The letters we write can’t be edited down to contain an entire year.
Fonts get smaller, margins get smaller. It just doesn’t matter.
We love you.
We miss you.
We saw you and we still miss you.
We hope we hugged you last year;
If not, it is our primary goal this year.
How’s our life? Pretty great. Hope yours is too.
Steve stays retired. Hard work.
Deb stays in education. Really hard work with payoffs (just not cash).
Kids are all working.
Grandkids still convince us of the value of humanity.
Stay warm in the winter,
Cool in the summer
And chill as hell the rest of the year.
May your Christmas be perfect.
May 2019 bring moments that steal your breath.
Two young poems walked down an alley
arguing.
“You already agreed,” said one,
“that Love is what we seek.”
“Yes,” said the other. “But not the only thing.
You know, food, shelter, some other things too.”
The first poem dug his bare hands into empty pockets
And hunched his shoulders into stubborn wind.
A cold mist had begun to drift inside buttons.
“Which one first?”
“Why, the most important, of course!”
The second poem was smug.
“Then love,” said the first,
his attitude improving despite the elements.
“I was thinking shelter,” said the second.
Low, distant thunder rolled through them.
“Shelter it is, then, where we might find love.”
Donald Hall died today
as he so often had promised.
I suppose if I live to nearly ninety,
some lesser poet could mutter
the same proclamation over my span.
I do not know why poets
who, more than anyone,
should know they are going to spend
infinitely more time dead,
mutter on so about what it is like to die.
Or what it is like to watch another
Felled by this or that “itis” or “osis”
Or some other affliction ending in “ia” or “oma,”
leaving behind an honest love,
haunting all the places and things the living touch.
Donald Hall died for thirty years.
The first time I died, I was thirty-six, whining.
Poetry was no balm.
Language lost value, diminished in scope.
It was unrecorded, unremarkable.
Life is disappearance: of mothers, good and bad
into unphased dirt; of fathers who did or did not
play catch with sons; of brothers, sisters, and old dogs.
The dirt abides. The ending of the lives of poets
is the black at the end of the fade out.
America,
What are your touchstones?
What is it that allows American arrogance?
I don’t say that judgmentally.
It’s able to simply sit like a toad in a puddle.
It’s a toad. It’s in a puddle.
In this case, the toad’s the truth.
In another case, it might be the puddle.
Lately, a lot has been said about guns.
Is it guns? Is that a touchstone?
You could make a case.
Lately the case seems very gory, and hate-filled.
Guns seem to have something to do with racism
and kind of sideways religious intolerance.
And hate. It’s rolled up into a
Tangled confluence.
Is it money?
Our money or will anyone’s money do?
Or is it the system that delivers the money?
Or is it the people to whom the system delivers the money?
I get lost in the hierarchy.
Seems like a lot of hate in the world about money right now.
Or maybe it’s the system that makes Americans hate.
Or the people who the system works for.
It’s kind of tangly too.
Is it freedom? I love freedom in America.
Freedom is great. More freedom is greater.
I’m free to do anything I want in America.
I can walk down your street with guns and money.
And I can say hateful things at the top of my lungs.
That’s freedom and it takes
a thousand Hell’s Angles spending money on guns on the head of a pin
to keep us free.
30/30 is always a challenge for me. I promised myself (and you?) to do 30 poems in 30 days. Here we are on day 23 and I’m a lot of days behind. But some days the muse honors you more than once. Yesterday was a good day. Lots of work reflecting Spring right now. But this one was a little different.
Retirement is a 500 Piece Puzzle
Great Grandma Lettie
Proved right.
Retirement is best borne
On the shoulders of metaphor.
Her last twenty years
Were measured in dirt.
Flower bulbs
In or out,
Fresh cut,
Sold face to face in her driveway—
Especially prized by
Both local funeral homes.
Winters were
The pieces between
Hills of potatoes
Or rows of Gladiolus
Planted like families
All inclining their faces
Toward the sun.
Always in March,
After the dour prophesies of February
Passed unfilled,
Pieces came stirring
And Lettie’s life would ache to green.
There were chores
That couldn’t wait like
Finding the key puzzle piece—
The one needed
For all the others
To fall into place.
It is in March we come to know
The puzzle can be solved.
The entire summer stretches out
And becomes less
Than placing all the pieces.
Knowing it can be done,
The puzzle is already solved.
A few days before April 1, I decided to do 30/30 (30 poems in 30 days of April) for the first time in any long time. So, two days in, I don’t exactly recognize this voice yet.
1 of 30 April 1
Two Poems Walked Down the Street
Arguing.
“You already agreed!” said one
“Love is what we are after.”
“Yes,” said the other. “But not the only thing.
You know, food, shelter, some other things too.”
The first poem dug his bare hands into his pockets
And shrugged his shoulders into the wind.
A cold rain had begun to spit.
2 of 30 April 2
Is The Afterlife a Road Trip?
Nothing feels as real
as being on the road.
All the rest is like reading old People magazines,
Or watching a worn-out, re-run sit-com.
The transition between is perfect.
One minute, lying there
In the hospital,
On the couch,
Maybe in the middle of the road.
It hurts to breathe.
The spine has turned to hot wax.
And SNAP!, that Olds is
Purring down a fine 1960s asphalt
Black ribbon snaking out of the mountains,
Maybe the sun is rising.
Only a little breeze but, of a sudden,
The Olds is a convertible with no perceptible
Ground vibration. Smooth.
It is a perfect world for motoring:
Gravity works about the same.
Inertia is identical but —
No friction. No turbulence. No angles,
Except the chrome.
Last week, those of us in Southern Michigan (who had our eyes open) saw a blinding flash in the sky.
First they speculated it was a meteor. The next day they speculated some of the exploded particles may have struck the ground, thus they were meteorites. Then they decided it must have landed in a debris field about 2.5 miles west of the village of Hamburg. I live about 2.5 miles west of Hamburg and so I decided it was the second divine attempt on my life so far. Here’s a little something about the first time.
GOD THREW A ROCK
Upon Seeing A Small Meteorite Land Within Yards of Me
I know the cosmic odds against a thing like this.
God threw a rock at me and missed.
It whumped into a little hummock of April-freshening earth and
threw steam up like sullen, smokey anger
at having come to rest in such an ignoble place.
From across the entire cosmos,
from the very beginning of time,
God made this rock to hurl at me and miss.
I can not help but wonder if God missed me on purpose
just to get my attention,
or if he has a lousy aim,
troubled, perhaps, as he is, by bursitis in his throwing arm.
At the very end,
too late to do anything about it,
I saw it coming—
it’s long green tail, glowing, streaking, cupric, downward at me—
phosphorescing in the still night air
for seconds after it slammed into the earth,
spraying its dying red embers higher than the barn.
And there it sat,
shaped like an old seed potato,
about the size of a quarter,
asserting by its mere presence that it was no accident.
Sometime after dawn it had cooled.
I stooped to pick it up,
felt its heft in my hand,
knew my hand touched what had touched the hand of God,
and I threw it back at Him.
I missed.
A few years ago I recorded this poem. There have been a couple of minor edits since then, but maybe you’ll get a kick out of hearing my recitation.
