Notice: Readers will find format disparities in the following text, due to an upgrade in my website software.  I’ve been too busy to reconstruct the site and ask your forbearance. 

                                                                          Richard Greene

                                                                          

                                          POEM OF THE WEEK


This webpage contains poems by Richard Greene.  Poems are posted to the  page weekly.  The poem for the current week appears first followed by previously posted poems .

Poem for This Week

September 7-14, 2008

Developing Eden

Eden was lost
the Good Book says,
but I’m sure that it’s been found.
With man covering the earth,
by God’s grace,
such fine real estate
can’t be unknown ground.
I’m sure it’s been improved by now.
No more lions or tigers at least
nor other dangerous beasts.
(We don’t care how bright they burn
in the forests of the night.
We don’t want them in our backyards.)
And no more elephants trampling.
They’ve been harvested for tusks.
What’s more this comes with an economic plus;
Noah’s ark has been downsized.
And no more dense growth to tangle our feet.
The land’s been scraped and scaped
and tastefully lined with streets.
Now we can glide from one end to the other
in comfort and at ease
in our powerful SUVs.
No more meadows looking seedy.
All well kept lawns and fairways
barred to the naked and needy.
An elegant sign now graces the gates,

      Eden Gardens

  Residential Estates

Poems for Previous Weeks

December 20-26, 2004

Note in a Bottle

I write this poem to
I know not who.
Whoever you are,
wherever you are,
if you should retrieve it
from the ocean of words around us,
I hope it will speak to you.

Children's Story

A bee lights inside our window
this late October day.
How did it get in I wonder.
I didn't hear it buzz by when I opened the door
nor see it out of the corner of my eye
nor feel a backwash from its wings.
But there it is on the windowpane.
What to do?
We can't live with a bee,
can we?
No, my wife wouldnt, even if I could.
(Wives are more practical.)
Were it a fly I'd swat it,
but a bee is too fine a creature for such a fate.
So I open the casement and blow
with all the force of my lungs
as if to extinguish candles on a cake
realizing, as the bee veers out
into the cold October air,
that it probably won't last the night,
that my breath is death to that bee.
Will it go knowingly, frantically wanting to live,
or is that beyond the insect mind?
Perhaps it will be numbed by the cold
and slip away anesthetized.
It's dark and getting colder now
and I wonder if the bee is already gone
or dying out there alone in the dark,
and I wish we could live with bees.
If this were a children's story
the bee would share this house with us
and we'd look upon each other
complaisantly every day
and in the spring the bee would go forth
and resume its gathering ways.

Season's Greetings

A card came in the mail today
on its face an old photo
of five boys running
across a snowy field in Central Park.
In the background tower the cliffs
of Central Park West
veiled in falling flakes,
as if this were a valley exempt from time,
and the boys,
their knees suspended in exuberant stride,
are wearing caps with earflaps
from that season when the world was young.
Now here in my warm kitchen
miles and years from that place
I feel its snowfield under my feet
and about my shoulders the sensation
of winter's cold embrace.

December 27, 2004 January 2, 2005

Winter Surprise

It was unseasonably warm
when I went to bed last night,
but when I awoke this morning
there was snow on the ground
and I felt that subtle excitement
that snow brings.
When I raised the window shade
the lower panes were frosted
and I could see only the sky.
It was its brightest blue,
a few small clouds glowing warmly
in the early morning sun,
and a pair of hawks quartered the air
with no urgency of cold.
Then I noticed white on branches
and bent forward to see the ground.
There snow surprised me
flashing across fields
where I had expected
only winters dun shades.

January 3-9, 2005

Birds in Black

Stepping outside I find
mere feet from my door
two large crows
in a leafless tree.
Too large for its naked branches,
motionless,
with vitreous eyes,
they look like clockwork birds,
but in their gaze I see
wary minds
appraising me.

January 10-16, 2005

Words

What are words?
Mere marks on paper,
maybe shallow grooves on a hard surface,
but often nothing more
than a trivial disturbance of the air
less palpable than a breeze.
Yet they propel us through our world
as furiously as any hurricane!

January 17-23, 2005

The Boy Within

Noticing the photo on my bookcase
of a boy being kissed by a dog.
I think to myself
that boy is me,
65 years ago,
and I think
somewhere in me
that boy still exists.
Yes, I no longer look the same.
My hair is gray.
my skin no longer smooth.
I wear spectacles.
I have a beard!
Yet, looking at that boy,
I feel we are one,
as if the boy were like a butterfly
lurking within
a caterpillar's skin.

January 24-30, 2005

Memories

I don't need more memories
yet they keep coming.
Nearly seventy years' accumulation stored away
in the attics, closets, cupboards of my mind,
but more arrive each day,
and the bedchambers too are full
of animated guests.
Granted, some don't stay,
and some stay only awhile
taking their leave considerately.
Others, however, remain,
stalking the halls year after year,
some congenial,
some unremarkable,
and some unwelcome lodgers who resist eviction.
And so, though the house is full
it keeps on filling
for it seems there's no end
to the memories it can hold.

January 31 February 6, 2005

Boxes

Our basement is full of boxes
stacked at random
and often when looking for something
I'll be surprised
by the debris of another time,
my children's toys or baby clothes,
my son's baseball cards
that haven't been touched in years,
the paraphernalia of forsaken interests,
long unused pots and pans,
and as I sit there sorting
memories flicker
in my mind.

February 7-13, 2005

Winter Brilliance

The geese are flying again
swiftly
after the languid slowness
of the snow,
celebrating the whitened fields
with noisy exuberance.

The geese are flying again
under blue banners
of cloud emblazoned sky.

 
February 14-20, 2005

I Feel Your Heartbeat

I feel your heartbeat
even though we're not touching
when we see each other and smile
after I've been away.

I feel your heartbeat
even though you're not at home
when I come upon
the sentimental gift I gave you
sitting on your pillow.

I feel your heartbeat
when I call you at your office
just to say hello.

I feel your heartbeat
and mine scats
in syncopated rhythm
round your metronome.

February 21-27, 2005

She

She sews my buttons
washes my shirts and underwear
wraps packages for me
and scratches my back.
She checks my spelling and punctuation
and supplies words I can't think of
and names I've forgotten.
She reminds me of birthdays,
even those of my closest kin,
and other important dates.
She also remembers our early dates,
where we went and what we ate,
and almost everything I've said,
and holds me to it.
She's a glutton for hugs and kisses
and other canoodlings.
She likes to tuck me in
when I go to bed before her.
(And I, for my part, like to be tucked.)
She calls me pumpkin and bubeleh.
She makes sure I don't forget
to get her cards for holidays
and put out the trash.
She lets me know when I've got food in my beard
and calls to my attention
driving errors and other transgressions.
She tries to dissuade me from eating
things that aren't good for me.
In short she is my
W I F E.

February 28 March 6, 2005

Ode to an Island

My sister lives on a Caribbean isle,
little more than a dust mote on a map,
no realm of magic,
nor Ariel, nor Caliban
(though a touch of each),
no stage for grand drama,
merely the familiar theater of domesticity, 
but birds flower there 
and flowers take flight,
fish flash rainbows over the coral,
palm fronds sway to the wind
as if spellbound in dance,
and in the night
as you drift into sleep
you hear the waves upon the reef
intoning the ancient anthem of the sea.  
 

March 7-13, 2005

First Notes
 
Though winter is with us still
the birds have begun to sing,
to the cues of spring,
first a cardinal, then a wren
and now this morning in early March,
as a chill dawn pinks the sky,
the wistful fluting of a mourning dove
which, after winter's longueurs,
when few but crows were heard,
now finds itself bestirred 
to loose its song.
 
 
March 14-20, 2005

I Saw a Heron Flying
 
It was cold when I opened the door
and a gauze of cloud covered the sky,
the sun a muted disk behind its curtain.
In the chill air a bird call seemed to echo.
As I wondered at its strength and clarity
a large bird labored into view.
A goose I thought, without thinking,
but then,
too large,
and I saw the long legs trailing
and the crookd neck at the prow.
A heron, I thought,
a great blue heron!
And the cold morning air
seemed less like the last breath of winter
than the first of newborn spring.
 
 
March 21-27, 2005

What Men Are Made of

My uncle Walter looked like a cat
with his round cheeks
and just-ate-the-canary smile.
He liked to fish,
you could imagine him playing with a mouse
and you might think you saw feathers around his mouth,
though that was merely his moustache.
At the same time he looked like a bird
with his jaunty walk
tweed jacket
and feather in the band of his hat.
Part bird, part cat;
that's what men are made of.
 
 
March 28 April 3, 2005

What the March Wind Saw

blossoms and clouds blowing white
against a blue-washed sky
 
aureoles of daffodils
above the winter stubble
 
forsythia miming sunlight
amidst the leafless trees
 
budded boughs cascading
from early greening willows
 
birds, birds, undeterred
by all the bluster and chill
 
 
April 4-10, 2005

The Kite

The kite
dances on air
still joined to our hand
capering to our command
as if its string
were an extension
of our nerves.
Through it we reach
cloud high
as if we rode the wind
and the whole wide sky
blew through our hair.
 

April 11-17, 2005

Spring Snow

Wet snow coats
twig, branch and bud.
Against the still black street
the waning season
limns its last words
in bold calligraphy.
 
 
April 18-24, 2005

Dog in the Daisies
 
Her black dog sits among daisies
in a photo my daughter sent
his tongue hanging out appreciatively
savoring the splendors of spring.
Black and yellow like bees
happy amongst flowers again,
like school colors for cheerleaders
hurrahing the vernal team.
It's dogs and daisies
and drowsy days;
it's spring in the hemisphere!
 
 
April 25 - May 1, 2005 

Blossom Time
 
Blossom time
trees abloom
pompons of pink and white
garments of lacy green.
I remember the Massif Central
about this time of year
almost fifty years ago
that high ground
spattered with new leaves
small orchards blossoming here and there
but mostly a sprinkling of green
fresh as the clear streams
with their thin sheets of ice.
Why that spring
out of nearly seventy?
Perhaps it was freedom,
for I was a young soldier then
on leave
driving from Heidelberg to Provence.
Perhaps it was the solitude
after the enforced society of military life,
alone and free
driving down a country road in France
the world just greening
the streams still braced with ice.
 
 
May 2-8, 2005

On the Downhill Side
 
April's over
having, it seems, only just begun.
Once past the apex
we speed ever faster.
Ascending was slower
The landscape labored by.
Each time you rounded a curve
there was another just ahead
and you never saw the summit
much less the decline on the other side.
Then one day you notice you're on the downgrade.
The landscape unreels
at an accelerating pace.
You glimpse lowlands in the distance
from time to time
but the road
absorbed in its curves
never reveals its destination.
Down you go
wind pressed to your face,
applying the brakes
which no longer work the way they used to
and the last thing on your mind
is to shout whoopee.
 
 
May 9-15, 2005
 
I See Myself Becoming Old

My closet is full of suits I don't wear anymore.
Nothing I need to wear them for.
There are days when I stay in my pajamas till noon.
I picture my heirs looking at my wardrobe one day
asking "Can you think of anyone who can use these
or should we give them to Goodwill?"
Or, "Would you like this tie as a remembrance of Dad?"
As I read the obits of the recently deceased,
which I took to doing a few years ago,
I compare their ages to mine.
 
