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!”
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!”
ODE TO DICHOTOMYSugar snow
makes winter sweet
if you like clompy boots
on both your feet,
if you like glassy streets
to slip and slide
while white-knuckled driving
petrified,
if you like your toes
and fingers too
stinging and reddened
to shades of blue,
if you like clothes like blubber
on arctic whale
just to go out
to get the mail,
if you like north winds,
those icy bullies,
roaring through layers
of itchy woollies,
if you like shovel kink
in your lower back
and a quiver in
sacroiliac,
but if you like a big sniff
of cookies oven-hot,
the company of stew
bubbling in a pot,
the softness of thick flannel,
most comfy of old friends,
the search for words and meanings
that never ever ends,
the pencil, pen, and mug
to draw and write and sip,
your sugar snow, like mine,
is introvert’s catnip.
The bench wants society.
Stop! it says. Sit! —
watch your species ignoring you and me!
They rush by but we are the busy ones,
busy stopping.
Soon another will come, stop, sit,
and society will happen.
Maybe a toddler, ooph-ing his way up,
will sit like an L,
revel in his new perspective,
then scramble away,
pollinator to his kind.
Then soon another, on the three legs of late life,
will ease down, lean back,
and toss some memories to you, hungry pigeon.
Maybe next a new parent,
jealously, wonderingly
hoarding that immense softness,
rocking slightly,
sparing a few hushed words.
By and by, maybe two, holding hands, cozy in,
nudging you to other times, other benches
where you stopped,
and you can’t help a small private smile.
Maybe someone who talks a waterfall
crashing down on you in atomic white foam,
like some relatives you’ve run from.
Then even the bench cringes but holds fast
for the sake of the human soul.
Ignore a bench at your peril:
society must be had.
I can’t help noting, dear reader, that I picture people aware of each other
whereas the reality is people are snookered into their phones
and have no idea you are on the bench with them.
I prefer my version.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg,
and to Wells Theater, Norfolk, VA.
Beauty shocks, and steals our breath,
makes our neurons fizz,
forces us to contemplate
what can’t be real
is.
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.
Grandma’s kitchen clock
ticked crisply like a snare drum,
by day blended in the rhythm of work,
by night echoed
through the bedded house
while the rite of springs squeaked under me,
percussive, brassy,
objecting, it seemed,
to my child’s weight.
A bare light bulb
dangling on thick black cord
hovered
over the bed,
beyond my reach
even when I stood
jiggle-kneed
on the jello mattress.
Grandma reached up
and turned it off herself,
then slipper-padded out.
Her bedroom a whole dining room
and kitchen away,
sly-eyed shadows deepened
around me
in borrowed bed
where once my aunts were little girls.
In the sleep breath of her house,
Ivory soap.
Now, as COVID blurs days into nights,
and nights into days,
my clock ticks crisply like a snare drum.
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.
The committee convenes
in officiousness large,
each of them sure
someone else is in charge.
A chip used to be
what isn’t there,
something lost,
leaving bare
a little bit
of what’s left,
remainder
with less heft
perhaps, but
less is more:
what isn’t there
is its own lore.
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?