April 7.22: Coping, but barely

The thing about time:

it’s never where I’m.

 

Some of you know that my father referred to me as “the late Maureen O’Hern,” that my family said I was insufferably poky. I maintain I was deliberate. Those of us who live deliberately tend to think things over — and over — before we act. Clocks and calendars are annoying.

Thus did I miss that Poetry Month is upon us.

I seem to be in a perpetual state of catching up. Time and I are, and always have been, at odds. Or perhaps it’s just the measurement of time. “Late” is relative only to clocks and calendars, yes? This leads me to think about how we measure time so surgically. The vast amoeba of life cannot be held in tidy sequences. But could it be measured in poetry, which, to me, is anything but tidy?

This time of Now is saturated with blood and tears. Grief and anger are chewing us up. Clocks and calendars cannot measure it. Maybe the measure is taken in a certain kind of written word, in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, music, maybe even in the ephemera of a garden. If I can ever figure out what poetry is, perhaps I will find that all the above are types of poetry.

I think we seek the timeless. May you find it where you seek, dear reader, especially in Poetry Month.

 

 

September 17.21: Coping

September stands tall

between spring’s childhood

and winter’s dotage,

a bit round perhaps

with pumpkin paunch,

its brow gold-speckled,

but vital still.

One leaf, two leaves,

abacus of mortality,

drop

in quiet obedience

to the authority of time.

A cicada sings of ennui,

its sleepy notes sticking to

wet morning air

where August lingers.

 

 

December 22.20: Coping

Time! That sneaky,

cantankerous power,

measuring immeasurables

by paltry hour,

grinding slow

when I can’t wait,

racing ahead

when I am late,

deliberate, cagey,

ever contrarian,

unbending, stern

disciplinarian.

It mocks and laughs

at helpless me,

scurrilous in its

hilarity.

My clock has stopped

at ten past eight

but feeble tickings

reverberate

through quiet night

and restless sleep

reminding me

that time won’t keep.

It will proceed,

will not defer,

disdainful of

what I prefer.

 

When I was a kid, dear reader, time stopped every December and I knew Christmas would never come. How like now. Time does seem to have stopped, and I must thank you, dear reader, for being my new batteries throughout a tedious, painful, terrifying year.

 

 

 

 

November 15.20: Coping

In autumn I teeter

precariously

between what is

and what will be.

The world is

a flaming jubilee,

a counterbalance

of surety

against the leafless

skeleton tree,

time’s drum that beats

relentlessly.

The crimson pledge

of cyclicity

bears also whiff

of mortality.

 

 

September 26.20: Coping

In bright foreshadow

does autumn sun

frost the amethyst;

then does the butterfly know

to kiss it goodbye.

 

 

With thanks to photographer Mary Jo Bassett.

May 4.20: Coping

Silly clock,

all tick and tock,

what’s the point?

Time’s run amok.

It seems it’s always

half-past same;

I think I need

a new mind-game.

 

 

And May the 4th be with you, dear reader.

Maybe some Jedi mind tricks will help.

 

September 7.19

Gather ye pollen

while ye may

in warm and bright

September day.

Tender zest,

to flower,

 to seed —

thus does garden

(and life)

proceed.

 

With apologies to Robert Herrick.

 

 

August 4.19

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.

 

 

May 3.19

The exquisite

revels in time

like dawn

savoring its own ephemera

mindfully Elysian.

 

Connections: March 15.18

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.

Connections