Then theres the arthritis in my hands and feet.
My left foot aches when I walk
and I suffered a rupture in a time-worn tendon not long ago.
I have more trouble lifting things and getting around.
Don't jump over puddles anymore
for fear of the damage I might do coming down.
(No more kicking up heels for me.)
 
What will it be next,
the incipient cataracts?
My hearing isn't what it used to be.
I don't think I need a hearing aid yet,
though my daughter disagrees.
Or will it be something unforeseen
like that ill-fated tendon?
 
I see myself becoming old,
yet it's as if I were watching it happen to somebody else.
 
 
May 16-22, 2005
 
Forever Young
 
Though I've passed the scriptural three score and ten
I don't feel old inside my skin.
My legs don't falter.
My hands don't shake.
My eyes don't water.
My mind doesn't stray.
I feel in the driver's seat
up here in my brain.
In fact I feel about nineteen,
still given to enthusiasms,
still remembering mistakes.
 
 
The Passing Parade
 
There are children on our street,
all sizes and seasons,
mounted on parental chests, and backs
like rajahs in their howdahs,
chauffeured by in buggies and strollers,
rolling past our window
on skateboards, scooters, bikes,
towing sleds and wagons,
toting books and backpacks,
bats and balls, hockey sticks,
toddling, swaggering, slouching, flouncing,
bouncing balls down the sidewalk as they pass,
earphones affixed,
boom boxes for bands,
or babies cries and babbling,
fluting voices
and brassy ones,
some loudly in chorus,
some softly in pairs.
It's a parade,
a  pageant,
an opera,
a performance that lasts so long,
the protagonists age before your eyes.
Gradually, to be sure.
You can't see it month to month
or sometimes even year to year,
but sooner or later you notice
that one after another
they've grown man high,
and then they stride offstage.
 
 
May 23-29, 2005

Early Birds
 
Quarter to six a mid-May morning
the sun not risen yet
but light enough
that this bit of the world is visible
aside from where the remains of night
pool under bushes and trees.
No traffic on our street so far
nor other noticeable human stirrings.
Crows cawing down the block.
Mourning doves crooning amorously.
A woodpecker's ratta tat tat
in the woods across the way.
A finch hops out from under a shrub
and takes off with two companions.
They fly in close formation
down the empty street,
already about their business
while most of us human kind are still asleep.
 
 
The Splinter
 
I got a splinter in my paw this morning
and my wife took it out,
as she usually does,
but she was sleeping late, so I had to wait.
I babied the hand for an hour or so,
and while I waited I wondered,
what would I do if I had no wife?
Go to the emergency room?
That would be overkill.
My doctor's nurse?
On Saturday?
A neighbor?
What did I do before I married?
Removed my splinters myself.
But one becomes dependent on a spouse.
 
When my wife awoke
she extracted the splinter easily.
"My lion," she said,
and I mimed an MGM roar.
 
 
May 30 - June 5, 2005

Early to Rise

The birds are busy at first light,
an orchestra of them
twittering in the trees.
They can't wait slugabed
enclosed in hermetic habitations,
reach out to hit a snooze control,
pull covers over their heads,
so, they don't fight the advent of day,
try to go on sleeping
while the world awakes.
No, its almost as if they eagerly awaited
the lightening of the sky
and at its first trace
rose to embrace its daily revelation.
Then quick about their business
in the air still fresh from night's cleansing
they go to work
with songs in their throats,
while we humans still struggle
against the coming of the day.
 
 
In Memory of
 
Another World War II pilot gone.
Obit on a back page of the Times
"Pilot who downed Yamamoto dies at 84."
A photo of three lean young men in khakis
looking as if they never could be 80
posed in front of a fighter plane
Pacific palms in the background.
He began high school about the time I was born
and I began it the year he downed the infamous admiral.
My cousin Bob was a fighter pilot in that war,
so much a part of my adolescent imagination,
and it's almost as if the young man in the photo,
now, unbelievably, deceased,
were my kin.
Obit the same day for Percy Goring, 106,
last British survivor of Gallipoli.
When I was a boy it was the last veteran of the Civil War
and, when a young man, the Spanish American.
For earlier generations it was the Revolutionary
the Hundred Years', the Punic, the Persian,
always one within reach of living memory,
and always some last veteran
to nurture
nostalgia for old wars.
 
 
June 6-12, 2005 

Memorial Day
Hopewell, New Jersey, May 2005
 
It was enough to make us weep,
half a dozen vets of the last great war
looking like fading away,
followed by the high school band,
youth booming into adulthood.
Next a squad in Civil War uniform,
harking back to the source of the holiday,
a fratricide that seems today
almost as if it occurred in another country,
not just another century.
Then making up in creativity
what our town lacks in size
a retired Humvee
with a small girl in back
wearing a grunt style cap
and waving mechanically; 
vintage cars,
big ones from a century ago
with wooden spokes
and other vestiges of their carriage genes,
still boxy ones from the 20s,
the streamlined 30s,
the fish tailed 50s,
a couple of Mustangs, an early Corvette;
then the fire engines, big and bigger,
like armor-plated rhinos,
our town's brigade riding old fashioned red,
others yellow,
sage green from a well-heeled nearby town;
delegations from veterans groups,
Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Brownies,
one scout troop with a five-piece band
trying like twenty-five;
a motorcycle club,
plenty of paunch and gray hair,
and, though some ponytails,
suburban angels rather than Hell's.
Finally a platoon of kids,
all safely helmeted,
one tireless on a pogo stick
others on scooters and bikes
and even a few on tricycles,
training for future wars.
 
 
June 13-19, 2005

Early Me
 
Looking at a photo of myself
toddling across a lawn
arms upraised,
I find it hard to envision
being so small,
looking out of so low a place,
standing hardly higher
than my mother's knee.
No, I have no recollection
of such a me.
 
 
June 20-26, 2005

Summer Is Tomorrow
 
When I opened the back door this morning
the air was mild
and sunlight
decanted steadily onto the deck.
I saw blue flowers
grown over its edge
and a butterfly fluttering above.
Summer is tomorrow, I said.
 
 
June 27 July 3, 2005
 
West Side Memories
 
We lived across from the planetarium,
mere yards from the sky,
while just down the street
was the el,
and still vivid
under the long gone girders,
a barbershop
with its candy stripe pole
and its carousel pony
astride which young clients sat,
at the center of the universe.
 
 
July 4-10, 2005
 
Summer Is Here Now
 
Summer is here now
as I remember it
consecrated by fireworks;
the long languorous days
tedious sometimes
but still sweet;
swimming in the lake
where skin and cool water meet
and fish dart away
from this alien invader;
water slapping on boat or dock
or weaving nets of sunlight on a boathouse wall;
the white froth of bow cleaving wave;
a sail flapping lazily as we come about;
or in a rowboat
suspended between water and sky
waiting for fish to bite;
playing into the dark hours;
and through the night
the myriad sounds of insects
and the lullaby of frogs.
 
 
July 11-17, 2005

First Tug
 
"I've got a fish" I shouted.
I was five,
gone fishing with my father
in his boat with oars I tried
but couldn't manage.
It seemed such a long time I sat there
dangling a worm in the water,
the boat gently rocking
in the drowsy summer sunshine,
when suddenly there was a tug on my line,
that first tug
of a lifetime.
 
 
July 18-24, 2005

Pullman Memories

Riding a train
takes me back
to those boyhood summers
when I traveled alone
from New York to Chicago
starting from Grand Central Station
with a gentle jolt,
gathering momentum
past the vacant eyed apartments
of upper Manhattan,
wondering about the people
who lived inside,
then over to the river
where we hit full stride,
our wheels clicking
at a Dixieland pace,
the Hudson Valley scrolling by,
lake-wide river, stubs of old mountain,
the play of light in a cloud crowded sky,
until we turned off at Albany
into mile on mile of farms and woods,
imagining myself again
into the houses
along the right of way,
those who might live within
seeming not quite real,
as we no doubt to them,
two worlds
sliding by one another
each in its own continuum
of time and space.
 
Then in the dining car,
self-conscious but proud,
the center of attention
in that adult place,
and not long after
in my berth,
snug as a tent,
shaken down to sleep
by the jiggling of the train,
waking during the night
when we stopped
at some anonymous station,
pulling the window shade up a crack
to see if I could make out a sign
of where we were,
watching the moving figures
swathed in steam,
silhouetted against the platform lights.
 
Then it was morning
and the flat fields of Indiana
were wheeling by,
telephone poles
were riffling by,
at a dizzy pace.
Like a horse
galloping back to its stable
at the end of the day,
we seemed to accelerate
as we drew near our destination.
I felt I had to hurry getting dressed
lest I would still be in my pajamas
when we reached Dearborn Station
where the train might be shunted off
before I emerged,
my father on the platform muttering,
"Where is that boy?"
But we slowed down
as we swam into the denser urban landscape
and instead of being caught unprepared
I waited impatiently
for that endless city
to end.
 
 
July 25-31, 2005
 
Summer Symphony
 
The days grow warm
then warmer,
blossoms display their petals,
clouds congeal
out of transparent sky,
thunderheads tower,
the air heaves into motion
then subsides,
drumrolls of rain
beat on fields and trees,
leaves are shaken,
puddles swell,
the sky clears,
the ground is dry again,
crops nourished
on the long summer light
grow stealthily
until one day
the corn is man tall,
children recycle perennial games,
frogs chorus,
songsters of tree and air
barnyard and pasture
do solo turns
while insects drone obbligato,
till autumn
with its melancholy airs.
 
 
August 1-7. 2005
 
Where Are You Now Shirley Temple?
 
Where are you now Shirley Temple
with your upbeat songs
and sunny curls
and dimples that could wish the world's cares away?
Not in some nursing home, I hope,
halo dimmed with blue rinse,
watching movies in your head
and smiling at cameras no longer there.
 
The world is coming undone,
warming at an ominous pace,
fish fast disappearing from the seas,
terrorism a plague.
Where are you Shirley Temple,
now when we need you most?
 
 
July 8-14, 2005
 
Summer Morning
 
Night having gathered the haze
woven by the heat of day
come dawn
has laid it to ground
adorning web and blade
with bright beads
while the sky,
stripped of its veils,
stuns with blue nakedness.
 
 
August 15-21, 2005
 
Midsummer Day

Over ninety Fahrenheit,
fans flailing in the house,
butterflies busy in the garden
extracting the coneflowers' pollen cache,
a flurry of butterflies,
some a modest white
others blue,
gaudy orange,
like confetti tossed in a sudden gust.
 
Above the house
clouds pile high,
with the fine sheen of porcelain,
luminous in the noonday light.
The weatherman's predicting thunderstorms.
Maybe that's why the butterflies flutter so.
 
 
August 22-28, 2005

At the Beach

Summers at the beach
we turned pink on the yellow sand
wore grit like a second skin
fast high-stepped to the water
on sand sometimes so hot
we tried to run without touching ground,
splashed into the cooling water
tasting its brine
our nostrils full of that scent
that told us where we were
when we first drew near the shore,
swam out to waves
that carried us headlong on their crests
whirling us down as they crumbled
supplying us with breathless tales
when we were back on land.
Then we walked on the wet sand
where water followed in our footprints
while we gathered shells and sand dollars
and flat, smooth stones
rounded by the tireless work of water,
and watched white vested gulls,
those dapper beachcombers,
waddle down the strand
or, balancing on a breeze,
glide down the shore
like notes of an arpeggio.
 
