To Ron (A Remembrance)

 

A crawl and then a walk

Never in its season;

A laughter and then a talk

Never in its season.

All a backdrop to his life

distant to his ears...a curiosity

Never center stage...

Lurking in the corner and shadow

Life going on around him

In him yet not.

Misguided questions from those shadows

Reaching out to touch an elusive person

Never quite.

A sensible life...

important for us to order;

To him improbable...

Became his own creations.

Words and feelings foreign.

Insects became his curiosity,

lightbulbs his fascination,

Painting colors an expression,

Lengthy showers his caressing,

Photographs his history, without captions,

only filed, neatly of course,

An ordering in his life.

Years unmatched by growth

Only lengthening the shadows.

Games meticulously etched in scrapbooks

With mazes and riddles from an earlier time,

Yet continuing as his sense of life,

Our sense of tragedy,

To be played.

Work quickened the heart, renewed the hopes...

Perhaps there is a way.

Fate cruelly teasing the yearning

As if scripted to be played out.

The riddle unsolved,

The shadows lengthening and tightening their grips...

All, forever, in its season

At Last!

Love,

Uncle Dave

8/27/85

Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled--
I'm wading along

in the sunlight--
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead--
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon--
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from--
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind--

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage--
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

—Mary Oliver 

[Spring 2023 at Bloedel Reserve Gardens on Bainbridge Island in WA].

Heavy

 

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had his hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel,

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–

books, bricks, grief–

it’s all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?

— Mary Oliver

[Roses in the wind on the coast of Maine].

Instructions on Not GIving Up

 

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

--Ada Limón

I Have a Time Machine

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future

at a rate of one second per second,

 

which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant

committees and even to me.

 

But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next

moment and to the next.

 

Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—

well not zipping—And if I try

 

to get out of this time machine, open the latch,

I'll fall into space, unconscious,

 

then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that.

So I stay inside.

 

There's a window, though. It shows the past.

It's like a television or fish tank.

 

But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim

in backward circles.

 

Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance

to see what I'm leaving behind,

 

and sometimes like blackout, all that time

wasted sleeping.

 

Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment

at having lost a library book.

 

Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting

to be found charming.

 

Me holding a rose though I want to put it down

so I can smoke.

 

Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me

because the explosion

 

of some dark star all the way back struck hard

at mother's mother's mother.

 

I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.

I thought I'd find myself

 

an old woman by now, traveling so light in time.

But I haven't gotten far at all.

 

Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like;

the past is so horribly fast. 

—Brenda Shaughnessy

Tomorrow

 

there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….

--Barbara Crooker

Credo

 

I believe in the Tuesdays

and Wednesdays of life,

the tuna sandwich lunches

and TV after dinner.

I believe in coffee with hot milk

and peanut butter toast,

Rosé wine in summer

and Burgundy in winter.

I am not in love with holidays,

birthdays--nothing special--

and weekends are just days

numbered six and seven,

though my love

dozing over TV golf

while I work the Sunday puzzle

might be all I need of life

and all I ask of heaven.

--Donna Hilbert