Look both ways
our parents told us,
and if we didn’t
they’d yell and scold us,
but a harder lesson,
heaven knows,
if cars and trucks
drove over our toes.
A lesson for life,
to look aft and fore,
then run like the wind,
wide-eyed and full bore!
Thanks yet again and a rousing HAPPY BIRTHDAY
to photographer S. W. Berg!
Many the Christmas
has faded away,
but here are a couple
preserved for today.
The curly-haired toddler,
a bit knobby of knee,
recalls the first Christmas
for cute little me.
The other, my parents,
with some of their caucus,
a nefarious bunch,
unruly and raucous.
A time to be serious
about four-in-hand,
and to mutter at tinsel
hung strand by strand.
Life wasn’t perfect then,
but still I hold dear
the Christmases seen
in life’s rearview mirror.
That’s my dad in the middle, and my mom is the one looking down at him; I can’t tell if she’s thinking what a great guy he is or his collar needs more starch. You will notice, dear reader, the Christmas tree in the far right of the photo. If you can remember the insanity of hanging tinsel strand by maddening strand, then you also remember the days when ties were what you could always get your dad for Christmas.
Apple walnut cinnamon pie,
winter oven, my, oh, my.
Syrup’d slices, cinnamon dust
rise through nose to memory’s must:
oilclothed table, rolling pin,
floured apron, floor and chin,
pigtail peelings, glowing stove,
maybe nutmeg, maybe clove.
Coming in from bitter world,
boots well stomped and scarf unfurled,
amber warmth starts deep within
like radiator through my skin.
Kitchens of the long-ago,
swathed in early evening snow,
hug me still because I spy
apple walnut cinnamon pie.
Huzzahs and thanks to photographer S.W. Berg,
and kudos to dessert chefs at McCormick and Schmick’s, Virginia Beach, VA.
What memoried fragrance arises from this photo!
As this hectic season hurls us into next year,
I wish you, dear reader,
some sanity from a warm and spicy kitchen.
Sometimes
if summer is old enough
and the leaves heavy with heat,
continuo of cicada
tricks me, and,
for so brief an instant,
I am back
in the time of bikes, grass prickles,
summer sleighbells of the ice cream man,
clothespin dolls,
clover braids,
a time when we had not yet heard of
mass shootings.
But it — that time — knew of nooses
of word and of rope.
To go back is to ask —
how could a country of lynchings
not become a country of mass shootings?
There is no perfect then.
Ice cream as accessory
might not occur to you or me,
but Emmy says in cone or float
it’s absolutely couture haute.
Happy National Ice Cream Day, dear reader!
With thanks to the anonymous photographer
and, of course, to Emmy.
Eyes up
or dead ahead
full-faced
uncorseted
youthful
oaken vertebrae
steel-enforced
DNA.
Downcast eyes
will not attend
the future that
these two portend.
Fearless Girl times two
foreseeing
each steadfast
in her own being.
To all the dads who have given the world Fearless Girls, a very happy Fathers’ Day!
With thanks to the unnamed photographer,
to sculptor Kristen Visbal,
and, of course, to Emmy.
I grew up in northwest Indiana, just outside Chicago. “Da Region.” Steel mills and oil refineries, cinders and soot. And earthquaking freight trains. Charging, bellowing behemoths, lifeline of thriving industry, they snarled traffic with sadistic impunity.
Mindful that then our phones were back home, attached to a wall, you will understand that life stopped when those behemoths blocked our ways. So there was nothing like the excitement of spotting the caboose. Life could resume! What cheer to the soul! What revving of engines! Until it stopped in the middle of the crossing, taunting us with half a road.
The caboose had the power to make people happy or homicidal.
If you were a kid and lucky, you got to wave at the man in the caboose, and he would wave back. To be noticed by the genie in the caboose was high living tinged with envy: who wouldn’t want to live in a caboose?
Every once in a while, a caboose would show up in some incongruous place, like someone’s yard. Here was mystery. How did it get there? Is the genie still in it?
It was my early introduction to garden art. A caboose in a yard was never mundane. Nor was the occasional non-red caboose, like the jarring countercultural yellow.
As symbol of time and place, the caboose is nonpareil. And when the train is gone and the caboose stands alone in the quiet of clover and vine, what does the caboose tell of the old time and place? Since I am the caboose, I must ask and answer that question.
Many thanks to photographer D.J. Berg.
Part Three
