It seemed to me
miscalculation,
a frozen
discombobulation:
expecting spring
he here alighted
but found a landscape
winter-blighted.
With frosted beak
and bluebird fluff,
he groused (I heard him),
“Phoo! Enough!”
Category Archives: Animals
January 31.21: Coping
The vendor vast
in winter blue,
we see self-serve
is nothing new.
Thanks yet again to intrepid photographer S.W. Berg,
tromping the beach in January cold.
January 19.21: Coping
What refuge
on a thin wire
that so many seek it?
What life
in a huddle?
When frigid waves
lap quietly
at our lives,
and a winter sun
makes the barren bright,
what warmth
in the insidious cold
is really creeping numbness?
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
January 17.21: Coping
The committee convenes
in officiousness large,
each of them sure
someone else is in charge.
January 14.21:Coping
The precarious known,
the thatched belief,
swayed by life,
like twig and leaf —
when bared to talon,
gale and cold,
will it crumble
or will it hold?
January 9.21: Coping
Beneath fur and feather
it’s hard to judge pallor:
which will prevail,
discretion or valor?
In my pursuit of whether Shakespeare should be credited, I encountered a statement about things that annoy Shakespeare scholars.
I must say that Shakespeare scholars are easily annoyed.
December 18.20: Coping
Live trees with their fragrant cachet
aren’t meant for a feline sashay,
but when Willis the dog
gets the cat all agog
the tree can’t get out of the way.
Thanks to photographer Eugenia Roche.
November 28.20: Coping
My grandmothers were daughters of immigrants. One grew up in a Chicago tenement; the other grew up in the coal country of Pennsylvania.
What does this have to do with me in a plastic tent? Making do.
Do you know about making do, dear reader? It’s a way of life when you don’t have what you need or want. You make do with what you have. Just ask my grandmas.
Am I saying that making do today is the same as what it was for my great-grandparents? Hardly. But the inventiveness to make do may be the same.
My son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids hosted Thanksgiving most inventively on their deck. The temperature squeaked to 50 with a nip and it could have been cold. But they made do in most remarkable ways: I had a Granny Tent! They tell me this amazing contraption is for watching soccer games. But with one old lady and one heater it is a regal Granny Tent. Add one old arthritic Jack Russell on the arthritic old lady’s lap, and a blanket around both, and you have the perfect toasty throne, the shedding of the Jack Russell not exactly an ermine cape but still a thoughtful contribution to layered warmth.
(The Jack Russell came post-dessert, needless to say. Their two dogs spent the entirety of Thanksgiving dinner making Precious Moments eyes at us. They wanted turkey but had to make do with warm laps.)
Most certainly we cannot make do when it comes to grief and human loss. But for those who tried to celebrate Thanksgiving carefully, there must have been a national make-do movement. Many made do with Zoom. Some made do with soccer tents. Therein, and not in the familiar table, lies tradition.
November 19.20: Coping
All hail the nap!
That mini vacation,
miraculous reset,
arm-chair sedation,
restoring us to
youthful vigor
instead of creeping
mortis rigor.
So, as fugitive from
myself and the news,
I follow example
of the duck group-snooze.
October 27.20: Coping
We’ve climbed up Darwin’s ladder
of Natural Selection,
the bug and I together,
toward evolutionary perfection,
but I ponder our relative states:
who has the higher trajection,
the one with legs and wings,
or the one stuck in this election?
