There once was a housefinch named Louie
who fretted crabapples were hooey:
“They pucker my beak
and strain my physique!”
And he flew away chirping “p-tooey!”
Once again, dear reader, the urge to add Burma Shave.
There once was a housefinch named Louie
who fretted crabapples were hooey:
“They pucker my beak
and strain my physique!”
And he flew away chirping “p-tooey!”
Once again, dear reader, the urge to add Burma Shave.
If you were light
and could play on a rose,
would you slide,
do you suppose,
down velvet hill,
where shadow splash
marks your soft plop
with grinned panache?
Then would you climb back up,
find that shy frill,
and pirouette there
in lucent trill?
Would you leap tip-to-tip
with weightless toes,
like drunken sprite
in perfumed throes?
Under, behind
each vale and peak,
would you dodge and dive
in hide-and-seek?
Would you stop perhaps
and oly-oly-ocean-free
to bask in the stillness
of unfurling reverie?
There is mystery here, dear reader. Apparently some call “olly-olly-oxen-free.” I was intrigued to see that some people who were kids in the Chicago area called “oly-oly-ocean-free” because that’s where I was a kid and that was our cry. So, oxen or ocean, nobody knows, though I did like the suggestion that olly/oly came from all-ye as a call at the end of the farm day to put everything, including the oxen, away for the night.
I remember it as inviolable. Once called, nobody could be tagged. Non-negotiable.
Many thanks to Susan Rushton for the beautiful photo!
“The Last Rose of Summer,”
that plaintive Irish keen,
sang itself inside me,
soaring yet terrene.
This brilliant ruby voice
of color ‘mid the browned
insisted that its smallness
was yet a mighty sound.
November madrigal,
enrobed in regal satins,
sleeps now in quiet earth
awaiting springtime matins.
Some will tsk and say that a moss rose is not a rose, that Portulaca and Rosa have nary a botanical thing in common. But you know what Shakespeare said, dear reader: “a rose by any other name.” If my grandma called it a moss rose, then it’s a rose. Grandmas rule.
With thanks to Irish poet Thomas Moore.
Brown birds,
brown leaves,
crackles, crumbles,
webs in eaves.
The glossy crow
in polished black
perpetual
melancholiac.
Pallid sky,
sunlight void,
droops a greyness
ichthyoid.
Pond of slate,
grass turned rubble,
wind that moans
of toil and trouble.
The year grows weary,
needs to sleep,
gardens snuggle
in winter’s keep.
Beshawled and flanneled,
I watch the earth
beshawl itself
with color dearth.
With apologies to Shakespeare.
It wrapped me like a cloak, that papery sound. October’s leaves, battered and bruised, but holding yet, whooshed thickly in a wind tantrum determined to strip away every remnant of summer, thrashing the trees and twisting each leaf, growling down from the dishwater sky and around our little homes, impatient for winter.
The air was warm still, but one muscular shove from the south bore an invisible stream of ice, a whisper in the tumult, frost-winged specter. I felt it and knew then it was saying what it came to say, this insistent rush.
I bent over the lavender, itself bent low. Spent, sleepy, it offered up a final incense as I trimmed back its floppy stems. Two fat bees lumbered through the air to watch and sniff. They too heard the Babel of the papery leaves, in tongues of crimson and copper, and saluted the deep purple of my harvest. They too knew the time.
The refined high art of breakfasting
cannot too much be touted;
its value to the day
ought never to be doubted.
In cherry tomato season
it’s especially exact;
one keeps the tomato whole,
juicily intact.
It’s cozied in the mouth
(don’t try to sing or whistle
lest you wing it into orbit,
the oops’d misguided missile)
along with crusty morsel
of sourdough browned just right,
one aims for balanced tandem,
the perfection in the bite.
The delicacy of timing,
simultaneous squirt and crunch,
requires selfless practice
sometimes ’til half-past lunch.
Green is so yesterday,
the marigold said,
purple is trending
(though some say it’s red).
I’m the David that blooms
an eyeful of sun;
by Goliath of maple
I’ll not be outdone!
Ceres paints in shades of cream,
daubing light like candle gleam
in autumn;
a mother’s sign when daughter leaves,
soft-whistling wind in union grieves
in autumn;
in seed-pod spike, in brittle stem,
desiccated requiem,
in autumn;
grasses in allegiance tender
bow their annual surrender
in autumn;
luminous mantle, light as breath,
gentle over sleep and death,
in autumn;
mother’s vigil thus ignited
over waning year twilighted,
in autumn.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg
and to artful arranger D.J. Berg.
Tomato bells,
dew besotted,
ring in language
polyglotted;
the dawn at play
in halo’d bead
in every tongue
gardener’s meed.
It’s a cool, dense September rain, grey as the sky, its splashes welcomed by the bowed heads of late summer’s garden. It is noisy, it is quiet, back and forth, to make me listen.
The images of the day, the somber pageantry in England, the shock and suffering of 9/11, tumble about in my head, looking for grounding.
At my front door, out of the rain’s refreshment, the potted pineapple mint looks longingly outward, poor thing, that cannot move itself. I step out into the cool drone of the shower, and there, against the sostenuto of the rain, the cricket’s aria. A piercing oneness.
The mint looks grateful as the drops wash over it, and I stand, stopped.
Were you ever surprised, dear reader, at how the tumble in your head was stilled by something so simple and ordinary as cricket song?