Book of the Dead 3
As time erodes,
The past fades.
All our deeds fade.
Memory goes gauzey.
Even morning is translucent by eve.
And by death,
We are making no new fading tapestries.
The image,
The tone,
The scent,
The taste,
The feel
Of fading dust
Is left but shortly.
The dead fade too.
Their countenance,
Their deeds.
Swept away like detritus:
A tie clasp,
A collar button,
A porcelain thimble.
By midnight they can barely be seen at all.
Tag Archives: 30/30
March of the Haiku
This spate of haikus comes from a prompt offered from the FaceBook page of friend and bard, Terry Wooten. That’s him in the photo performing at his unique venue, Stone Circle. He wrote:
Bi-polar April.
Peepers singing in snowflakes.
Change lawn mower oil.
(April 18, 2022)
I shared his poem on my FaceBook page with the following comment: “It is a nearly perfect example of the the American Haiku: 5-7-5, presents something funny and/or surprising, it contains nature and makes a comment on humanness. It goes above and beyond by banging two things together that don’t belong together (twice!!) for a little “contrapposto.” I took it as a challenge to write my own April poem. I thought I could take inspiration and match his genius. Not today! I’ll keep trying.”
The rest of the day I continued to put out haiku and some are better than others. I’m not certain any rose to Terry’s level above.
Oh no! I just drank
six gay beers and I liked it.
Please don’t tell my wife.
[68]
Heart doctor gave me
(prostate the size of a peach)
Mass diuretics.
[69]
What makes a haiku?
In America, mostly
Humor and surprise.
[70]
Ski masks make baseball
Look like bank robbing–
Another stolen base.
[71]
It’s hard to see things
If you don’t do anything.
Bad haiku! Bad ‘ku!
[72]
When the sun peeks through
on a snowy April day,
don’t believe the lie.
[73]
A Fox News headline
Is a lie that might happen
In Bizarroland.
[74]
Matter/energy
Cannot be made or destroyed.
Where’d the ice cream go?
[75]
50 words (#22)
The doctor prescribed a device
To practice stretching my lungs.
I catch a glimpse of
My shark dead left eye,
Monocular, in the bathroom mirror.
What damage to my brain
Allows my right eye–believing
it is engaged in life–
To catch my dead eye?
I can’t breathe deeply enough.
Cathartes Aura (#9)
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.
Spring Conversations (#6)
In the back pond,
while I am burning leaves
and winter-downed limbs,
two Red-wing Blackbirds
chatter “chuck” in the reeds.
I tried to join their conversation
and they went silent–
two black-eyed parts,
invisible in the wider sytax.
In the next door front yard,
the neighbor’s daughter
is standing in early sun with her new beau.
They also chatter.
Their eyes shine for each other.
I did not try to join their conversation,
although I know the language.
To My Wife the Witness
I must apologize to the vines this year.
I was much too late in the pruning.
Instead of my cuts coming in the middle of winter,
when cold and ice have anesthetized
their limbs on cordons of frozen steel,
I was in my own darkness,
wrapped in a blanket that hindered action.
I merely bore out the short gray days and
stared impotently into the black nights.
Winter shook me like a dog shakes a snake in summer.
Instead, I come to them in a time
more comfortable for me–
A warming day,
knowing
that the necessary cuts come in Spring–
that living sap will leak
because of my tardiness,
that I risk the health,
of buds,
of growth,
of flowers,
of fruit,
the wine.
I am sorry.
I will do better now.
Our chemistry is better applied this Spring.
I vow to better protect against living rabbits and deer,
against a thousand kinds of scuttling bugs,
against the single minded mania of birds
and greedy ground squirrels.
The end-of-the-season Autumn battle
will be fierce.
I cannot be certain of next November
or her cruelest shorter sister February,
But I can offer the summer, still with hope.
Haiku?
These come in from a cull of some old notebooks. I’m posting them here for an archive, if nothing else. Feel free to peek in this archive if you want. If, when you leave, you are still counting, I have failed.
I am unsure of the date for these three. Maybe March of 2017
Is alt-medicine
newspeak for Flint tap water?
Or do you smoke it?
My father enrolled
in watchmakers’ school. He lived
His perfect metaphor.
The rheumatism
has my left leg in its jaws,
Motherfucker!
On November 1, 2017
The old, fat man sees
his penis in a mirror.
“There you are, young Toad.”
On August 4, 2018
Refrigerator
On the fritz. Warm beer’s better
Than no beer at all.
On Ash Wednesday of 2016, I wrote:
No ashes for me.
Why the annual proof of faith?
Faith isn’t on skin.
I also wrote a note that I was glad I got to live in a country and a culture where I can write this idea. Today…eh.
A February 2017 offering a memory of a thing of beauty.
Thicker than bacon
Spanish cheese made of sheep milk
Medium oven.
It seems very odd to post the next two in May. They spoke of a much different experience than now.
At last, it is winter.
I have missed you like mania
Misses depression.
and
Today is too cold
For Valentine’s Day, my love.
My blood fails to heat.
And the marginal note said, “Deb’s 200 miles away anyway.”
On 4/19
Three year old Nora and I walked to the pond today.
We brandished a slingshot to ploop stones.
Deer tracks littered quotation marks
over the sandy approach to the south end.
We found bleached bones in a handful of gray fur–
unlucky young opossum’s night path crossed mother Red Fox.
The jawbone, with most teeth still intact,
was declared “Dinosaur” and ordered for collection.
We also collected three interesting rock samples.
They are polishing each other in my right pocket now.
Geometry & Poetry 4-18
The sun appears to rise in the eastern sky, increasing its angle of incidence from the horizon.
My window is on the SW side of my house, above ground level. I sit with my shoulders perpendicular to the glass.
#1 At what angle will westbound and downbound rays of light correspond to the angle of inclination on the rear window of that SUV parked directly west of me so that its glint prevents me from reading?
#2 As the sun appears to rise in the clear sky and arc toward the south, at what time will the beam be so deflected as to permit me to continue my book?
#3 Can I apply this geometry to my SSW facing passive solar heat collector that, until now, has been content to sit in shade every morning?
#4 Is this poem worthy of the distraction?
Show your work.
Touchstones
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.
God bless Hell’s Angles.
God bless freedom.