If it is depression,
it comes and goes.
You know that.
Sometimes, like a cat,
it takes its own sweet time leaving.
It glides slowly out the door,
threatening to run back inside every step or two.
It changes its mind and returns
And reverses again.
It seems particularly fickle
when there is rain or snow.
[1]
May 2 Story
Once upon a time, I started a WORDLE puzzle with the answer to the previous puzzle. It threw me for such a loop that I failed to solve it, thus, seven words for this WORDLE poem.
FORGO
ROMAN
ORALS
SAVOR
SHORE
SCORN
(STORY)
I had to FORGO my ROMAN holiday.
I had failed my ORALS.
The depression forbid me to SAVOR the flavor of fruits,
The smell of the SHORE—
All but the SCORN of my professors.
The scorn of my cohorts is a different STORY entirely.
The game, starting officially tomorrow, May 1, 2022, is to use the words in your WORDLE solution to serve as a prompt for a poem each day. My addition is to strive to use the words in the order used in the puzzle. But surprise! On this puzzle I did a 2! If I don’t use the start word in the poem, that leaves me with only one word, the solution. Start word: EARTH, solution: TRASH.
Earth Trash
It seems we can go from
EARTH to
TRASH
In one long, slow step.
A very early hominid
stood barefoot
near a fire
and discovered
good
beneath the limitless sky.
A very late hominid
kicked off his Crocs
near a fire
and cut his foot to the bone
on beach glass
beneath a sky interrupted
for low latency internet access.
An idea emerged kind of organically on Brett Axel’s FaceBook page. The idea was to use one’s WORDLE words as prompts for poems. Further, we (at least three of us) resolved to do this daily through May for some potential book deal later. I put another layer of “rules” on the experiment in that I will endeavor to use the clue words in the order I used them in the WORDLE puzzle.
Book or no book, it’s a fun experiment which I have begun. This might be the first keeper.
Schrodinger’s Kitty
So, they threw me in jail
like a THIEF.
Locked me in a box
and left me.
Pitch dark, silent.
It smelled of tin cans
and ESTERS of cardboard glue.
No room. Could take no STEPS
left nor right.
I do not mind.
I take RESTS.
I admit, after forever,
I panicked
and let loose
lusty howls and
ZESTY yowls and
whimpering mewls.
With each breath,
all of what is/was/
may never be
outside the box
winked into and
out of
existence
.
And now the bulb is poised to pop.
And now the seed trembles in the soil.
The rhizome simmers sugars
Surging through cells to crush through mud.
And now the bud swells pregnant
And now the leaf grows shoulders in the bud.
The sun, the rain, the wind thrust,
All tremulous.
And now the yolk shivers in its sac.
And now the worm uncoils in a lurch.
Copulation is insistent and frequent.
The hive quivers its fertile breath.
And now the spring’s fidget returns.
And now the death must dither.
The rut is unopposed.
Even churches cannot begrudge a flower.
I recently joined a FaceBook group called “Haiku for a global pandemic.” Once or twice a day I drop a haiku in that group. I’m going to keep a little collection of them here as well. I’m sure mostly they will be my own, but I’ll put up ones I like with author’s permission. This will be a growing collection through this period of isolation.
4/13/20
Cold Michigan wind
the morning after Easter,
trails strands of somber.
–Steve D. Marsh
4/10/20
My highest highlight:
The most yellow daffodils
Telling Death to wait.
–Steve D. Marsh
The otter floats, playfully aware,
on the currents and the tides.
She dives to examine
an interesting stone.
She turns it every way
in the sunshine,
floating on her back.
She flips it away
and finds another.
It, too, is interesting,
turned in the air,
maybe for the first time in a thousand years
or, perhaps, since last week.
It smells of the water.
It slips away.
She does not keep the interesting stones.
They would weigh her down.
She would drown in her sleep.
She darts to the bottom.
She pries a fish from a crevice
and returns to the surface current,
always floating on her back,
enjoying her lunch.
Sometimes she spies a clam.
She also finds the right anvil stone and,
again floating on her back in the currents,
beats the clam on the stone
she balances on her stomach.
It is primal and
it is dinner.
She releases the clam shell and the stone.
One plunges to the bottom.
The other rocks back and forth in descent.
Tomorrow:
different stones,
different clams.
Go on, little poem;
Go down the hill and get in line
With the others.
There are hundreds of you now
Trying to stand as tall and straight as soldiers
Holding fixed bayonets at the ready.
But most of you are small,
Bent little things,
Like a long rank of twisted teeth
Standing stubbornly in your sockets.
You are barely strong enough to stand
And give testimony
To how someone once lived
And raised you
In all your misshapen fortitude.
But, go on;
Go get in line,
Like old-time farmers
Leaning on long handled hay forks,
Gossiping at market.
You tell them
After I’ve gone.
Show them my crooked scowl,
My bent grin.
Stand, like strikers, holding aloft
Your placards and slogans.
Stand against the bullies and braggarts,
The privileged and the aloof.
Stand in line after I have lain down
And make a good bit of noise.
When morphine slowed and thickened
my Dad’s voice,
he told anyone who would listen
about the bee colony
in his hospice room.
Back and forth,
they flew.
He said in his dry, dying-man voice,
“I think they are moving
from one place to another.”
Dad, deep in glaucoma,
without his glasses,
high as he ever had been in life,
watched bees
go back and forth
building,
while he was dying.
Two days before his death, Dad,
who was vain about his voice,
who some would say was vainglorious about talking,
who was not a conversationalist so much as
one who didn’t know when to listen,
used the last of his voice
to castigate my sister,
for a mass of imagined insults and disappointments
over a malignant lifetime.
She left in tears and vowed never to return.
Something sacred had broken
and it couldn’t be healed over
or sealed up, at least not in time.
The golden honey of her daughter’s love
had drained out
and was lost upon the ground.
When he finished,
and she had left,
the cancer took his voice.
And still he watched the bees coming and going,
tearing down and building;
he signed to me
to bring my sister back to him
that he might make amends.
I did not know how to trust him either.
Bees make honey
but bees have stingers.
And when they sting, they die.
For two days,
I went back and forth
to bring my sister back to my father’s death bed
And when she consented,
with steel in her voice,
and steel in her backbone,
and steel in her jaw,
I promised I would be with her.
He took her warmth in both of his paper-dry cool hands
And clutched her hand to his thin chest
near his heart.
He looked at her face and moved his rough lips
and though he was no longer taking water,
tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes
and rolled backward
across his ears
onto the smooth hospice pillowcase.
That night, he moved on–
no more back and forth.
Five years later, my sister thanked me
for being tough with her
and for insisting,
although I don’t remember it
exactly like that.
had told my therapist
about the chilling images
spontaneously blooming
in my waking brain,
like I’m trying to scare myself,
the image trying to be the whole
jumping-out-of-the-closet gestalt.
I had assumed
gore was intended to draw revulsion–
revulsion bound to all negative.
Until today,
the pictures became more
than the puzzle.
In real life:
blood clot headed for my brain
but gets caught in my eyeball.
I can see it floating.
It is deoxygenated maroon,
shaped like a large ant or
stinging, flying insect.
It is inanimate but
maybe wasn’t always.
There, a string,
a clot,
an antenna? on one end
waving in the liquid currents as it floats.
I can’t know if it is bad that it is in my eye
(and frightening to see,
let alone what that forebodes
for the health of my eye),
or if it is good
my eye filtered it out of my brain
and saved me from the stroke
I might have had today.
October 28, 2019.