Enduring 90 minutes medically,
when 20 would have served all issues well,
I left the place a grateful escapee
from patient posture and attempted sell
of medicines no doctor can compel.
Full happy to be ambulating fast,
I took the route by where I used to dwell –
a 43 year token of my past.
Arrested by pink
petals as I pace up hill,
my pause is well paid.
We children of the 50s chanted claims
espousing beauty, freedom, equity.
To overturn stale culture were our aims,
destroy the old and dance in amity.
So revolution was the path we blazed,
we thought, our numbers large, our energy
unending. Even now I am amazed
at how we withered in maturity.
Today we witness one who sits on high
and decimates traditional with haste,
dismantles, closes, hamstrings, sends to die
the ethos, without thoughtfulness or taste.
A master of destruction’s been set free,
to gild us on a path toward entropy.
Surveying daily my anatomy
while meditating, as I’m wont to do,
I focus extra on the parts of me
that evidence more wear. So in my view
(internal, eyeless), visibility
is centered cervically – the avenue
of neck and throat, esophagus and gland,
of my attention makes the most demand.
Aware of dull fatigue and worn sinew,
attempting to be grateful for what works,
I plan to walk today, collect the view
above me, and observe whatever lurks
amid the gardens. Maybe I’ll pass through
a scene that prompts a smile, one that perks
my stamina to prove that I’m not done.
At least, I’ll savor dogwoods in the sun.
Preemptively I took on yesterday
the work I would have put my back in now.
I thought that might enable me to play
more freely at today’s events. That’s how
I figured then, as if I could defray
backwards, like I’d the power to endow
improvement to a day that’s overbooked,
when perfect seldom answers how it looked.
I’ve walked this neighborhood near 20 years,
and here’s a tree that often grabs my gaze.
From autumn till past April it appears
well-shaped but maybe dead. Then lit with May’s
extended sunlight it sends blooming spears
of buds. Each spring I greet belated sprays
of green as they festoon the way it’s limbed
toward earth, but now I see my tree’s been trimmed.
Attending Friday services because
my daughter (middle-aged) has joined a shul,
eight times or so a year, I come to pause
and say Shema, remindful of a rule
or three I hadn’t heard as natural laws.
I slow and let my heritage unspool –
agnostically I even murmur prayer –
less avid, and mature enough to care.
The daily walks of Covid had no aim,
except to circulate without my walls.
Selecting a duration was the game,
and midway through I’d angle back to home.
I rarely had an errand I could claim,
but always knew when I was halfway through.
An exploration cannot be the same;
I can’t anticipate where effort calls
me. Middle’s somewhere near, without a name.
Commuting home last night, I saw the sign
reflected backwards in a window pane.
And I read “Bears” in every rounded line,
the B reversed but otherwise so plain
I couldn’t unsee it. “2169″
was nothing obvious – I can’t explain
why even after reading it direct,
the false made sense and begged me to reflect.
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