nest pocket
look like they stuck
their beaks in a socket.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
And, if there are any grammar purists left,
my apologies to them for the improper conjunction.
July 25.20: Coping
Summer snowflake
luminescent,
polka-dot
of lace florescent,
meadow frosting,
highway frill,
whitewater froth
of mid-air rill.
Thanks yet again to photographer S.W. Berg.
July 20.20: Coping
On a still summer evening,
near the trees’ looking glass,
I developed the fidgets
from eyes in the grass.
I share my shade gladly,
I grant it rent-free,
so why this imperious
staring at me?
Magnanimous me,
all live-and-let-live —
could they be thinking the shade
is not mine to give?
July 17.20: Coping
Snuggled foursome,
still,
sky-dyed,
belies the thrash
and jab inside.
Scrawny, tipsy,
life emergent
insists
to be
is ever urgent.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
July 16.20: Coping
If I were clothed
in raucous blue,
in alien world
I never knew,
I think I’d be
more erudite
than to flaunt myself
on terrain of white.
No, I didn’t skoosh it. I escorted it outside.
July 12.20: Coping
My muse! Impertinent,
wayward thing!
Taunting me
on mighty wing!
Graceful she,
in bluest height,
indifferent
as I try to write.
I watch her float,
from earth unbound,
while I, like stone,
am stuck to ground.
In those clouds
vocabulary,
eloquence
extraordinary.
She could bring it
to cloddish me,
but prefers to soar
metaphorically.
July 11.20: Coping
2019
2020
Yesterday I read a blog that asked if the reader has any gardening disappointments this year. Is he kidding? “Gardening” and “disappointment” go together like echinacea and Japanese beetles.
This is my third gardening season here; if you are a gardener, you know the third season is the beginning of seeing the garden as your own. For me, two distinct garden worlds: a bit shady in the front, a lot sunny in the back. Yes, Indiana clay and nasty root systems, exuberant invasives, malicious rabbits and chipmunks. But gradually mine.
Problems with a contractor have made it impossible for me to plant anything in the back this summer. All I have is a struggling collection of gangly seedlings with no place to grow. Empty tomato cages. No frilly yellow blossoms morphing into reds and golds. Not merely disappointment: it’s loss.
Gardeners survive the winter because they know a garden is coming, so when the garden fizzles the gardener kind of fizzles too. She might even let slip an imprecation. Maybe two.
Not everyone is a gardener, of course, but everyone has disappointments. And losses. It seems to me they are all felt more deeply this year because isolation is fertile ground for deep feelings.
So we cope, best we can, with emptiness where there should be life, and watch disappointment become loss, but we should never underestimate the toll it’s taking on us.
July 7.20: Coping
Three thyme transplants —
I didn’t need more —
when I went to water,
lo, there were four!
A second look,
I gasped agog:
I’m such a good gardener
I grew a frog!
July 5.20: Coping
From a purpling east
in pompadoured peach
toward twilight sun
they’ll never reach —
no matter: in beauty
airy, narcotic
they revel in being
purely quixotic.
Oddments 