Belated Words

Write On!

Tag: poem

  • I’ll mow the yard…

     

    I just fell off the page;

    for hours it seems I slid

    and at the edge my hands,

    cupped in ells, failed to grasp,

    and so, until I crash,

    I’ll pretend I’ve more important things to do.

  • Dread

    Always the palpable dread turning behind

    my smile or frown; I’m the victim in the

    horror film that feels the sentient house’s

    aura on approach, the foreboding, the angst.

    Behind the pulled shade she waits to inform,

    throwing looks, crying distrust of even me,

    her tenaculum snared offspring.  I come to do

    her bidding grudgingly; a calloused hearted son.

    I’ve never learned: I attempt to reason, to plea,

    but logic is dead in her house, killed by disease

    which mints lies and villains as readily

    as harsh light cast shadows onto a wall.

    She’s not the one needing help she warns,

    but the others and, yes, me too, if I think so!

    So absolute in her anger…I wish it were true;

    this helplessness precludes affection.

  • The Body

    The body fails the mind even before

    the last moment cast consciousness to where

    it goes.  Forget disease, the slippery tub;

    muscle slackens or turns to stone, wrought hard

    by pain from errant bone, the ear, the eye

    can fail from use , the joints refuse, the lungs

    rebel; the parts unite to fight for warmth,

    for softer, for a peace, stasis, for time.

    The will can be hard hit by pain and dreams

    of youth deferred until can fade or slink

    away hardly noticed or lamented.

    But yet, a mountain bald, a topless sky

    invites just me to come and see a bit

    of truth, hidden, held close along a ledge

    secured by pine. A sweaty climb along

    the bluff, a grunt of pain a pill can not

    relieve, and now I strain to see tiny

    iris, cristata; blooming blue and gold

    and white so pure that God is real,

    at least, worth consideration.

    Atop the bald, a boulder makes a bed

    of soothing heat to draw fatigue away,

    and leave a space in which a breeze warm with

    the smell of pine needles can ease my hurt.

    Dwarf-crested iris, cristrata
    (stock photo)

    This poem comes from 2002 and rings even more true today than ten years ago.  This is not about remorse, self-pity or even ageing, but rather the soothing power and joy that the natural world can provide, at least temporarily, if a person is so incline to make an effort to see the wonders that exist.

  • My Fortieth Year…3:47 A.M.

    There were footsteps outside my door last night;

    loose gravel crunched, there was a catch in a gait.

    Something stood squinting in the darkness

    checking a number or matching a date.

    My heart ran rampant, throbbing, pumping dread;

    an emptying slash…..now a cavernous hollow.

    Opened now……anti-being knows my smell;

    when will it beckon for me to follow?

    I was actually 40 before I seriously considered and accepted the concept of mortality.  I awoke in the middle of the night with the most horrid feeling which haunted me for days.  This poem was an effort many, many years  ago to put words to it.  This feeling initiated the clichéd “mid-life crisis” which I quickly and completely recovered from…I’m now content, accepting and at ease.

  • Babies in Bottles

    Lured to the streets of a lay-over city,

    a place foreign to my soul, a mob

    of askant stares, titillated expectancy,

    shrill hawking of flesh and wares,

    and placards enticing, promising all;

    I walked halls narrowed by sideshow trite:

    latex attempts at grotesquerie, cast horrors,

    a two-headed this and a five legged that,

    the longest, thinnest, the nastiest things.

    Quickly contrite, I sought an out-door,

    but down-cast eyes led me astray into

    the dim, sad light of a smaller corridor.

    Each bottle hovered in its own alcove.

    Suspended by and washed by, so slow,

    a stainless, sterile sluice, a gentle sate,

    each “malfeasant of nature” each

    “quirk of fate” slept in its own forever.

    Each baby was lite for affect and show:

    a stunted webbed limb, a bulbous head,

    a truncated body without appendage,

    a Cyclops, a hermaphrodite, a Hydra;

    each a double handful of sorrow for show.

    By what were these unions frowned upon:

    a gene glitch run rampant, toxicosis,

    a gods punishment, or mans violence?

    A cause cries for blame for through

    the particled sate a delicate eyelid,

    a perfect toe, alludes to original joy,

    though fleeting, of a life proposed

    but not realized or ordained, but taken.

    Who or what along the blade of existence

    nixed this one or that one or that?

    What were their sins condemning them

    to naked display with stitched scars

    of exploration visible to see along

    the palest of blood freed flesh?

    And, where were their souls? Were they

    those vague entities of phosphorescent

    sheen locked in jars;…..fireflies

    snatched from night’s vitrine, stuffed

    beneath blankets in trunks in darken rooms?

    The phrases, “malfesasant of nature” and “quirk of fate” were taken from a poem by Robert Penn Warren.  I can not locate my copy of his collected works to give the poems title.  The origin of the idea is somewhat vague in my memory, but I believe it came from reading somewhere, several years ago, that some museum or commercial enterprise had put on a public display of deformed fetuses for whatever reason I can’t remember.  Needless to say, this bit of information affected me profoundly as I have worked on this poem over several years.  It is time to let it go.

  • Dying Pine

    The beetle-ridden column of pine, still

    coppery-brown—-stark against a flood

    of deciduous cousins’ May green,

    looms, surrounded by shedded, layered

    bark chunks and brittle limbs detached

    and dropped to litter his meager yard;

    precursors of the fall, numbered in

    days or months, unknowable, to come.

    Still, in wind, his stilted sway of youth,

    but now with creaks and groans of doors

    closing….opening, still offering his body

    to nuthatch, squirrel and the jay and still,

    though fading, his green crescent of a

    smile at his tip-top, unencumbered by

    regrets or daunting musings of mortality.

  • TC

    tc

    She’s gone for good this time…..I think.

    I’ve not seem her for seven days.

    Wet food collects slugs in her bowl; three days

    of rain evicting them from danky hidey-holes.

    That is the only sign. We rarely spoke

    ……or acknowledged the other.

    I did stoop to offer my hand, a back-arching lintel,

    ……….but not too often; no spoiling.

    She was a true hunter; eating her kill

    with no gloating, no display for display’s sake.

    She preferred the wild-wide-world, at least,

    that’s what I tell myself……as balm,

    but I really can’t know cat thought,

    or human thought for that matter.

    Others I’ve left to wander? Too aloof,

    too free with freedom, or has it

    just been easier to let them roam

    so blame can only know their names?

  • Sunbathing

    Tomorrow, a flirting innocent, slips a string
    around a toe— tugging, enticing, implying
    realization is just past that task.  Just there!
    Yesterday, an old neuter, ask questions,
    prods for justification, cast doubts.

    But occasionally, the prods, the tugs relent;
    my heart races with the pleasure of strange time,
    Now ,when  the sweet smells of oil and radiant heat,
    even that of chlorinated water, delight and paint
    a lazy smile.