It wasn’t you who helped me overhaul
perspective in the pits of 22
years old. You gave advice, but overall,
it wasn’t you.
Some bar room rules you mentioned – that is true –
and how to flirt or even fake a drawl.
But thinking on it now, your mots were few.
I didn’t beg for expertise in mall
affairs. I’d have you think before you do.
Reviewing memories, I can recall
it wasn’t you.
Is this compulsive, or a discipline,
to daily post a poem for near four years?
It had a therapeutic origin
in quarantine – locked in I thought for weeks,
I figured I would give new forms a spin
(I’d worked in sonnets for some decades then).
I’m now near fourteen hundred mornings in,
and no impulse to stop this craft appears.
It’s under, like a fine tattoo, my skin.
Last night I didn’t hear a ceiling sound.
No thump or whimper moved me while I slept.
There’s nothing musky in the air around
me now, and nothing black & white has crept
peripherally into sight. I found
no sign of skunks today to intercept
my peace and atmosphere, but I don’t guess
they’ve yet removed their noise and noisomeness.
(Ottava Rima)
Twice recently I woke amidst a dream
in which I had a worry or concern
about my little girl or boy. The scene
was not a nightmare, but it took a turn
of search or plan required, and between
the instant fade and blink, I’d time to learn
my circumstance was dream. Then real was known –
my kids are well away and fully grown.
(Ottava Rima)
Persimmons hang like orange Christmas spheres
and tantalize this squirrel in the yard.
She climbs and stretches so her chest appears,
and bites the fruit that is no longer hard
the way it was two weeks ago. On guard
and geared for predators, I take a shot
behind my window glass, and she is not
aware of me, absorbed in sucking juice
and chewing flesh like sour apricot,
that’s ripening to hint of maple mousse.
(Dizain)
The theme a week ago was gratitude –
eight minutes meditating on the rug.
I crossed my legs in peaceful attitude,
and ocean-breathed as if it were a drug.
The guide said now be glad to be imbued
with grace you haven’t voiced. I gave a shrug
to realize I love irritation’s touch,
that makes me wake and innovate so much.
(Ottava Rima)
I’ve co-existed with the critters here –
the garden is their home as much as mine –
and wasn’t overbothered till this year,
when building on my eastern boundary line,
and now the north, has changed the biosphere.
Too many skunks no longer seem benign.
I’ll have to find an expert to repel
this surfeit of small neighbors, and their smell.
(Ottava Rima)
For five days there was nothing on my list,
and I leaned into leisure all I could,
aboard my landboat sloop and comfort-kissed,
admiring tile, glass, gas flames, and wood.
Beginning at a luncheon with a good
old friend, I then embraced full solitude,
and hunkered down in down. My only “should” –
avoiding too much celebration food.
(Huitain)
Pre-natal yoga seemed a likely choice
today: attending warmly to my girth.
I tried to cradle belly and rejoice
although I’m over 70 on earth,
and 40 years beyond the younger’s birth.
Today I didn’t hate my globe of fat
that at 16 was toned, completely flat,
and unproductive actually. In truth,
I love my abdomen. I’m thinking that
I gestate wisdom now, in place of youth.
(Dizain)
They told me history repeats itself.
I heard it from my father and in class.
I found the phrase in books upon a shelf,
with liberty to browse. It came to pass
I got it, reading fiction, history:
the cruelties Dickens caught, Voltaire and Swift.
I noticed awful similarity
in Austen’s arguments and Orwell’s drift.
But repetition now accelerates –
the cycle shrinks as pixels blink and spread.
The body politic degenerates
at speed – depravity is never dead.
And virus surges yet, that wasn’t solved.
It’s bleak to see the way our kind’s evolved.
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