May 30, 2025Reading the Room
Wondering if he’ll (cleavage) listen to my (cleavage) poem all the way through (cleavage) to the no.
half-life
the constant weight
of a pendulum
from #87 – Spring 2025
May 29, 2025Tanager’s Cantrip
Flicker flutter flap and float—
song explodes from every throat.
Shimmer shadow sparkle shine—
dappled sunlight draws the line.
Enter wander wonder will—
magic lives within you still.
Glimmer glisten gleam and glow—
the sky’s the road; the song you know.
from Ekphrastic Challenge
May 28, 2025Guttering
He has been doing this for decades,
climbing the ladder to clean out
rotting leaves, twigs, whirligigs.
In retrospect, perhaps he should
have bought gutter guards long ago,
but they couldn’t afford them at first,
then there were always other expenses,
schools, vacations, cars, medical bills,
and who knew they would live here
this long? It still seems day-to-day.
Once, when the kids were young,
he insisted that they and their friends
weren’t responsible enough to clean
the gutters, and each one had demanded
the chance to climb and scoop muck.
A fine Tom Sawyer trick on his part.
In those years, he would find tennis balls,
frisbees, army men, and once sunglasses
from one of his daughter’s break-ups.
Now it’s just the autumn debris of trees.
For a while he suggested there should be
a National Gutter Day when we clean out
what’s collected over the year and is now
clogging us, a day we get out trash bags,
put on gloves, and clean the channels.
The day wouldn’t necessarily involve
climbing rungs, but could be walking
with an old friend, having a coffee, or
dropping off boxes at the Goodwill,
or it might mean putting up new gutters
in places they haven’t been, a relationship
with a parent, friend, lover or neighbor,
recognizing a need to separate and sluice
away what might damage the foundations.
Then he realized that day was New Year’s
with its resolutions, and he did chores
like this on holiday weekends anyway—
Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day—
and who would want to swap out, say,
Fourth of July for National Gutter Day?
Plus he had vague memories of an uncle,
a Navy vet, who would talk about the need
to get drunk and “get his pipes cleaned out,”
and he could see how National Gutter Day
could become “End Up in the Gutter Day,”
a bacchanalia, like St. Patrick’s or Mardi Gras,
which is not what he meant, so he stopped
making that suggestion. Now he surveys
the neighboring yards and houses of friends
long gone, of children grown, and remembers
another joke, one about Jesus they loved to tell
in Catholic school with its punchline of Christ
saying to Peter, “I can see your house from here.”
He feels he understands the joke more each year,
the dark humor in the face of mortality, the pull
of the banal even as a life gutters towards its end.
It occurs to him there could be a good variation
of the joke, something along the lines of “Peter,
I can see you need to clean your gutters,” and
then he realizes this aligns him with Christ, and
he laughs at such arrogance and ridiculousness.
He still has enough self-awareness to know
it probably makes the neighbors nervous, seeing
an old man angled in the air, sporadically laughing
and appearing morose. He wonders how long
he can continue to do this, but they can’t afford
to pay a neighbor kid, even if they knew one.
He still expects to hear her come out and yell
in that angry voice that shows worry and love,
“Jesus, get down!”(or “Jesus get down!”) but
she stays inside now. In bed. Trying to cough
the muck in her lungs clear. When he’s finished,
he’ll make her tea and tell her how the people
in the McCaffrey place have painted the kitchen.
He thinks it’s just as well they never bought
the guards. Some maintenance is good to do
on his own, to remember old jokes, to plunge
his hands into the year’s decay, and to prepare,
as best as he can, for the storms that are to come.
from #87 – Spring 2025
May 27, 2025[as much as I want] and Other Haiku
as much as I want to be still these wild flowers
second
dose
forsythia
with
a
chance
of
rain
moon my mind
moon by moon my mind pines
moon by moon my mind through the pines
moon by moon my mind returns through the pines
first sun
the tears of not
ending
two years gone barefoot in the garden
spring hike
how close I came
to deering
after winter rains the river spoken here
deep green
the oxygen trail
all adjectives
among the views
of blues and greens
a tree cathedral
May 26, 2025What Remains True after the Golden Anniversary
This morning’s argument was because I insisted the house you grew up in had a porch: a lovely, off-white deck your father built after Korea, where on Friday evenings, I would show up with my bicycle and two bottles of Coke stolen from my auntie’s store. I could feel the pine step hard against my buttocks, the warm static of our Catholic arms brushing while we watched my bike twisted on the grass, whispering ways we could fit all that we had on its tiny frame and leave everything behind.
young lovers
moonlight
in the summer grass
You said most of it was true except you never had a porch. You came back from the bedroom holding a tin of old pictures, and I knew then I was about to be proven wrong. In a yellowed photograph taken on a morning before church, you were standing on the slab that led to the front door of your house surrounded by woods. Cardigan over a polka dot dress, you were smiling, the world around you turning to a different shade. I couldn’t believe you put up with me all these years.
changing leaves
we live our lives
just the same
from #87 – Spring 2025
May 25, 2025On My Parents’ Wedding Photo This Memorial Day
When I look at the both of you in your wedding photo,
him, in his uniform, you, in wedding gown, with flowers,
I find myself asking what you thought about your futures,
which, of course, I know and you couldn’t possibly know;
an ordinary black-and-white photo, taken in some studio,
though it’s crazy of me to think anything ordinary in war,
him, about to be deployed, who will come back and father
me; you, who, when he’s again in some VA hospital, will go
see him and will bring him brand new black slippers; though
you know he won’t be getting up, you bring him new slippers,
which you keep in a hall closet, next to a suitcase with letters,
his V-mail and other papers, regarding his convulsive-electro
shock treatments, and a death certificate citing “pneumonia,”
and a plot number, which has in marble: “Tank Destroyer.”
from Poets Respond
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