Then late in the day
when we were tired and the tide came in,
mesmerized by the ocean's pulse
we watched it rise on the beach,
dissolving sand castles,
so painstakingly wrought,
then, nonchalantly, slide back down,
and at night
the timeless sound of breaking waves
lulled us to sleep.
 
 
August 29 September 4, 2005

The War Against the Weeds
 
It's an endless war we wage against weeds.
Just this morning, 
bringing in the morning paper,
I noticed weeds among the pachysandra,
weeds with narrow-eyed leaves
and runty flowers,
for whom that miniature jungle
seems a preferred habitat,
and I stopped there on the spot,
newspaper in hand,
in my pajamas,
to take out the intruders.
And so it's been since gardening began,
or at least soon thereafter,
this war between man and weed.
Makes the Hundred Years' War
seem ephemeral. 
 

September 5-11, 2005

Back to School
 
The weather turned cool last night,
the end of August near,
and my mind returns to school
schedules
homework
confinement in a classroom
gazing out a window at a still bright sky
enduring through still open windows
the lure of fresh autumn air.
All this weighs heavily on my mind
though I haven't been to school in fifty years.
 

September 12-18, 2005

Silly Man

I was a serious boy
and most of my life
rarely indulged in silliness.
Oh, I was prone to the inadvertent kind,
causing me to avoid the deliberate sort all the more.
Then I married a woman who liked my jokes
and gradually I extended them
into a bit of clowning.
She laughed and I clowned some more
and again she laughed.
I was energized,
like a dog walking on its hind legs
egged on by applause,
and the more my audience of one applauded
the more I two-footed it,
progressing to splits and fast buck-and-wings.
Now I even clown in public, sometimes,
and when I do, publicly or privately
I feel lighter for it.
At this rate, I'll end up floating away,
like a helium filled balloon.
 
 
September 19-25, 2006
 
Rhapsody in Butterflies
 
It's mostly small white butterflies again,
some with a spot or two
but still plain and unassuming.
So the season began,
followed soon by varied hues,
black, then sulphur, and blue,
and swallowtails,
tigers, big and boisterous yellow,
great spangled fritillaries,
like tambourines,
and finally monarchs
swelling the season's close
with orange harmonies.
But now it ends as it began
returning to the simple tones
from which that grand crescendo grew.
 
 
September 26 October 2, 2005
 
The Sphinx
 
Behold the sphinx with its powerful torso
mighty as a lion if not more so,
with a human head on top of it all.
Not much it can do with a mouth so small,
not good for ripping prey,
no way,
not threatening nor fearful.
nor equipped with a roar
that would blow down your door
or even give you an earful.
Perhaps that's why the sphinx is so inscrutable.
In this world of fortunes so very mutable
it doesn't want anybody to know that
its just a very big pussy cat.
 
 
September 3-9, 2005
 
It Was One of Those Fine October Days

It was one of those fine October days
free from summer's heat and haze
but not yet gripped by autumn chill.
 
It was one of those fine October days
when the sky's so clear
you can see the moon
through the atmosphere
at midday.
 
It was one of those fine October days
when the trees sport yellow and red
instead of everyday summer green.
 
It was one of those fine October days
when one draws a deep breath
and is grateful
to be resident on Earth.
 
 
October 10-16, 2005

Just Before Dawn
 
Pale green seeps
into the soft fabric of night
as if dipped in light.
No stars in view;
their glitter subdued
by dawn's tide
and the moon's faint luminescence.
Only an applique of trees
adorns this dark tapestry.
That and a crescent moon.
 
 
October 17-23, 2005
 
A World That Was

As I turn on the radio
this Saturday afternoon
opera swells out
from where I left the dial
and I'm transmitted back
more than half the century
to those peaceful prewar days
when I had no intimation
of what the future held,
and our radio
with its gothic wooden case
was tuned to the Met
in the living room
surrounded by birch and magnolia trees
and the long, smooth slope of the lawn.
 
I associated opera then
with dull times
when I was housebound
and would restlessly quarter
that thicket of sound
chafing for something to do.
For years after
I never cared much for opera,
but it sings to me now
of a world that was
in a child's hopeful eyes.
 
 
October 24-30, 2005
 
October Morning
 
The hazy morning air
though honey gold
supports no bees
only dry leaves
tracing their slow arabesques
toward the ground.
 
 
October 31 - November 6, 2005
 
Suburban Autumn
 
The chill of autumn is upon us.
Leaves have begun to fall,
their herb-like odor
redolent of those days
when after school
we threw ourselves
shouting and laughing
onto piles of dry leaves,
and, older, played ball
on the leaf-flecked streets
until our hands grew numb
with the cold of dusk
and we were called
into the warm brightness
of our homes.
 
 
November 7-13, 2005
 
Boots on the Ground
 
Put boots on the ground, they said,
as if they were dragons teeth
which, sown, sprout spectral armies
that fade away, once battle is done,
leaving no blood behind.
 
They said nothing about
the men and boys
who would no longer have feet
to wear those boots,
or would wear them to their graves.
 
 
November 14-21, 2005
 
The Century's Wars
 
I'm not good at birthdays
but have always remembered my stepfather's,
for his was the day
the great war ended.
We have a photo of him in France,
on a hill overlooking the Rhine,
a tall, clean shaven, young marine
in breaches, boots and campaign hat
hands on hips, legs spread,
seeming to tower like a monument
over the river's far bank.
 
There's another photo of him,
on Saipan,
carbine in hand
soiled battle fatigues
helmet with chin strap hanging open
looking smaller than I'd ever seen him look.
That was the day
his friend's son died there,
a friend he'd carried
from a battlefield in France.
 
 
November 21-27, 2005
 
North Wind
 
Yesterday north wind came
scrubbing the air blue
sending clouds scudding
across clean fields of sky
lashing leaves from trees
sweeping away summer's traces.
 
When I went for the newspaper
this morning
the front door opened
on a wall of chill air.
 
 
November 28 December 4, 2005
 
Ode to Wholesome Pastimes
 
Hiking, birding, gardening,
we approve of these.
So much more healthy and wholesome
than watching TV
or playing computer games.
And they don't depend on an uncertain power supply.
No, they look to mother nature for their energy.
 
Then too they're venerable
like some purveyor to the queen, "since 1862".
Granted, hunting is even more so,
but it kills.
Or fishing
which makes us swell with pride
at being smarter than a fish.
 
But hiking, birding and gardening,
they're OK.
And those who do them too,
not slick
like the spin doctors and celebrities
who crowd our pages and screens
in their Armani suits and Manolo Blahnik shoes
or whatever they're wearing these days.
So I speak for the L.L.Bean-clad of this world when I say
give me your hikers and birders, in honest boots,
your gardeners, in kneepads, smocks and jeans,
who don't use electronic means
and aren't trying to persuade anybody of anything.
 
 
December 5-11, 2005
 
That Time of Year
 
Gorging on turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce,
pumpkin and apple pie,
I think of those who rarely taste meat,
seldom sleep with their bellies full
or pass a hunger-free day.
Reading how our children are becoming overweight
I think of mothers without enough food
to still their children's hungry cries.
What if we spared a few calories for them?
 
Seeing my fellow citizens
carrying piles of clothing into dressing rooms,
leaving stores with laden bags,
I think of the people clothed in our discards
baled, shipped and sold
in bare-soil markets around the world.
What if we sent them what we spend on new clothes
before the old have worn out?
 
Seeing driveways with three cars
I think of those who have no shoes.
Seeing McMansions
I think of shacks with dirt floors and cane walls,
shanties of cardboard or flattened cans,
children playing on unpaved streets
where open sewers ooze.
What if we gave them what we pay
for a few hundred square feet?
 
Seeing the crowded shopping centers
I think of the hundreds of millions
who live on less than a dollar a day,
earning less in a year
than we splurge on Christmas gifts in a few weeks.
What if they all turned up at the mall?
 
Seeing us filling our houses of worship,
professing love of God, I ask
what if we could find more love for our fellow men?
 
 
December 12-17, 2005
 
Snowfall
 
The sun, a fiery nest
in crystal flecked haze,
is soon no more than a smudge,
embers smothered in ashen cloud.
Stillness settles
on a waiting world.
The snow begins,
mere motes at first
speckling the sky's gray shell,
then a steady flow of flakes,
soon swarming, swirling, driving sideways,
whiting out fields, trees, houses, hills,
piling extravagant coiffures
on bush and branch,
muffling the ground
in downy layers,
wrapping us
in a cocoon of silence.
 
 
December 19-25, 2005
 
Deep Snow
 
Snow came during the night
padding rough fields
with sensuous curves,
burying brown stubble
in voluptuous whiteness.
Then came sunlight
sliding softly over the fresh flakes,
running its fingers
down the hills' shining flanks,
caressing the slope by the kitchen garden,
embracing the house in blue shadow.
 
 
December 26, 2005 - January 1, 2006
 
Still Delighting in Snow
 
I still delight in snow
some seventy years after I first did.
Though my body now is tentative,
my spirit weary of lifes contests,
I still take pleasure
in that world of whiteness
just as I did when I resided
in a frame so small
I can no longer remember how it felt.
Was I an infant?
No way of knowing,
but when I see snow fall
I sense boy-feelings of decades ago,
flakes on my lashes,
against my skin,
the bracing scent,
the compact blizzard
as I tumbled from my sled
a scattering of cold powder
turning my eyebrows white,
as now do other causes,
my clothes encrusted
the wetness soaking through,
the warm kitchen
where I disrobed
("Get out of those wet clothes!"
my mother said)
fading
into the one where I sit now
tapping out this poem.
 
 
January 2-8, 2006
 

The Ficus

The ficus in our dining room,

once scraggly and forlorn,

is sprouting new leaves.

I noticed them when I opened the shutters

this morning on another gray day

in a winter of early cold and snow.

We acquired it eleven years ago

with the house we moved into that year.

The former owners told us

a friend would come to pick it up,

but no one ever did.

We nursed it back to health

watering it weekly

fertilizing it twice a year

adding fresh soil

moving it to successively larger pots

till now it occupies a large glazed one

with an old Chinese look

like one you might find

in a courtyard of the Forbidden City.

We took it with us on two moves

fussily supervising its loading

to the resigned annoyance of the moving men.

We did all this

not because it was a beauty

but because it was homely and left behind.

January 9-15, 2006

The Bear

I found a worn teddy bear in our attic,

one half-remembered

as if only a dream.

When I squeezed it

it played a lullaby,

a tune I remembered

without knowing its source,

and with that tune came back

a time before memory

that I knew only from photographs,

of my mother

younger than I could recall

smiling with pleasure at me,

of myself still bald and stubby legged,

or lofted gleefully on a teeter-totter,

or a bit later

posed and pensive

with a halo of light brown curls.

For years that bear

lay in its box

waiting for me to pick it up again,

that bear I can no longer find.

January 16-22, 2006

Milkmen

This morning I dreamt of the milkmen

who used to deploy through the half-lit city,

when I was a child,

with their cargo of clean, white liquid

and rows of glistening bottles,

depositing their burden

on doorsteps and porches

with a soft clinking

that made sleep

all the more voluptuous.

This morning I dreamt of milkmen,

but, when I awoke,

they were no more than a dream.

January 23-29, 2006

Where Have the Hurdy-gurdy Men Gone?

