Category Archives: Poetry

Memoir, Poetry

Grandpa’s Workbench

Leave a comment
Gravestone for Frank Roderick Marsh

My grandfather said,
“Always buy the best tool you can afford,”
and
“Don’t try to get by with a substitute.”

He didn’t own a pair of vice grips.
He told me he couldn’t figure out what they were for.
Anything they could do, he had a better tool.
He had fixed-span wrenches, boxed and open,
he had crescent wrenches in seven sizes,
he had reversible ratchet sockets
and maple handled nut drivers.
He had left handed wrenches,
specialized wrenches bent at precise angles,
wrenches with heads gamboled on universal joints,
and everything duplicated in metric.
He had pliers but I was never to use them on bolts.
Pliers were for compressing spring clips,
twisting wire,
for replacing hose clamps
and breaking dried plugs out of the spout of the glue bottle.
He always used WD-40 as a solvent, never as a lubricant.

His son, my father, was born in 1928,
just in time for the Great Depression,
and those tools had fed Grandpa’s family for six years.
He could no more throw a tool away
than burn a fifty dollar bill.

He had dozens of screwdrivers.
Some had broken or chipped.
Grandpa ground them down,
reincarnated them with a shorter shank
or transmuted them into a scribe or an awl.

Sometimes, on overnights,
after supper,
while Grandma cleaned up the kitchen and washed the dishes,
Grandpa and I would go out to the garage.
On his immaculate workbench,
which must have weighed 800 pounds,
he would show me how to raise a wooden curl as fine as an eyelash
using a spoke shave,
or how to hack out wooden handles with a draw knife.
or how to build drawer slides with a matched pair of hand planes.
or how to sharpen a plane iron on a whetstone and
how to de-burr the edge with a strop .

He showed me how to use my thumbnail as a guide
for the kerf of the crosscut saw,
how to use a bow saw,
a coping saw,
a backsaw.

He looked over my shoulder while his bifocals slid down his nose.
The wire cage of the single bulb lamp shone from behind him.
The smoke from his Pall Mall curled up past an eye, an ear,
into the light and the wire cage.

He never, not once, said, “Wait until you’re older.”

Poetry

It’s Entropy, Baby

Leave a comment

This is another old poem, but I found a link on YouTube to an old video I put out years ago. If I were to record it again today, I’d pick a moderately slower tempo. (and my new gravelly voice.) It’s a good poem to put out on one’s 69th birthday.

 

No matter what you build, it all comes crashing down. No matter what you want, it all goes out of round. No matter how you sing, you make a discordant sound. It’s Entropy, Baby and it’s the law of the land.

It all spills into disarray. It all breaks into pieces. It happened to Sister Teresa. It happened to Jesus. As much as we want to keep breathing, eventually it ceases. It’s Entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust.

The universe is collapsing in upon its point of birth, or else it’s evaporating  away from the center. No matter what we do In our little stay on Earth, we end up evicted like A delinquent renter. It’s Entropy, Baby and it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust. And we’re breaking up the band.

Energy flows to where it hasn’t been. No matter how much you have, you always need more again. Feather, fur or fin–you die, you rot, you pay the wages of your sin. Your molecules go out. They don’t even know each other when they meet up again. It’s Entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust. And we’re breaking up the band. On a subatomic level

Everything goes to hell Given enough time. My effort to keep the rhythm raises hell with the rhyme. When I pay attention to the rhyming, the timing falls apart. Everything goes to hell. There’s arrhythmia in my heart. It’s Entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust. And we’re breaking up the band. On a subatomic level they need your parts again.

Sunshine singers say, “Look, it’s bright.” The sun comes up and spreads the light. The rain that falls on the grave in the spring brings grass, and leaves, and there’s life again. But it’s Entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust. And we’re breaking up the band. On a subatomic level They need your parts again. ‘Cause it’s entropy, Baby.

