February garden,
my tabletop Versailles,
petalled constellation
against a winter sky.
Regally aloof,
raucous in its joy,
exalting in itself
above the hoi polloi.
This season of the drab,
the common grey mundane,
is quite beneath the station
of beauty so insane.
Soon green
this white,
this cold Now,
a sleep,
a breath held,
a frozen song,
a stillness
chiding me,
impatient
for Something Else
when I too should stop
so I too can bear green.
“High and low”
doesn’t begin to say
the places I looked
on a late winter day.
All the candles but one
were packed in their places,
and that meant a morning
of wild goose chases.
Up on the stepstool,
down on my knees,
crawling, stretching,
huff, puff, and wheeze,
I looked everywhere,
probably twice;
my thoughts weren’t very
civil or nice.
Frustrated, tired,
I plopped in this chair,
heaved a great sigh,
and noticed RIGHT THERE
the *&@!! candle,
plain as could be,
completely unhidden,
laughing at me!
And what about this?
More time down the drain:
one oven mitt missing!
Where’d it go? What a pain!
Again high and low,
in cabinet and drawer,
I searched for that mitt
with a great inner roar.
What is it with things?
There’s a plot, I declare!
The mitt’s in the pantry!
How’d it get there?
Next to the jam
is not where it lives;
what gremlin’s afoot?
What is this? What gives?
It cannot be me
so absent of mind!
And now I must go;
I have marbles to find.
For Valentine’s Day,
my gift to you,
a coveted daydream,
that it may come true:
just you and the box,
chocoholic’s lodestar
(think hyped Cookie Monster
with full cookie jar).
Your eyes glaze over,
brain turns to ganache,
it’s num-num-num-num,
a full-throttled nosh.
No weight gain or guilt,
no way will you rue it:
nobody saw
so you didn’t do it.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg for this portrait of bliss.
Unhurried, the tree spins
its wooden web
ever finer
to twig tip
while birds
and squirrels,
obedient to the ancients
that course through them,
gather pieces
from a yielding earth.
Fore-ordained, in deliberate pace,
birth and growth,
while speed flashes,
withers,
fades
in a distant air.
Oddments 