Where have the hurdy-gurdy men gone--

Reader, do you even know what they were?--

the knife sharpeners, the milkmen, the icemen,

who peopled the world of my youth?

Have they all quite faded away,

or is there an alternative universe

where crowds of them circle in the streets

performing the slow waltz of time?

January 30 February 4, 2006

World's Fair

I went to my first world's fair

when I was eight.

As is the way with such events

it was more about us

than the world,

and refracted the future

through optimist eyes.

You wouldn't have known

from anything on display

that a cancer festered

in Europe's bosom

or that the most brutal of wars

was mere months away.

Nor was there any inkling

of the  baleful new words

soon to be unleashed

on our vocabulary,

blitzkrieg, storm trooper, quisling,

kamikaze, Hiroshima,

holocaust,

while the Futurama

with its ebullient guides

depicted a morrow

of shining towers

where poverty was ostracized,

Oh, the world looked good

in our neighborhood

in the spring of '39.

February 6-20, 2006

Under the Apple Boughs

There was a wall along the road

where we played soldier

behind the loosely stacked stones.

Next to it a row of mountain birch

tops tinted in memory with evening sun.

Then the house

in dappled coat of whitewashed brick,

and the orchard with gnarled trees

where we pressed apples on chill fall days

and savored the cold, sweet cider.

Outside my bedroom window

a magnolia tree glistened,

and, beyond, a broad lawn

sloped down to the pond

where frogs held nightly congress

and I learned of mallards

and snapping turtles

and green-winged teals.

There we skated in winter

until darkness hid the agate surface,

swam impatiently in spring,

the ice barely melted,

as if our innocence protected us from cold.

Between pond and house

stood a lone apple tree

where, as I watched at first light,

pheasants gathered

in their courtly plumage

to feast on windfalls.

Then bombs fell on Pearl Harbor

and soldier games gave way to war.

February 13-19. 2006

Snowy Morning

Though dawn has come and gone

you might think the sun hadn't risen,

the snow so heavy

you can't see houses down the block.

Two goldfinches on the feeder

shrugging off the flakes

and a third waiting patiently

as if it werent bothered by the cold.

Somehow these birds,

so yellow in summer,

seem out of place.

Though they wear their drab winter coats,

I think of them as the color of sunshine,

forsythia, daffodils, dandelions, buttercups,

and am always surprised to see them about

these gray and frigid days.

February 20-26, 2006

Watch Your Step

Beware the grammar police

and their auxiliaries, the punctuation prigs.

The penalty for a split infinitive is unspeakable

not to mention a comma splice.

When asked who’s there

don’t answer, “It’s me.”

If you do, it may no longer be,

but you’re safe with I.

If you want to prosper in this life

watch out for the spelling constables

and the handwriting cops,

pay attention to the proctors of political correctness

and above all give heed

to the propriety priests

lest you end up

for an infraction as small as using the wrong fork

in that circle of hell reserved for the indecorous.

February 27 March 5, 2006

Medicine Man

I've arrived at the age of medicines.

Every morning I arrange a bouquet

of varying sizes, shapes, colors, textures, transparencies.

You are what you eat, they say.

I picture a man made of pills and capsules

like a sculpture composed of found objects

by some Picasso of the medicine chest.

I remember seeing my grandparents,

and then my parents,

setting out their daily array of medications.

I didn't give it much thought at the time

but now I know it defines the old,

and I've become one of them.

Most of my life it's been "them".

One doesn't think of oneself

as destined to be old

For that matter, one doesn't quite believe it

when it happens.

I see the signs

but their significance escapes me.

My body may be old

but not me.

March 6-12, 2006

The End of the Race

For much of our lives we wish we could hurry time,

become one of the older kids,

then an adult,

graduate,

end the week's work sooner,

gallop to an anticipated holiday or anniversary,

for a child to be born

and we're pleased when time seems to run flat out.

Then one day we notice

the end of the course is in sight

and we'd like to slow down.

But time keeps cantering

at its habitual pace

immune to rein and spur alike

and what seemed so slow before

now seems all too fast.

March 13-19, 2006

Winter's End

This Sunday morning is less somber than the last.

A lightness ruffles the solemnity,

childrens' voices rising from the park

where recently the ground was shod in ice.

The clouds are taller

and sunlight peaks

their summits with a vibrant white.

A flock of pigeons flutters in the light.

The hazy air is tuned on higher strings.

March 20-26, 2006

Hasta La Vista Baby

Though we may love snow

we're never sad to see winter go

like a charming guest

who has bad habits

and wears out his welcome.

March 27 April 2, 2006

Birthday

Dawn rose on a clear sky this morning

a few small cakes of cloud

gilded by a billion candle light.

Today I'm seventy-five.

Seventy-five

I woke up 75 this morning

suddenly three quarters of a century old.

I can look back on three generations

six dogs

a dozen presidents

almost as many cars

and an even larger number of wars.

Yet I don't feel any older than yesterday.

April 3-9, 2006

Crayon Work

Colors burst from the ground

like a child's fancies,

splashes of crocus, daffodil,

hyacinth, jonquil, narcissus.

New leaves fleck trees

with diaphanous green.

Blossom clouds puff

from shrub and tree,

and forsythia challenges

a cornflower sky

with impudent graffiti.

April 10-16, 2006

Daffodils

Oh daffodils, the daffodils

beneath the trees

in our backyard,

everywhere in the neighborhood,

all over this patch of planet and more,

of poets long beloved,

but still worth a word or two,

so yellow, so yellow

they make one giddy,

oh daffodils, so daffadowndilly.

April 17-23, 2006

Dog in the Daisies

Her black dog sits among daisies

in a photo my daughter sent

his tongue hanging out appreciatively

savoring the splendors of spring.

Black and yellow like bees

happy amongst flowers again,

like school colors for cheerleaders

hurrahing the vernal team.

Its dogs and daisies

and drowsy days;

its spring in the hemisphere!

April 24-30, 2006

Dog Photo

I am eight.

Duchess is kissing me

with blissful spontaneity,

her long collie muzzle

thrusting up lovingly

into my face.

I am smiling

with a mixture of appreciation

and the reflexive reaction

of one being tickled

by a very wet, canine kiss.

May 1-7, 2006

Frabjous Day

The sky its brightest blue

the clouds their cleanest white

the air balmy

as young leaves

bedeck the trees

in their fairest green.

What a fine day to be on Earth

sailing around the sun.

May 8-14, 2006

Room with Cats

Two bushy cats

dispose themselves

about the room,

one on the couch,

paws in air

head upside down

tracking me intently

willing me to rub its belly,

the other on a chair

under the dining table

studying, no doubt,

the secret underside of tables,

and when the chair is drawn out

rising like a lion from the grass

ravenous

for a scratch behind the ears.

May 15-21, 2006

The Tree

That tree was still youthful when my mother died,

that tree now gnarling with age.

If she'd stood by the kitchen window where I now stand

she'd have seen it,

smaller then,

and the pond

with its tendrils of early morning mist.

She gardened nearby

up the hill

where chickens now roost.

It was a cock's crowing,

something, city dweller, I rarely hear,

that woke me to the apparition of the tree in its youth,

the mist on the pond

and the mountain across the valley,

swathed in early morning fog,

on which my mother might have gazed

near the end of her too young life.

May 22-28, 2006

Catch as Cat Can

A cat sat under our bird feeder this morning

staring up with a studious appearance

more of meditation than menace

as if it were considering how to get at the bird seed,

rather than the birds,

but, though it was sitting there in plain view,

it looked furtive to me.

Cats always do.

May 29 - June 4, 2006

Pie

Apple, blueberry, cherry, peach,

coconut custard, banana cream,

boyhoods soft-focus dreams.

I used to stop at the neighborhood bakery

on the way home from school

to buy an individual pie

one just the size for a boy

except that an aunt

with whom I stayed for a while

forbid me them,

deeming pies bad for one's health.

Seeing me once coming home

downing a pie as I approached,

she gave me a scolding so fierce

I flinch from it to this day,

when pie is forbidden me again,

age having taken its toll.

Shades of Simple Simon,

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn

and maybe Adam too

for what do you suppose was his favorite dish

after that first taste of sin,

which leads me to a metaphysical question,

was pie designed for boys

or boys for pie?

June 5-11, 2006

Cat about Town

6AM, a mild June morning.

A cat is padding down the sidewalk across the street

coming back from mousing perhaps

or a late night rendezvous,

going home for his saucer of milk

or just enjoying the early morning air.

As I watch him saunter down the street

I say to myself

now there's a cat who's living life to the full.

June 12-18, 2006

Dandelion Wars

Oh dandelion so merrily yellow

with your delicate feathery spheres

and your seeds so fine they float on the breeze,

how have we become enemies?

Where did we get the idea for lawns?

Was it hubris

a need to master nature,

to show who's in control?

Do we see beauty in uniformity?

And you dandelion, why yellow?

Why not modest green?

Is it wise to flaunt yourself

before those who consider you a trespasser?

Are you taunting us

(yellow is the color of laughter, I believe),

saying "here I am

and you'll never get rid of me"?

Though we may be at the top of the totem pole

though battles we may win

fact is you've fought us to a draw

oh lowly (?) dandelion.

June 19-25, 2006

Our Backyard

Reading something rural

by a poet from Vermont

I think to myself it would be nice

to live in such a place,

explore it with my poetry,

but then I look out our back window and see

a sky of very blue and white

a trio of goldfinches at our feeder

a squad of robins

combing the yard for worms,

and a young squirrel

chasing a robin playfully.

June 26 July 2, 2006

Seventeen

That summer I worked at a camp

not far from the city

on the other side of the river.

One of the counselors, Didi--

Shirly Lutz, from Akron Ohio--

was a lithe, compact girl

with a sweet smell of sunlight about her,

and as she sat in the high lifeguard chair

her smooth legs crossed

the guys would crowd around

like stage door Johnnies

vying for attention.

Didi and I had the same night off

and we'd go into the city

down to the Village

and all night smoky jazz,

heading back to camp

not long before dawn

taking the nearly empty subway

to the bridge.

The buses didn't run at that hour

so we'd walk the mile across,

solitary voices

high above the water,

the sun rising at our backs

our shadows stretching out

long as the life before us.

July 3-9, 2006

Independence Day

Recurring dreamlike

through the haze of time

and the tedium

of those hot summer days,

my back to the grassy slope

where spectators remain

bent over the ballpark

of that small town

as dusk turns to dark,

and rockets loop lazily

through the velvet air.

July 10-16, 2006

Watermelon Days

Here I am, a graybeard, eating watermelon

and remembering those summers

when I could count my age in single digits,

summers at the lake where my grandfather had a house

and all the cousins would assemble for dinner

around my grandmother's large table.

Though there's plenty of melon in the fridge

I find myself cutting close to the rind,

as I did in those days,

and there I am,

still that boy at seventy-three,

at the table with the tiffany lamp overhead

or descending the hill to the lake,

its remembered water, smooth and green,

lapping softly on the shore,

and the sound of mourning doves in counterpoint.

July 17-23, 2006

Summer Shadows

As a breeze stirs the leaves

it seems cool

among the flickering shadows

under a lone tree or forest canopy

or in the house

where summer lingers

somnolent

in the flickering shadows.

