BIRTHDAY
I wasn’t born yesterday.
~The Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite, T. Pratchett
I was born years ago in a snowstorm,
butt first, which explains my perspectives:
right is left, north is south, and so on.
There’s something, too, about winter,
blowing snow that blew itself
into my bones. There are things
you won’t understand
until you are so old
that no one alive calls you children.
The patterns, strangeness of passages,
the way the long corridor winds,
edged with fewer doors.
What is this life if busy as hell
We have no time to sit and smell?
No time to sit beside the bogs
And smell as long as cats or dogs,
No time to scent when fields we pass
Where some one stopped to drag his ass,
No time to find, as though alone,
Where someone chucked a chicken bone,
No time to ponder every track
Of each deer passing onward, back,
To use your nose to best avail
To search the neighbor’s garbage pail,
No time to sit and contemplate
What each and every neighbor ate.
A poor life this, if busy as hell
We have no time to sit and smell.
I wrote this somewhat iffy poem ages ago—a parody of one of my favorite old poems, “Leisure,” by William Henry Davies— when we had an airedale. We have another dog now, and it still applies.
ON LEAVING FACEBOOK: part II
I went there
when I was lonely or bored.
There.
As if it were a place
like the back porch of my house
where I sit with the dog
or The Bakery where people I know
go to drink their coffee
or the yarn shop full of color and light.
I liked
things there so casually,
not the way I like
a cat on my lap
or a walk in the field with the dog
or sitting beside my husband on the sofa,
each with a book and a mug of tea.
I could share
things there mindlessly,
not the way I share
worries and joys with Meg
when go for our morning walk
or the way I share with my Real Godmother
Eleanor when we email every morning,
or the way I share recipes and rants about the news
with my old friend Kathy
or the way I share time on the phone
with my sister or my son or my grandson
or lunch with Linda or Megaera or Carol
or pie with Jean and Mel
or energy with the Tai Chi class
or books with the Heretics
or life with the Spring St. Poets
or music with Encanto.
They said it was always free
but not as free as making music
or knitting socks or reading Proust
or weeding the garden.
Not free
like the smell of bread or apples,
like sunset across the meadow
and sunrise through the branches of the gingko tree.
It is right that on this day–
remembering his nakedness, his simplicity,
his begging bowl, the broken church,
the wolf and the birds, the peach–
I should separate my worldly self
from so much busyness, should turn
away from a virtual world.
The real one compels.
The last crickets.
Coyotes in the dark.
The moon rising as the sun sets.
Mother died seven years ago.
The haunting has ceased, perhaps
because I can see her
more clearly at this distance,
her brave smile, so like mine,
her hand raised, still waving me on.
A STITCH IN TIME
. . .saves nine.
Can you stitch time? Catch
the threads and pull it together?
Mend the little tears that happen—
the morning you killed
irritated by a broken gizmo,
the hour lost cursing at traffic,
that meeting—all those meetings,
those obligatory parties—
great rips in sense and grace?
Is there a patch or stitch or weave
that can redeem those moments
that might have been salvaged
but because you didn’t even notice,
leave you with tattered scraps
not whole enough for rags?
May 2017
WHAT I DID AFTER YOU LEFT HOME
Went to New Orleans,
walked alone in the early morning.
They were opening windows,
washing down the streets.
Are you ready, M’am?
An old man stood on the cobblestones,
beaming in the steaming light.
He held reins in one crinkled hand,
extended the other to me.
His brown horse shook its head, bells rang.
Ready? For what?
Are you ready for a buggy ride?
I had not planned to act like a tourist,
but how could I do otherwise
in this unexpected land, this place I’ve never seen?
The people sitting above the tall red wheels
were talking and laughing together
like people in a painting, or a play.
The driver cocked his head, waiting for my answer.
I asked the cost.
There was no reason to refuse.
I placed my damp white hand in his,
my hand with the split lifeline,
the single crack foretelling a single child.
Twenty years ago a sibyl read my palm:
You’ll live long, but two lives, different.
You’re a musician. And try not to be so stingy.
Yes of course I’m ready, I told him.
Boost me up.
You, I’m afraid, would have been
disdainful, cool. You would not
have approved of me,
sweating in my purple dress,
gawking, singing along,
leaning out behind the horse’s bobbing feathered head
above the spinning wheels
in that impressionistic light.
I felt a city dawn that day,
saw men in stiletto heels and black stockings
prancing down the shining sidewalks,
artists reaching for long moist shadows,
women like statues, painted gold.
The city smelled like fresh coffee,
sour beer, things frying in lard.
On every bright wet corner
were little children, dancing.
I wrote this a long time ago, in response to the Empty Nest. It ended up being a performance piece.
March 24–November 16, 1999; Jan. 30–April 20, 2001
Quatrain Chapbook: Sing in me, Muse, Feb. 2005