The elements that bring back the new life will erode my gravestone over time And the granite will turn to sand. Even the conquering worm becomes dust motes in the sunshine. And children who play in the sunshine will grow,  break their hearts, break their necks and die all alone. It’s Entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land. Everybody turns to dust. And we’re breaking up the band. On a subatomic level They need your parts again. ‘Cause it’s entropy, Baby. And it’s the law of the land.

Poetry

Sit Still

Leave a comment
Common frogs mating

 

As light fades
over the pond.
Frog song emerges;
one, then two,
five, then twelve.
Dozens sing.
Hundreds harmonize.
Thousands send an acoustic aura.
The musical swells
rise and fall,
synchronize,
then fall apart.

Each male chants,
“Come. Pick me.
My genes are splendid.”

And the females too,
hasten to frogsong
sung seasonally plumb.

And still,
if she is seized
from behind,
rough, rude thumbs
hooked into armpits,
she sings again:
either, “Yes. Yes,”
or “No, release me.”
Wrong breed?
Wrong species?
Deformed sperm?

Males release, mostly,
if told to.

The sound is not a murmuration.
(I looked it up.)
It is more a susurration,
rising
and falling–
a weak repeating pattern
that screams
into the otherwise
still night–
“Seize me.
Spill seed.”
Afresh, the cycle begins.
Sit still.

Memoir, Poetry

I celebrate the life of my father’s mother’s father: Francis Marion Cox

Leave a comment

I can remember
near Memorial Day
of 1955.
My great-grandfather Cox,
(just Grampa to me)
has me seated in the car
up front with him.
I am sitting as tall as I can
in order to see out the windows.
Grampa is driving through the center of town,
three traffic lights then as now.
The first light clicks to red
in front of the courthouse.
Grandpa rolls to a stop next to
a skinny man
wearing an army barracks cap
in the cross walk.
The man, much younger than Grandpa,
nonetheless familiar, says,
“Frank, where’s your Poppy?”
Grandpa always looks pissed off,
Like he’s chewing something tough.
But he pulls two dollars
from his shirt pocket,
hands them to the man in the cap.
“I want two, Melvin.”
He gives me a glance.
He doesn’t smile,
He looks like he got stuck
with some duty
beneath his station.
He lays both paper flowers
on the dash.
He drives one block and turns right,
drives past the Post Office,
makes another right
into the parking lot behind Beech Market.
He stops the old Dodge,
takes a paper poppy
And twists the wire stem
around the middle button on my shirt
He does the same to his own.

I remember he placed his higher,
where he couldn’t really see it
but others could.
The VFW had completely
occupied our downtown.
I didn’t know then
that
the poppy was a protection racket.
It was a cool poppy.

Grampa always smelled of tobacco.
The poppy didn’t smell like anything.

Memoir, Original recording, Parody, Poetry

My Mem’ry

Leave a comment

This is what I did today instead of work. (Sound on.)

You know this is semi-autobiographical parody, right?

You know, of all the things
That got away from me,
I miss my mem’ry most.

Of all the things
That got away from me,
I miss my old mem’ry most.

Lost my money.
Lost my love.
Lost my house,
But I miss my mem’ry the most.

I lost a bunch of other things
I don’t remember right now.
Oh, God–I miss my mem’ry the most.

Of all the things
That got away from me,
I certainly do miss my mem’ry most.

I lost so many things,
But mostly I miss my mem’ry.

 

I must acknowledge the lifelong inspiration of Tom Waits,  Leon Redbone and especially Chuck E. Weiss

Poetry

Shame

Leave a comment
The Wounded Angel 1903 Hugo Simberg

 

You quit.

For years after,
I wanted you back.

At first, I was willing to make any sacrifice,
Change any foible within me,
Deny every quibble I might invent.

In trying to open to others,
I knew I was still searching
For some 2.0 version of you.
Unspoken shame lives darkly in that truth.