July 24-30, 2006

The Climbing Tree

The tree was tall

but made for climbing

branches close to the ground,

thick foliage

where we could perch

concealed from the world

like secret birds,

branches closely spaced,

a Jacob's ladder

into the airy realm

of birds and squirrels

and the daydreams

of tree climbers.

July 31 Aug. 6, 2006

Fog on a July Morning

Pre-dawn fog

veils the trees

blurs hard lines

dissolves solidity.

Houses loom like ships.

Our familiar town

becomes a mystery.

 
Aug. 7-13, 2006

Early Explorer

Living in L.A.

when it was much smaller than today

I ranged far

on my balloon-tire Schwinn

from our suburban fastness

eastward down the daylong boulevard

rolling the city's length,

like LaSalle

exploring the great mid-continental

       waterway,

past movie houses

and department stores

full of siren temptations,

past buildings monotonous as waves

toward the city's towered center

that I saw each time longingly from afar

but reached only once

having to turn back time and again

to be home before dark,

westward toward the ocean,

that shore I never reached,

picturing its blue expanse

with dogged anticipation

as I toiled my way  

past mile on mile

of urban Gobi,

or over the high hills to the north

through untamed canyons

with their boulder strewn streams

and groves of scrub oak

to the range's far shoulders

overlooking a broad valley

that reached into the blue-gray distance

(imagining myself a pioneer

surmounting the last westward fold

        of the Sierra)

then down to the citrus groves

where I lingered

among multitudes of orange globes

in the welcoming shade.

August 14-20, 2006

A Manatee Comes to Manhattan

A manatee has been seen in the Hudson River

gawking at the tall buildings,

wondering at the absence

of mangroves and palm trees,

poking its W. C. Fields nose out of the water

as if it were about to don a top hat

and tap dance down Broadway.

This is just the beginning.

The climate's becoming warmer

the seas are rising.

Soon manatees

will crowd our summer streets

like tourists with fanny packs.

August 21-27, 2006

Butterfly Ballet

Looking out the window

almost any time of day

I see tiger swallowtails in our garden,

and, to let them know I'm glad to see them,

I sometimes say,

in that welcoming Spanish way,

"Esta en su casa",

"You are in your house".

These are macho mariposas,

living up to their feral name,

big yellow butterflies

a hand's breadth wide

with black stripes on their wings.

When I approach they don't fly away,

they pay me no heed,

just keep sipping nectar

as if to say

"You think this is your garden?",

imbibing as tranquilly

as patrons at a soda fountain,

inserting their long probes into the flowers,

like straws,

but suddenly a pair

will pirouette around each other

in helical dance

as if caught up in a whirlwind,

or romance.

August 28 - September 3, 2006

Last Days

Summer ends twice,

once by the calendar,

and once before

when cooling nights and waters

give notice

that carefree days are at an end.

No more lingering lazily abed.

No more wondering what to do next,

or wandering

without a destination in mind.

The reign of alarm clocks is about to begin.

And slowly we slip away

from mountain, lake or shore

like sand sifting down in an hourglass.

September 4-10, 2006

Soccer Season

September 1,

gray and unseasonably cool,

as if autumn were already here,

I drive by the high school playing field

where the portable soccer goals are out.

Images of picking my son up after practice.

His birthday's today.

He's thirty-three

and I picture him now,

six inches taller than me,

with broad shoulders, long nose,

and wide mouth,

bent in an ironic smile,

and inside the image of the man

a much smaller one

with the gently angled features of a child.

September 11-17, 2006

Coalition of the Willing

Having trouble keeping our allies in Iraq.

Not much help anyway.

Hard to coordinate,

a dozen contingents of less than battalion size

speaking as many tongues

(bringing Babel back to the Fertile Crescent).

And we have to pay them to be there,

money we could put to better use elsewhere.

Solution: dogs.

Really willing.

Wouldn't entail much political protest,

no bitchy Cindy Sheehans.

Would make our army warm and fuzzy.

Good at sniffing IEDs.

Useful for scaring information

out of prisoners.

Would raise the level of military intelligence.

September 18-24, 2006

I Was a Soldier Once

I was a soldier once, and young,

though I never fought in a war,

no buddy of mine died in one

and indeed I don't remember

that any Americans fought in those years

or even if there was a war at the time.

I was a peacetime soldier,

drafted,

with no dreams of glory,

though I came to dream of waging war

on the military mind.

Oh, there were intelligent ones

but they took care to hide their intelligence.

It was OK to be smart,

but thoughtful, no,

nor inclined to see things in shades of grey.

Decisive was the ticket--

though it didn't matter where that decisiveness led--

respectful of tradition and authority

and the primate hierarchies of rank.

So it was a time of disgruntled draftees

overeducated and disdainful

hating every minute of their military lives,

and I was one.

But I survived.

September 25 - October 1, 2006

Autumn Road

Autumn arrived with the wind today

on a highway of  clouds,

macadam grey

stretching flat bottomed

to the far horizon

through fields of flagrant blue.

October 2-8, 2006

Memories

I don't need more memories

yet they keep coming.

Nearly seventy years' accumulation stored away

in the attics, closets, cupboards of my mind,

but more arrive each day,

and the bedchambers too are full

of animated guests.

Granted, some don't stay,

and some stay only awhile

taking their leave considerately.

Others, however, remain,

stalking the halls year after year,

some unremarkable,

some congenial,

and some unwelcome lodgers who resist eviction.

And so, though the house is full

it keeps on filling

for it seems there's no end

to the memories it can hold.

October 9-15, 2006

Geese on the Loose

Crowds of geese

over the lake

this fall fresh afternoon,

flying helter-skelter

not in neat formation

but in ragged troupes

honking raucously

like partygoers--

blowing away the old year,

tooting in the new--

joyously free

unbound by gravity,

nowhere they need to go

nothing they need to do.

October 16-22, 2006

To the Basement and Back

Looking for something in the basement this morning

I noticed once state of the art equipment I'll never use again,

which reminded me

of other phantoms that haunt my nether world,

paint that no longer adorns our walls,

gadgets whose use I no longer know,

the too warm sheepskin coat I never wear,

still good suitcases

supplanted by newer ones that won my favor,

books I'll almost certainly never read again, nor lend,

a book I was going to return but never did

which reminded me in turn

of friends I meant to call,

but weeks turned into months

and months into years,

and I came back upstairs

bearing the baggage of those years.

October 23-29, 2006

Indian Summer

harlequin hued trees,

the fragrance of fallen leaves,

the quiet streets

of children away at school,

the sight of one's breath

in the chill of evening

or on mornings

when frost glitters

in the light

of the late-rising sun,

summer warmth suffusing

this late October day

October 29 - November 5, 2006

Veterans Day, 2006

Each day we read in the Times

the names of our soldiers

who've died in Iraq,

sometimes imagining bits of their lives,

the towns where they grew up,

their families,

their now grieving spouses and friends,

and we're saddened.

Yet more with the names of thousands,

mostly young men,

engraved in marble or granite,

their parents hopes and dreams

interred in stone.

All that remains 

a few keepsakes

and memories

of newborns, toddlers, vulnerable boys,

youths becoming men,

those now sad memories,

and names carved in cold stone.

Who wanted those wars?

Their leaders of course,

but all too often those same young men,

and those who mourn them.

November 5-11, 2006

The Days Grow Shorter

It's dark now when we sit down to supper,

when I open the door on the morning paper.

Day has become parenthetical.

Leaves, dry and fractal,

slide down the curve of the season

slow-glide down Earth's arc

through air still thick with sunlight.

Soon the air will turn brittle,

harden on window panes,

and the leaves, all fallen,

will drift through the streets

like the aimless crowds of the underworld.

November 12-19, 2006
 
Strike up the Band
 

Geese have taken to the flyways,

wave after wave,

the air charged

with their ragged woodwind cries,

stirring as marching bands

striding smartly

over fall fields.

November 19-26, 2006

Above the Valley

Above the valley

where old mountains slumber

grizzled and gray with leafless trees,

a counterpane

of fence-stitched meadows

glows in the parchment light

of late November

and calico clouds bedeck

a cobalt sky.

 
November 26 – December 3, 2006

Endangered Species

All my life it’s been Ace combs,

reliable as…

Kellogg’s Cornflakes?

I never much liked the name—

made me think of youths with greasy pompadours.

Still the combs were good,

not quite unbreakable as advertised

but more durable than most,

and whenever I went to the drugstore to buy a comb

I looked for Ace.

Now they’ve disappeared from the shelves

displaced by a rabble of brands I don’t recognize,

but I still have an Ace in my bathroom cabinet,

reminding me of simpler times

and my long gone youth.

December 3-10, 2006

Betty Greer

The first girl I admired was Betty Greer.

That was in fifth grade.

Girls I’d known before

though subtly alien

seemed like boys in many ways.

It was only in fifth grade

that they became creatures apart.

I went to a bigger school

where the kids weren’t all from the neighborhood,

weren’t almost family,

and something inside me changed.

Girls became yearned-for-from-afar beings

like angels.

I sold my three pet ducks

or rather asked our handyman to sell them for me

(probably for somebody’s dinner—

I didn’t ask)

to buy angora mittens for Betty Greer

for the Christmas of ’41

not realizing

that the world and its wars

had fated me to move on.

December 10-17, 2006

The Afterlife of Gods

What happens to gods

when people stop believing in them?

Do they expire,

or live out their eternities

in some special limbo

for the late divine?

Though we don’t recognize them

     by name,

some may live on

in the hearts of men,

a confined space, to be sure,

but widespread.

Mammon, of course.

Mars, Venus and Bacchus too.

But what of Baal, Ra, Zeus, Thor,

Quetzalcoatl,

and all the others?

Are their immortal remains

shrunken and shriveled

like sun-dried fruit,

or do they survive

in fine form

playing endless rounds of golf

in some other-worldly

retirement community?

December 17-24, 2006

How I Know It’s Winter

There’s no ice or snow

so I can’t see the cold

but I can see

the bare trees

dead stubble in field and garden

the sun still struggling

to clear the horizon at 7AM,

its glare low in the afternoon sky

and that of rush hour headlights

on roads already dark at 5,

and dark eyed juncos in the garden.

December 24-31, 2006

Winter Solstice

The shortest day,

born in darkness,

endures the gray limbo

between dawn and dusk.

But nightfall kindles

primeval fires

where light blossoms

from the cold ground.

December 31, 2006 – January 7, 2007

My Father’s Top Hat

Seeing a photo in the Times today

of someone celebrating the New Year

in top hat, white tie and tails,

like a traveler from another time,

I remembered the topper my father had.

It collapsed into a disk

when you pressed down on the crown

If you turned it over

and rapped the brim against your hand

it sprang back into a cylinder

with a pleasing pop. 

My father kept it on a closet shelf.

I used to take it down sometimes

when my parents weren’t around

to play with it;

cylinder, disk, cylinder, disk.

I tried it on too

to see how I looked

but it came down over my ears.

Some hats are mostly practical

like ski or baseball caps,

but others are like peacocks’ tails—

the feathered flourish of a cavalier’s

or a lady’s flowered chapeau—

mating plumage, of course.

What of the top hat?

All that vacant space under the crown.

And not decorative.

Au contraire, severe.

How on earth did a hatter get such an idea?

The answer, perhaps, is in that mad word.

Though the form may be absurd,

people wear them still.

They’re thought to be debonair.

Think Maurice Chevalier,

Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire.

