14
life
vigil
tune
mute
Life goes on. Really.
We keep vigil together .
It is possible to be friends
on a screen. David
mutes to tune. Kathy C’s
computer is down
but she’s here, there,
and we know she is,
making art. Kathy H
met Wanda
in a parking lot
and reports that,
as we suspected,
she is three-dimensional.
DISAPPOINTED
You were good all year.
You kept the rules, even
the ones you made up:
Always say “please’ to the dog.
Don’t eat chocolate on Tuesdays.
(new stanza)
You’ve learned all the magic words:
not only please and thank you kindly,
Hocus Pocus and Abracadabra,
but the secret ones, the ones
you’d never dare write down.
new stanza
You know the gestures:
The morning bows
the evening pirouettes
and everything else
in between.
(new stanza)
You believe there are enough
ponies to go around,
and more. They tell you that
all the time. Abundance,
they tell you.
(new stanza)
So every year, you write
the letter, asking.
It’s all you want,
you say. You’re not
greedy. And you’ve made
(new stanza)
space—a little barn,
a fenced-in pasture.
You can afford grain and hay
and apples and sugar
and vet bills.
(new stanza)
But every year,
when you wake
on that morning
and look outside
there is no pony.
(new stanza)
Only the sun rising.
Only your breath
clouding the window.
Only your beating heart.
Only the trees against the snow.
I paid wordpress some more money so I could format poetry properly, and I cannot do it. Sorry about the “new stanza” business, but stanzas are important. I’m asking for a refund!
OPEN STUDIO POEM #13
bobble
bauble
clarity
celebration
POEM FOR THE LAST DAY OF 2020
With smiles and nods, thumbs up
and applauses, with bright baubles
of technologies—our new necessities—
we’ve bobbled through this hardest time.
We have more courage than we knew,
our loves are stronger than we thought.
Now, let us begin a celebration, now,
as we tiptoe toward the clarity of light
at the far side of this dark passageway.
We are beginning to know
how tender we are; beginning
to know how gentle we can be.
With thanks to Wanda, Kathy H, David and Kathy C for their words.
OPEN STUDIO POEM #12
patience silent ricochet hibernate Have patience, my friends. There is no need to run, to roar, to ricochet from hard place to rock. Practice being silent instead. Sit still, hibernate your mind. Go stand in the snow. Listen to the stars.
METAPHOR
Last night, a theater company zoomed a Hanukkah play written by a woman I met in a zoomed playwrights’ group. My friend Kathy spends her evenings taping the alto parts of Christmas anthems. My husband’s coffee group zooms. We see the grandchildren once a week running around in their backyard or sitting at their art table, or practicing reading and singing. This morning, I drove to town. Stopped a minute for two runners on opposite sides of the road. (Something that used to irritate me.) Masked women, still running together. I went to Old People’s Hour at the food coöp: silent shoppers, all those kids stocking shelves. I listened to my Christmas playlist on the drive home: Revels, Paul Winter, the Polish carols from my Warsaw cousins. All jolly till “Lulajże Jezuniu,” a lullaby the homesick Chopin quoted in Scherzo No. 1. I had to pull over to cry. We’re so sad. And so brave. Yesterday my new friend Sherry told me she saw a single blade of grass rising up through a cow pat in a field. Not a poetic image like, say, a young oak sprouting in leaf mould. But still. Can you think of a better metaphor? Perhaps something even less polite. They spread manure on fields. Cowshit gets on your boots. Whatever you call it, it’s full of seeds. It’s food for seeds. For seeds.
OPEN STUDIO POEM #11 zoom sure pattern How hard to see the pattern: new friends who zoom past for an hour. How tall are they? Do they wear shoes? And who were they before— before I knew them in this peculiar way, both tentative and sure.
OPEN STUDIO POEM #10 riff-raff heart glue synchronicity SYNCHRONICITY I dream of unmasked riff-raff. Anxiety is collaging my heart: scraps torn from memory, the flattened faces of my friends, a quarter of my granddaughter’s life. Will I ever have glue enough to paste it together? Emergency. Emergence. Emerge. Resurge.
REPORT: December 1, 2020, 6:45 a.m. Fog. The moon an hour past full. Gold through silver. Each oak branch an oak tree branched through the fog, across the moon.
OPEN STUDIO POEM #9 coats coax helm ochre A captain stands at the helm in his ochre coat, coaxing the wind into the sails. The artist in her rusty coat coaxes the ochre from the leaves. Her easel is the helm of a ship sailing into the winter sky. His coat of arms: a purple coat on an ochre field, crowned with a silver helm. too many suit coats, too much ochre light, too many vying for the helm, too many trying to coax a resolution from the deep
OPEN STUDIO POEM #8 ribbons ukelele spew The sky spews rain from silver ribbons of cloud. It patters on the roof, unabating: Beethoven’s fifth symphony played by a ukelele orchestra in the park on a moonless November night.