Shame remains, a sniper in the night.
It does not look at me with liquid blue eyes.
Or if it does,
They are unblinking
Like a shark.

Today, I have a different love,
Together now for decades.
Through the whole panoply of feelings
We have traversed dead lunar landscapes,
Navigated oceans of tears
Which would have consumed you again.

Shame abides.
Mine is uneasy and refuses to rest,
We co-exist. It’s like owning a mean cat—
Tail switches like mad some days, ears laid flat.
It murders songbirds at night
But does not gift them to me as restitution.
My shame is a mercenary stuck tick-tight.

Poetry

Cathartes Aura (#9)

Leave a comment
Stepped off the thermal

Ancestors in my family
(mostly women–the men are heathens)
believed that when the Turkey Vultures
roosted in the trees,
the lower they roosted
the greater chance of a death nearby.
It was not always a person.
Sometimes a pet or a milk cow.

I have been feeling a step or two
closer to death all winter,
but with the return of the Vultures
and the very late hints of an actual Spring,
I have felt Death’s silent retreat.
She understands her eventual victory
and she is satisfied to be patient.

The Buzzards have been working the back roads
now that the snow is gone,
especially in the ditches by the two lanes.
Winter has conspired
to preserve and to age
deer carcasses
and the hairy lumps of raccoons and opossums.
The Raptors survived the snow that lingered
after their arrival
on a predictable fare of flat squirrels.

The Old Ones are patient too.
All day they have wheeled high in the sky.
They constantly survey eight square miles.
They watch and they wait.
They understand their inevitable victory as well.

They come from miles to roost in loose communities.
They wheel in from on high
in tight arcs, left and right.
They depend on smaller currents,
Invisible to us.
A precise and studied aerial ballet,
they spill air from powerful wings,
which if provoked
can break a man’s forearm,
wheel tight through branches.
Again spill wind,
drop the back of the wing to slow speed, spill air,
drop the black curtains of feathers,
to hug the air to breast and
to stop
with no visible support.
To step
off the wind onto the branch
more than halfway to the top of the tree.
Folding wings, they squat motionless,
hunching their shoulders into the last fading rays of the sun,
black, slender lumps on the limbs of leafless trees.

They sleep
and dream Vulture dreams
of warmer days
and bounty.

Memoir, Poetry

Grandpa Buddha’s Epistle to His Grandkids (#10)

Leave a comment

Dear Grandchild,
(If we share a funny name for each other, put yours here ____________.)
(If we don’t have one, you should be called Farnsworth…
unless your real name is Farnsworth,
in which case you should be called Bingo,
like the dog.)

Time has gotten stretched in my generation.
Everything takes people longer now.
Childhood lasts a very long time.
When I was a child,
I couldn’t wait to be an adult.
Each birthday mattered. Even half-birthdays.

5 meant go to school
8 meant getting homework
10 was DOUBLE DOUBLE DIGITS DIGITS
12 was a dozen
14 meant high school
16 meant drivers license! Freedom! Buy gas! Pay tax!
18 meant adult. Move out. Go live your life.

But here I am writing to you when I’m almost 70
And I don’t know how long we will know each other.
One or some or none of you may not be BORN yet!
If you know me,
I hope I loved you enough and
Just the right way.
If you don’t know me,
Or you can’t remember,
I did love you,
Even if we didn’t say hello face-to-face.

I have held you as much as you needed.
I wanted each of you to need holding
As much as I wanted.
I smelled your baby head.
I can still smell your baby head.

I was there when you ran,
When you swam,
I was there when you scored in soccer.
And when you sang in the play.
I’m still there whenever you do something important.
Baptism? Yup
Wet your pants in school? Uh huh
Hit the ball?
Stopped the shot?
Wanted to ask out that special person?
Picked a puppy at the rescue?
I was there.
When you think of me,
I’m there.
I’m there
Any time you think of me.

Love,
PopPop