January 7-14, 2007

Cat and Goose

The air is suddenly full of geese

dozens, scores,

wave upon wave

like bombers over Tokyo

all honking vigorously

as if they'd been sent off with a rousing speech.

The neighbor's cat

is racing around the outside of his house

now on his third lap

excited perhaps

by the aerial enthusiasm

or maybe unhinged

by the sight and sound

of so many fat birds

flying out of reach.

January 14-21, 2007

Chicago Winter

That winter the lake froze over,

ice piling up on the shore

like cards scattered

by a capricious hand. 

I imagined what it would be like

walking to Michigan

sixty miles away on the far shore,

ice so wide

I would see the Earth’s curve,

sun bleached sky

blending into the frozen surface

in one vast, luminous chamber,

then stars stippling an infinity of night,

as if I had stepped out

into the universe.

January 21-28, 2007

This week’s poem commemorates International

Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27.

Growing Up

While I was growing up in a comfortable suburb

a million and a half children

Jews like myself

died in camps,

not like the ones where we passed our summers.

While I dallied down the tree-lined street to school

past big houses and spacious yards

those other children

were turned out of their schools and homes.

While I studied Hebrew and piano lackadaisically

those other children learned firsthand

the meaning of the Kaddish and the dirge.

While I pushed away the food

my grandmother urged on me

those other children grew thin

till they seemed not much more than skeletons.

And while I lay in my familiar bed

in my lovingly furnished room

fretting, perhaps, about a catch I'd flubbed,

but nonetheless falling asleep easily,

those other children slept fitfully

disturbed by barrack sounds

and nightmares of men in jackboots

and the smoke from chimneys.

January 28 February 4, 2007

Baskin' Robins

Robins descended on our winterberry bush today.

There've been scouts,

but these birds are fastidious.

They don't eat the berries just anytime.

They wait till a day in mid-winter

when for reasons imperceptible to lesser kind

they know the berries are ready to be enjoyed.

Then they descend in a gang

like kids piling into an ice cream parlor.

February 4-11, 2007

The Poet Laureate of Hart Avenue

I’m the poet laureate of Hart Avenue

Hopewell, NJ, USA

pop. 2,000.

I memorialize our ceremonial occasions

write odes to what’s passing on the street

the birds and squirrels in our backyards

our sky, our seasons

the butterflies, the ants, the bees

the trees

whatever’s happening on Hart Avenue

that’s of universal import

which is to say

just about everything.

February 11-18, 2007

Sugar and Spice

“My darling boy,” says my wife.

“Your septuagenarian boy,” say I.

Fact is I feel more boy than seventy some.

But it’s rather, I suppose,

my wife adoring that imaginary boy

of photos from the family album.

And for my part I love the girl

once blond and looking shy

and imagine her

laughing with her friends

the way girls do

more readily than boys,

and see her sitting knobby kneed

behind her school desk

knowing the answer

but too reticent to raise her hand.

I see her now

inside this gray haired woman

who speaks her mind.

February 18-25, 2007

Poets Emptying Garbage

“Poets don’t empty garbage”

Bob Dylan said.

He was wrong.

I often carry

the detritus of our lives

neatly wrapped

out into the darkness.

What could be more poetic?

He also said

“Poets aren’t on the P.T.A.”

Wrong again.

I've hanged many a diaper too.

Who says

a poet has to be

this or that?

February 25 – March 4, 2007

Thaw

Woods and fields are brindled now

with ragged patches of snow

while in the earth life stirs

as rivulets run

across the thawing ground

and the warm breath of day

rises in the light

of the early morning sun.

March 4-11, 2007

Cat Capers

A tabby cat

idly explores

the courtyard

in front of our house

like a restless boy

whiling away his time

waiting for a family reunion to end.

It sets out with a stutter step

as if playing

at changing of the guard,

stops to stand upright

against a car bumper,

clapping its paws futilely

but with no self-consciousness

at some airborne target,

then resumes its rounds

parading its long shadow

the length of a grassy strip,

bounds twice

for no apparent reason,

crosses a parking lot

with a stroboscopic gait,

and disappears behind

a row of parked cars

never to reappear on the other side.

March 11-18, 2007

Room with Cats

Two bushy cats

dispose themselves

about the room,

one on the couch,

paws in air

head upside down

tracking me intently

willing me to rub its belly,

the other on a chair

under the dining table

studying, no doubt,

the secret underside of tables,

and when the chair is drawn out

rising like a lion from the grass

ravenous

for a scratch behind the ears.

March 18-25, 2007

Birthday Poem for a Senior Citizen

Looking in an old file I find

a copy of my birth certificate

and notice that its says

"Born Alive, 4:27 PM"

and that moment comes to life:

afternoon light,

a hospital room,

my mother

in the full force of youth

(the certificate says "Age at last birthday 22"),

myself

kicking as infants do,

face still puffy from long immersion

still red from being squeezed into this world.

Will leaving be any easier?

March 25 - April 1, 2007

Pushing up Pumpkins

This is the last day of my seventy-sixth year.

I'm leaving the three quarter century mark behind.

That sounds like a vessel filling up.

I suppose in a way it is,

filling with the well-aged liquor of life,

but it's more conspicuously an emptying.

The hour is nearing midnight--

may the literarily correct forgive me

for mixing my metaphors--

and before too long the bell will toll for me.

I won't turn into a pumpkin

but I might end up fertilizing some.

More likely, cemetery grass, alas.

Cemeteries should be turned into pumpkin patches.

Then we'd be memorialized

by cheery orange globes

instead of cold stone slabs,

and we could be sure

that someone would visit our resting place

a few times a year

to plant, harvest, cultivate.

We might become pumpkin pies

or jack-o-lanterns.

What a lovely afterlife!

April 1-8, 2007

Passover

 
I was eight

when I learned the four questions

(Why is this night different from all other nights?),

a duty reserved for the youngest child,

memorizing them in Hebrew

in the car

on our way from the suburbs

to my aunt's apartment in the city.

For me that night was a time

of waiting hungrily for dinner

through a drone of words

in a language I didn't understand,

a blur of readings, songs and prayers,

and of falling asleep after dinner,

drowsy from the ritual wine,

on a big bed covered with fur coats

that smelled of perfume.

I didnt get any thrill out of stealing the afikomen

(a sheet of matzo conspicuously hidden under a pillow

and ransomed with a gift)

while the adults pretended not to see,

a privilege reserved for the youngest,

and the questions I mouthed

weren't the ones I would have asked
for it seemed unfair to me

that the Lord had hardened Pharaohs heart

then punished the Egyptians for it.

It only occurred to me years later

that this holiday celebrated freedom.

April 8-15, 2007

Rites of Spring

First it was crocuses

thrusting up

out of the bare ground

like the sound of a woodwind

piercing a silence.

Now forsythia has flared

proclaiming itself with brassy fanfare

while from bush and tree

leaf buds emerge

pianissimo

but building to a grand crescendo.

April 15-22, 2007

Cardinal Number

Early spring mornings,

this time of year,

a cardinal

belts out his song

right next to our bedroom window.

Its the same song every year

two bars, three notes each

delivered with operatic vigor

and always just before the first light of dawn

or a bit after.

Why does he sing so?

I think he wants to let us know

that our yard is his territory.

April 22-29, 2007

Springtime

A time of new leaves

and blossoming trees

of pollen swirling

and birds returning

of coy looks

and languid urges

of preening and wooing

and lolling on the grass.

April 22-29, 2007

Springtime

A time of new leaves

and blossoming trees

of pollen swirling

and birds returning

of coy looks

and languid urges

of preening and wooing

and lolling on the grass.

April 29 - May 6, 2007

So Many Springs

So many times
I’ve seen winter's stick and straw
metamorphose
into the yellow of forsythia and daffodils,
hyacinth purple,
pink and white blossoms
of magnolia, cherry, apple, pear,
chartreuse of new young leaves,
grass that’s vivid again,
seventy some times that I remember,
but I’m grateful still.

May 6-13, 2007

Listening to Fats Waller

Listening to Fats Waller,
I think
this was the music of my mother’s youth.
She danced like a flapper, I suppose,
something it can be hard
to imagine one’s mother doing,
but she showed me the Charleston
when I was in my teens.
We danced it the only way you can,
energetically,
mother and son,
between the sofa and the baby grand.

May 13-20, 2007

Falling in Love with Greer Garson

Reading recently about a 1942 film
I was reminded of Mrs. Miniver.
My memory of the movie is vague—
something about the home front,
stalwart English and the war—
but I remember falling in love with Greer Garson.
I was eleven at the time.
A few years later my brother
became enamored of Ingrid Bergman.
Ingrid Bergwin he called her.
He was much younger than I.
For a later generation
it was Julie Andrews, I suppose.

What is it with the American boy,
this partiality for European stars,
and what would Tom Sawyer say?

May 20-27, 2007

Look Who’s Coming to Dinner

I put up a goldfinch feeder not long ago.
For weeks none came.
Then at last they arrived,
sometimes singly,
or in matched pairs
rhythmically pecking at opposite sides
like figures striking a bell
on an old town clock,
sometimes in trios, quartets,
sometimes so many they have to wait in line.

When I was a child
sighting a yellow bird
excited me,
for they were rare,
and still are
(unless you know where to look).
Now with our goldfinch feeder
I see them almost every day,
but, though I may look blasé
as befits my age
I still experience that childhood thrill
whenever those bright birds
alight outside our window.

May 27 – June 3, 2007
(a poem for memorial day)

The Things They Carry

I hear casually booming voices in the street
and, looking out the window, see
two boys in their early teens.
From the sound it might have been men,
and I think of such almost men
(still, I know, partly children)
some will grow up to be soldiers,
carry their childhood fantasies
into the world,
like flags,
and I think,
in another part of that world,
if not for good luck in where they were born,
these men-children would bear arms,
kill and be killed
before becoming men.
What could be more manly?

June 3-10, 2007

I Was a Soldier Once

I was a soldier once, and young,
though I never fought in a war,
no buddy of mine died in one
and indeed I don’t remember
that any Americans fought in those years
or even if there was a war at the time.
I was a peacetime soldier,
drafted,
with no dreams of glory,
though I came to dream of waging war
on the military mind.
Oh, there were intelligent ones
but they took care to hide their intelligence.
It was OK to be smart,
but thoughtful, no,
nor inclined to see things in shades of grey.
Decisive was the ticket—
though it didn’t matter where that decisiveness led—
respectful of tradition and authority
and the primate hierarchies of rank.
So it was a time of disgruntled draftees
overeducated and disdainful
hating every minute of their military lives,
and I was one.
But I survived.

June 10-17, 2007

Sumer Is Icumen in

Birds clamor at dawn.
Mosquitoes buzz through the night.
Cars grow hot in parking lots.
windshields bespattered with bugs.
Lawns demand to be mowed.
The war of the weeds has begun.
We shall know sweat again.

June 17-24, 2007

Firefly Time

Fireflies tonight,
first time this year.
Looking out the window
I see them winking
where there was only darkness
       yesterday,
signals from a time
when fireflies foretold
freedom from school,
playing late in the dusk,
and the languid procession
of long summer days.

June 24 - July 1, 2007

Coalition of the Willing

Having trouble keeping our allies in Iraq.
Not much help anyway.
Hard to coordinate,
a dozen contingents of less than battalion size
speaking as many tongues
(bringing Babel back to the Fertile Crescent).
And we have to pay them to be there,
money we could put to better use elsewhere.

