It’s only a roof
until the sky shimmers
above it,
when a gold gauze
creeps by inches,
daring me to breathe,
rising brighter
until sliver-tip of
gold doubloon
peeks
over it.
Then does roof become
stage, curtain,
ringmaster,
revealing in due drama
the night sun.
A dog and her stick,
most mysterious meld
of inertia and focus
I ever beheld.
With nary a muscle,
a leg or a wing,
the stick’s going nowhere —
it’s just a dead thing.
The dog, disbelieving
in inanimation,
is taking no chance
on stick ambulation.
Convinced that the stick
is just playing possum,
the dog bides her time
with readiness awesome.
This stand-off, I’m sure,
has lesson for me,
and I begin to suspect
what that lesson could be:
today isn’t yesterday.
You just never know
when the stick will escape
and you’ll look like a schmo.
Life’s almosts —
seismic shifts —
herald of looming
inscrutable rifts,
tearing the fabric
of the everyday,
stripping the known
and the snug away,
emerging newness
from this to that,
change aborning,
verdant fiat.
From depth of cyclic
mystery
its swelling vow:
What wasn’t will be.
The lessons of childhood,
bothersome baggage,
surface at Christmas,
like this overworked adage:
patience is virtue.
It’s so over-rated;
too much have I wanted,
too long have I waited.
How is waiting
a motivation?
Yeast insists:
anticipation.
The incipient garden,
boundless dream,
anticipation,
happy scheme.
Pot and bag
transcendency:
in gardener’s eye
an Eden-to-be.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
The exquisite
revels in time
like dawn
savoring its own ephemera
mindfully Elysian.
Wait
is a four-letter word
shameless, brazen, uncouth
the dig of a bully’s elbow
the gnaw of a blunted tooth
it stops the clock on the wall
and renders good company mute
makes us ponder our hangnails
and feel like slow-rotting fruit
impolite, crass and unseemly
intrusive, indifferent to plan
from childhood to dotage it stalks us
intractable bogeyman.
Thanks yet again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives and the ever-ready camera of the curator thereof.
Oddments 