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.
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.
I stood in the kitchen pondering the winter world through my window; what wasn’t brown and grey was grey and brown. Sunless days had lumped into a lead weight in my head. What a fine moment for a poet’s melancholy, and then I looked up. Darn. There was Grandpa Mauck, looking out from his winter day, telling me to get real!
You might know the movie “A Christmas Story,” dear reader, set in Hohman, Indiana, which was really Hammond, Indiana, where I was born. This is Hammond. Grandpa was a Borden milkman there. A milkman! What mystique! What could be more enviable than riding a sled behind horses delivering milk in freezing temperatures?
Grandpa left Borden for a so-called better job, but all he had then was a lot of paper and people working for him. Boring.
Meanwhile, I was growing up in a house with a wooden milkbox at the side door. The milkman drove a truck, not a horse, and stopped by a couple times a week. The milkbox had a door that pulled out, making it a cozy place for the cream to freeze and push up over the (glass) bottle. I remember the pleated-edge paper caps that sat like cloche hats atop the frozen cream.
In the summers, before air conditioning, the milkman allowed us to climb into the cool back of his truck, which smelled awful, but the ice was remarkably clear and therefore desirable, so, much to my mother’s horror, we sometimes got chips to chew on.
Then I looked out the window again, and everything was still brown and grey.
(Grandpa is the one in the middle.)
It’s a dishwater world, scum grey,
painted with daubs of whey,
then Iris awoke
and with lavish deft stroke
smeared a pint of the rainbow’s glacé.
Lilac bones,
spare, skinny things,
porcelain remnants
of long-ago springs,
winter-bleached,
shorn, unclothed,
seemingly peaceful,
nothing loathed.
Unlike the gardener
in my blood,
patience in its marrow,
ages in its bud.
Beanies on the trellis,
a topping most precarious,
a balance act of daring,
defying air nefarious.
The steely north wind roars
head on to southern blast
of pugnacious rainy air
over garden mizzenmast.
Rambunctious winter storm,
duking cosmic knuckles,
can’t displace the beanies
no matter their swashbuckles.
Proud and straight the trellis,
unbowed by storms or mirrors,
it hasn’t any clue
how goofy it appears.
Perhaps you too have beanie memories, dear reader. I have several. One was back in fourth grade, when Confirmation was a significant milestone, and we were dressed accordingly in gorgeous white robes, with sleeves that flowed like the Mississippi. I loved those sleeves, and I flapped around in happy contentment. I was a butterfly queen in that white robe. But then they crowned me with a beanie. A beanie! In Holy Ghost red, more’s the ignominy! I went from queen to fungus in an instant.
I still think the Holy Ghost laughed uncontrollably.
All this from looking out the window.
Color makes the world go ’round,
I’d never dare deny it,
but I am drawn to black and white,
to me a form of quiet.
In exhibition varied
I always gravitate
away from bustling colors
to black and white sedate.
I find in it a calming,
a perspective documentary,
exact in careful render,
basic, elementary.
I love the gentle power
of pencil, plain, quotidian,
wielding it to velvet
or glassy-deep obsidian.
But what I draw with graphite
insists I’d best not think
it will ever be as wondrous
as Nature’s pen and ink.
No extra charge, dear reader, for reflections of kitchen cabinets and muttering be-robed photographer. I tried a bajillion times, but the wall kept moving.
When life hands you lemons,
so it is said,
you oughtn’t just pucker;
make lemonade instead.
If I liked lemonade,
I’d consider this wit,
but I seriously don’t
like lemonade a bit.
So I adapt the old adage
and therefore say I:
when life hands you lemons,
bake lemon meringue pie.
Still the lesson’s the same:
make the most of the less,
see what you can do,
bring order from mess.
And so, when snow doesn’t
pile up when it should,
but blizzards of boxes
descend on your ‘hood,
you roll up your sleeves
and give life a shove,
make something of what
life gave you lots of.
Your medium might not be
new-fallen snow,
but your oeuvre will be hailed
as art most nouveau.
When the snow that you ordered didn’t come, but boxes did, then what? Well, this is what: two ultra-chill femmes fatales! The one with magenta hair, a shameless coquette at the front door, and the other, with more sense of decorum, beaming pearls and benevolence in the living room.
But both a testament to defiance. So what if there isn’t snow?
We are in a bleak time. I think I have never felt so angry and so helpless. But here is a new year come upon me to ask what I’ll do about it. How will I be defiant?
May we as writers and readers be defiant, peacefully, creatively, in this new year. I wish you, dear reader, a year of lemon meringue pies!
With more thanks to photographer S.W. Berg
and with kudos to the artist, D.J. Berg.
As the water hardens to ice
I find it not very nice
that the ducks get their z’s
where everyone sees
and set me to shivering twice.
Looking out the window has become hazardous to my health, dear reader! In the grips of an arctic blast, I am layered like puff pastry, and I do not need to see these frost-footed napping ducks. You may argue for their ready down comforters, but my bones are no warmer for that.
Oddments 