Solution: dogs.
Really willing.
Wouldn’t entail much political protest;
no bitchy Cindy Sheehans.
Would make our army warm and fuzzy.
Good at sniffing IEDs.
Useful for scaring information
out of prisoners.
Would raise the level of military intelligence.

July 1-8, 2007

Wag's Tale

Driving down the street
I saw a dog standing in front of a house
facing some workmen unloading a truck
a ball in its mouth
its tail wagging tentatively
as if to say “Anybody for play?”
but tempered with the recognition
that it might be importuning.

July 8-15, 2007

Dogs

Smooth, fuzzy,
hairless, shaggy,
elegantly coiffed,
big as bears,
barely larger than rats,
faces elongated to squashed,
dappled, spotted, monochromatic,
shades of brown, black, yellow, white,
amiable, menacing,
smiling?, growling, making sheep’s eyes,
barking, woofing, arfing,
slobbering, kissing,
tugging, fetching,
tearing, bounding,
sleeping, twitching,
putting paws on your chest,
chewing slippers,
gnawing bones noisily,
imploring at the dinner table,
sniffing intimately,
marking turf.
Dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs.

July 15-22, 2007

Tiger Season

Two tiger swallowtails in the garden today.
First I’ve seen this year.
Been expecting them for the last few days
since the echinacea bloomed.
Now I know that summer’s here for sure.

July 22-29, 2007

Wings

Butterflies
born again with wings,
wrinkled, wet, deflated,
yet, glory be, wings,
that soon dry, deploy, display,
wings of many colors,
plain and parti-colored,
tiled and striped,
wings with peacock eyes
or strung with lights,
kaleidoscope wings
art nouveau wings,
wings the span of a man’s hand
thumbnail wings,
wings spread like kites
or solar panels,
or reaching up like sails.

Butterflies busily fluttering
from flower to flower
tirelessly sipping, siphoning
their long probes inserted
into the heart-depths of flowers.
Butterflies bucketing
across fields,
over yards
or breaking off suddenly from foraging
to circle one another in rising spirals,
mating in mid-air,
then laying eggs

and in the spring
eggs hatching into caterpillars
smooth and segmented,
tufted or hairy,
striped like tribal bracelets,
like peppermint sticks.
Then the caterpillars spin cocoons
to lie inside
until, one day,
they reappear
with wings…
wings, wings,
glorious wings.

July 29 - August 5, 2007

Fête Champêtre

I open a window shade and find
a yard full of birds and butterflies:
robins bobbing for worms,
mourning doves davening for seed,
goldfinches upside down at their feeder
sparrows spearing what falls;
tigers in force on the butterfly bush,
a black swallowtail on a coneflower,
cabbage whites everywhere.
It’s as crowded as Times Square.

August 5-12, 2007

Duchess

I still remember it
though it was almost seventy years ago
the day my parents brought her home.
I was seven.
When I came home from school, they said
“We have something for you,”
and ushered me into the pantry
and there was a puppy
with its crushed velvet fur,
not yet collie silk.
Love at first sight.
Her tail wagged.
My heart beat faster.
I named her Duchess
thinking it aristocratic, I suppose.
In my teens I thought it corny
but now I see it fit her long collie nose.
That was close to three quarters of a century ago
but I still remember how I felt
and what she looked like in that little room.

August 12-19, 2007

Dog Photo

I am eight.
Duchess is kissing me
with blissful spontaneity,
her long collie muzzle
thrusting up lovingly
into my face.
I am smiling
with a mixture of appreciation
and the reflexive reaction
of one being tickled
by a very wet, canine kiss.

August 19-26, 2007

Man and Dog

Long ago you decided to join our pack.
We had fire to warm you on cold winter nights
and fed you bones and scraps.
You helped us hunt,
warned of intruders
and helped us drive them away.
Later you herded our other animals.
Above all we gave each other love.
Now we enter you in shows
walk you on a leash
and pick up your feces in plastic bags.

August 26 – September 2, 2007

September 1, 1939

Where was I?

At home in our tranquil suburb?

In school, or was it too soon?

Playing with friends?

Reading in my room?

Still at the lake perhaps

or on a train

coming home.

I don’t know what time of day it was,

don’t think I even heard the news.

My parents surely knew

but they must have said

best not tell the children.

Nor did I know of Kristallnacht

Munich

the Sudetenland

Anschluss.

It was probably summery still,

the leaves unchanged,

a calm September day.

September 2-9, 2007

Summer's End

This morning

for the first time in months

it was cool enough

that I felt like wearing something

next to my skin.

All the summer's haze had gathered

into a few small clouds

hung out like newly washed sheets,

and migrant swans came down

on the wings of the wind.

September 9-16, 2007

Sandwich Man

Some mornings my wife
goes to work early
and I make a sandwich for her.
I pile it high with healthful ingredients
and wrap it lovingly in foil
neatly folded at the ends.
Drive carefully, I say,
and let me know
if you go anywhere after work.

September 16-23, 2007

Terms of Endearment

I left my wife a note this morning saying,
You’re a doll
and the other day
I called her my old lady.
That set me to wondering
about the origins of such expressions.
I remember old lady being used
in those movies they used to make
about motorcycle gangs.
Could it be a tender tribute
to a promise of permanence
among the famously footloose?

My regular name for her is sugarplum,
something fragrant and delectable,
always in season
in this alcove of Eden.

Her favorite for me,
currently,
is pumpkin,
though I’m not very round
or at all orange.
Huggie bear is another favorite
easy to decipher.
Then there’s stud muffin
Why muffin?

But my favorite is bubeleh,
a fragment of Yiddishkeit,
out of the mouth of my
Italian-Polish, Roman Catholic wife.

September 23-30, 2007

Mécanique Céleste

Laplace, I’ve just learned,
wrote a book call Mécanique Céleste.
I wonder if it’s a users manual for Celestes
for I have one
and I’d dearly like to know how she works,
if such knowledge is vouchsafed to man.


September 30 – October 6, 2007

Moving

It was your ninth birthday
26 years ago today
that the movers came.
Your mother and sister had gone two months before.
You stayed to finish day camp
and I stayed with you
coming home every evening to a half empty house,
you from camp
I from Foggy Bottom.
We ate most of our meals out
and you had your fill of pizza,
and popcorn shrimp.

You finished camp
and the next day
the movers came.
When they were done
I swept the floor for a last time
and we got in the car and drove away
to another city, another state,
leaving behind an empty house
that was no longer ours.

October 7-14, 2007

Bird Watchers

Birds sitting on a telephone line
along US Route 1
in the heart of New Jersey,
like city dwellers
leaning on their window sills,
watching what?
The passing cars?
Counting makes and models perhaps?
Spotting the rare antique
or maybe even a once in a lifetime
Lamborghini?
Do they compare sightings
at the end of the day?
Do they have clubs?
Do they harbor warm feelings for us
and yearn to protect us
from environmental degradation?
Do they fear
we’re becoming
an endangered species?

October 14-21, 2007

Moon Madness

Stepping out our front door
I’m suddenly awash
in the cries of geese
filling every corner
of the night sky,
silhouettes bobbing
across the lunar disk,
a crowd of shadows
driven to mad dance
by the spectacle
of a full moon
floating free
of the planet’s grasp.


October 21-29, 2007

Autumn Sonata

Sunlight pierces the clouds
setting linden leaves aglow
yellow as daffodils
against a dove-gray, autumn sky,
as if the seasons were juxtaposed.
And I hear music playing
on a long ago gramophone,
the sound of strings
pressed between the years
like a blossom in the pages of a book.


October 28 – November 4, 2007

Those Days

I open the blinds on rain
and a chill autumn day
and am reminded all at once
of other such days,
Manhattan in the dream of youth,
Heidelberg—my time as a G.I.,
Paris on some visit,
and all those views
charged with longing and loneliness
and yellowed leaves
wetly embracing the pavement
in a parody of love.

November 4-11, 2007

Crows in the Rain

I’ve always wondered what birds do in the rain.
Surprisingly, I’ve never seen.
Today I noticed a cluster of crows
hunched stoically (I imagined)
in a tree
a cold November downpour
running down their backs.
One was clucking faintly
as if in misery.
Now I don’t much care for crows
but seeing them pelted with icy water
gave me a shiver of sympathy
and I wanted them to be
somehow immune
to the wet and cold.
They must be, I thought,
or they wouldn’t be sitting in a tree.
But then where would they sit,
those shifty, thieving,
suffering fellow creatures?

November 11-18, 2007

The Charms of War

It was a good war,
World War I,
for us Americans
who were in it only briefly
and didn’t lose so many young men.
It had its compensations,
its mademoiselles,
its Hemingway,
old Europe
with its worldly charms,
and our heroically coming to its rescue.
Then tickertape parades
down lower Broadway,
and the best of times
in left bank cafés.
Would we have been there
if not for the war?

Then World War II
less romantic, true,
but righteous,
a war against evil,
the best of wars.
And even Nam,
food for nostalgia even there,
for we love war
and will, I suppose,
as long as men grow from boys.

November 18-25, 2007

The Twittering Tree

branches scratched on a flat gray sky
ornamented with feathered spheres
distributed with subtle symmetry;
starlings resting on a leafless tree
looking like a painting by Paul Klee


November 25-December 2, 2007

First Snow (Manhattan, 1952)

Rain comes
painting a thousand mirrors
on the pavement,
a dense panorama
half formed
as in a dream.

Vehicles ply with caution
the melting streets,
the landscape in pools.

Then snow.
A man hurries by my window
his coat collar turned up round his chin.
 

December 2-9, 2007

Becoming T. S. Eliot

When I was young and impressionable
I wanted to be T. S. Eliot.
No matter that I didn’t understand much of his poetry.
I felt a man of letters was the most admirable thing to be.
As for the physical heroes of yore,
I knew that wasn’t me,
and, having been “poet laureate” of my eighth grade class,
I aspired to emulate
the paragon of modernity.
The first step I took
was to get horn-rimmed glasses
though it was arguable whether I needed glasses yet.
An aunt of mine said to me
with amazing perspicacity
(though she never even went to college)
“You may think they make you look intellectual,
but you’ll have to wear them the rest of your life.”
I kept them anyway
and wear glasses still
but, as far as I can tell,
they did nothing for my poetry.

December 9-16, 2007

Confessions of a Bourgeois Gentleman

My life, I confess,
Has been largely without drama.
Oh, I spent a few days in a war zone once,
though not in combat.
I’ve had my share of depression,
but always of a low key sort,
like a bad cold,
and endured small childhood traumas,
though nothing worse than being bullied.
Then there was being the last one picked
when the boys were choosing up sides for a game,
and the banal ache of rejection by the opposite sex.
Yes, there was loneliness,
again not out of the ordinary,
but enough to give me an unencumbered view
of the poetry all around us.
So it comes as no surprise to me
that I’ve been speaking poetry
most of my life.

December 16-23, 2007

Ouch

No matter how many people like my poems.
It always hurts a bit when someone doesn’t
even if it’s merely indifference.
Something like what happens after the nurse says
“This’ll pinch a little.”
But rarely mortal.

December 30, 2007 – January 6, 2008

The Mountains Are Losing their Snow

I remember the first time I saw it
driving west as a child
the white wall of the Rockies
rising out of the high plains
like a phalanx of moons;
then Mexico,
Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl
serene above the city;
later Ecuador,
the avenida de los nevados,
Cayambe, Antizana, Cotapaxi, Chimborazo,
and snow capped cones
framed by jungle;
then farther down the spine of the continent
Illimani looming over La Paz
like a thundercloud.

But the mountains are losing their snow.

December 23-30, 2007

It’s That Time of Year Again

That’s what it says near the top of the ad,
a half page in the Times.
The caption below reads
December To Remember  sales event
The photo shows a box wrapped with ribbon
a window
a handsome stone house across the street
a woman’s well-formed hand above the box
a tasteful sweater sleeve covering her arm.
The hand is holding a bow
between thumb and index finger,
and under it there’s an expensive car.
I picture a child in Darfur.

January 6-13, 2008

Happy New Year

Suppose there were no years.
Would anything be different?
We think important things have ended and begun
when it’s only dates on a calendar,
perhaps some resolutions
(largely to be unfulfilled)
or the earth beginning,
for over its four billionth time,
a new circle around the sun.
The world doesn’t stop at midnight
like a train changing engineers.
There’s no bump in the road of time.
The scene hasn’t changed.
The characters are the same.
The play goes on much as before.
Dramatic climax is no more likely
than on any other day.
There’s not even an intermission.
A foot raised at the end of one year
comes down the next
with no pause in between.
Isn’t it really the same bottle
with a new label?


January 13-20, 2008

Angst

Anxiety for Luxury Brands as Tiffany Reports Slowdown

New York Times, 1/12/08

I wring my hands
for luxury brands.
They’re not flying off the shelf
maybe not even crawling.
That’s appalling.

So much love and care
invested in their shaping,
like only children,
and now they’re orphans
abandoned and forsaken.

It’s shocking that in this wealthy nation
our finest creations
have no takers.
We need a better safety net
for luxury market makers.

January 20-27, 2008

Cotapaxi

Just below a great snowy cone in the Andes
on a broad flat shelf of mountain
wild horses race
keeping pace
with wind-driven clouds overhead,
breath steaming 
long manes swirling,
exhilarated,
as if created
just moments before
out of the primordial chaos.


January 27 – February 3, 2007

To My Brother in His Sixty-Eighth Year

Our sister was seventy this week
and I thought to myself
incredulously
you’ll soon be sixty-eight.
I was nine when you were born
and though I remember the name
of the hospital you came from
I have no recollection of what you looked like
until you were going on two,
and that maybe from a photo of us.
In it you’re wearing a naval jacket 
with two stripes on the sleeve.
Your hand in the pocket,
you look casual and self assured,
Churchillian with your plump cheeks.
Yet it’s probably not until you were eleven or twelve
that you made a three dimensional impression
on my mind.
Now you’ll soon be sixty-eight
your hair is gray at the fringes
your pate bare above the brow
all trace of baby fat vanished long ago,
but I have no trouble visualizing you in the round.

February 3 -10, 2008

After the Storm

After a day of sleet and slush,
skies of gloomy gray
and a nightlong drumroll of rain,
morning comes
sounding a note of sunlight
on the slope across the valley
while in the eastern sky
chords of blue and gold strike up
an overture to a new day.


February 10-17, 2008

Seventy-six Going on Seventy-seven

I recently moved to another state
and am frequently asked my age
as I sign up for this or that.
Each time, though I only say “seventy-six”,
I think, with a mental titter,
“seventy-six going on seventy-seven”
for it reminds me of those long ago days
when I was eager to lay claim
to being almost one year older.
“Six going on seven”
I’d say with a modest smile.
Now I say it matter-of-factly
and my smile is wry,
but still with a touch of pride.
Of course I don’t hope for my listeners to respond
“My, what a big boy.”
It’s another sort of compliment I’m fishing for:
“You certainly don’t look your age.”

February 17-24, 2008

How I Know I’m Getting Old

When I was young
and the Andrews Sisters were popular
I couldn’t imagine what people saw in them.
I didn’t care for their songs
or three part harmony.
But basically it was what they stood for in my mind.
Though I knew no Andrews Sisters fans
I could imagine what they were like:
people who lived in tacky houses
and voted for Eisenhower,
women with perms
who waxed orgasmic
over refrigerators,
and said things like
“Ladies first” and
“That’s what little girls are made of.”

Now when I hear the Andrews sisters sing
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,
or The Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,
nostalgia creeps over me.


February 24 – March 2, 2008

Men of Stature

All these men of stature,
the cosmologist who stares out of today’s science page
theorizing about the multiverse,
the statesman who steers the massive ship of state,
the poet who opens us to new ways of seeing,
the titan who snares the globe in his corporate net,
the bishop
the pope
the judge
the general
the dictator
all were once infants
lying on their small backs
kicking aimlessly
spasmodically grabbing handfuls of air
feeding from a teat,
were once small boys
mixing up their words
unable to cross the street alone,
then, a bit older,
with clear skin, piping voices 
and still childish repartee,
and adolescents
contrary, sullen, unsure of themselves
driven by the fever in their loins.
You wouldn’t have known then
that these boys
would one day be men of stature
nor is it easy to imagine now
that they once were young and vulnerable.

March 2 – 9, 2008

The Voices of Stones

Who can look on Ayers Rock
without hearing songlines,
Stone Mountain
without Dixie or the Battle Hymn
ringing in one’s inner ear,
Angkor or Machu Picchu
without phantom voices,
boulders without mountains’ deep bass,
pebbles without the murmur of streams?
Who says that stones are mute?
They whisper, babble, boom, chant, sing.

March 9-16, 2008

Portents of Spring

For the first time in months
it was mild this morning
when I stepped out for the paper.
At least it seemed that way
after relentless frozen nights and frigid days,
the ground in a shroud of snow,
the sky a mournful grey.
This morning it was warmer
than when I went to bed last night,
the front walk was wet with melted snow,
and down the block I heard a cardinal cry
cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer.

March 16-23, 2008

Residence on Earth

Opening Neruda’s poems
I notice an inscription inside the cover

        May 1950
        to R. Greene
        with affection
        Ulu

Ulu, my cosmopolitan classmate, a refugee,
who so named himself
with rare self-assurance,
and I’m carried back over half a century
to that time
when our faces were still unlined,
our limbs firm and confident.
Rooms facing each other across the hall
and studying into the night
we would meet when we emerged
befuddled by the lateness of the hour
laughing at something for reasons
nobody but us could have discerned.
Since then our paths have diverged
and it’s been—how long?—
close to three decades since I last saw Ulu,
but noticing that inscription in the book
I see him as he was then,
hear in my mind his delighted laugh
and think of lines from Neruda:
“or as from high above the road,
the crisscrossing toll of bells is heard.”

March 23-30, 2008

March Wind

      I

The wind has blown since dawn
rolling the sun up the slope of day,
sweeping away the darkness,

and now, as the sun
rolls down the other way
the wind is blowing the light away.

      II

This side of the window pane
the air is still
but I know the wind blows
for beyond the glass
trees writhe in frenzied dance
this day of the equinox.

      III

The wind comes down
with a rush and a roar
like a locomotive in a 3-D movie
hurtling towards us menacingly
piston rods pumping frenetically
whistle a deranged shriek
trailing cyclonic clouds of smoke.
Why does spring come on this way?

March 30 - April , 2008

Out of an Economy Endlessly Growing

It’s  no longer the same America, Walt,
the land you gazed upon and listened to
from the coast where it began,
a youthful land
unsure of itself, yet cocksure,
still sorting out who it was,
a slower land, horse-paced,
an aspiring land
with much to aspire to,
a  land bent on nation building
with a continent to fill.

We know who we are now.
We’ve lived through
“the American century”
and the world emulates us,
would you believe it,
though grumbling.

The continent is now full from sea to sea
not just with homesteads, towns and cities
but with highways long as the Mississippi
and half as wide,
satellite cities clustering around our cities of old,
housing plantations with scores of dwellings,
buildings big enough to hold a town.
There are boxes in our houses and auditoriums
with pictures that move and talk.
Our space is filled with messages
that can circle the globe in an instant.
With all our building
we’ve used up so many trees
that many of the forests you knew
have all but disappeared
and we’ve paved over more fields
than a thousand men could plow in a lifetime.

We no longer need to walk
or ride a horse or behind one
to get where we want to go,
for we have carriage-sized machines,
almost one for each of us,
that hurtle across towns
and through the countryside
at speeds that would lap
your trusty old nag
seventy times a day,
and flying machines
that leap the continent in hours!

And so we race by
the places where we used to pause
and had the time,
had to take the time,
to face those we passed
and talk with them.
Now we can travel coast to coast
talking at most
with a few toll collectors,
those who fuel our machines,
impersonal night clerks in impersonal inns
and bored youths who work in our
       “fast food restaurants”.
Our eyes don’t meet,
we exchange a few functional words
like putting coins in a jar,
and we’re off.

All the things we aspired to,
we have them now,
as well as things you couldn't have imagined
in astonishing variety
but there’s never enough.
Our appetite for things knows no bounds
and we spend more and more time
creating them
shopping for them
and enjoying them for just a short while
before moving on to the next.
And move on we do
at pounding speed
the way you might run down a rainy street,
for fashions change now
almost as fast as the weather.

Everything is fast these days.
We work fast
we eat fast
we talk fast
we try to think and read fast
and we change our interests fast
and our trades
hurrying from one to another.
 
So the promise of your time
has been fulfilled
the possibilities have been realized
but where in your time
we had a few empty spaces to fill
we now have a vacuum of a strange sort.
The more we fill it
the more it grows.


April 6-13, 2008

The Crew

A crew is out for early practice
caressing the morning air
with rapt strokes
cleaving the smooth water
with rhythmic thrusts
feeling no doubt
it’s good to be young
and drowsily awake
stretched out on a long-limbed river
this fine spring morning.

April 13-20, 2008

Planned Obsolescence

My hands no longer work the way they used to.
They ache this morning
and I had trouble opening a jar.
Problems too with my wrists, eyes, feet,
shins, shoulders, sacroiliac.
I’ve had my body in the shop
several times of late
but the wheels still squeak
the steering’s loose
and it chugs when going uphill.
Trade-in, however, isn’t an option.

April 20-27, 2008

Pyrotechnics

cloudy spring day
late afternoon
satin gray sky
trees abloom
blossoms bursting
in the tingling air
like fireworks
at a county fair

April 27 – May 4, 2008

Blossom Time

Blossom time
fruit trees in flower
pompons of pink and white
garments of lacy green.
I remember the Massif Central
about this time of year
over fifty years ago
that high ground
spattered with new leaves
small orchards blossoming here and there
but mostly a sprinkling of green
fresh as the clear streams
with their thin sheets of ice.
Why that spring
out of more than seventy?
Perhaps it was freedom,
for I was a young soldier then
on leave
driving from Heidelberg to Provence.
Perhaps it was the solitude
after the enforced society of military life,
alone and free
driving down a country road in France
the world just greening
the streams still braced with ice.

May 4-11, 2008

Citizen Soldier

I was a soldier once
in a far away land
though not on death’s hallowed ground.
It was during an undeclared peace
and I went to an office every day
where I battled armies of paper,
and by night toiled in other ways
in beer halls and brothels.

There were field exercises, to be sure,
and Saturday parades
where we practiced maneuvers
unseen in warfare
since the redcoats were ambushed by the minutemen,
and our company commander polished
his patent leather holster
l