Güd wrtr

Is what the astrologers call it,
this falling back into the darkening
months of the year,

leaf litter increasing underfoot
and, sitting between Earth and sun,
the invisible new moon offering

a quiet, fertile space to plant
ourselves in deep stillness.
Whether we want to or not,

it’s a time of excavation in this
introspective moment, on long evenings
at home, perhaps by firelight

with a book and cinnamon tea
to lift the spirits. Time to release
the need to appear presentable,

to simply feel all the feels,
as the kids say, in this dark,
bountiful pause.

It’s not another death,
I remind myself. If I can trust
the quiet, insights will rise

like the moon solidifying
in the sky, slowly becoming whole
and bright and clear.

(Latin: for each day)

Daily I wish for
the best version of me

to show up, the one
with an expansive heart,

an elastic mind
and far-reaching arms

ready to embrace
the world.

Each day’s spacious beginning
stretches wide

over a pinkening horizon,
and ends that way, too,

which is what I dream of:
this great earth holding us

till the end of you,
till the end of me,

which, as we know,
is not truly the end,

just a beginning
dressed in a new outfit,

sparkling in the light
of forever.

•••

Today is the fourth anniversary of the daily poems I share here.
I have no idea—and people do ask—how I’ve produced a poem
daily for four years, but I’m grateful to the muses that appear
with phrases and images that I can follow down the page
to see what happens.

They’re not all poetic gems, but each (of more than 1,460 poems)
is a little miracle, which I post daily with my favorite whispered prayer:
thankyouthankyouthankyou.

And yes, in 2027 a book of some of these poems will be published
called “Per Diem.”

Fluttering around a casa garden
called Romantica on a cliff
overlooking the sea, three of them
helicopter through foliage planted
just for them,

alighting on velvety purple
Mexican bush sage, intricately petaled
zinnias and a rainbow assortment
of lantana.

It’s not that I see every monarch
as the one who flew from us,
she who loved anything adorned
with butterflies but didn’t think
to plant foliage in her yard
to attract them.

My logical self knows that it’s
highly unlikely that, though she
would have loved to, she has
reincarnated as one of these
beauties.

But in a garden only 50 miles
from where she birthed me,
I sit on a bench watching the trio
play tag from blossom to blossom,

flowers that will thrive here
through winter, as I hope
the butterflies will in this
Mediterranean climate.

And I get now, as I always do when
they flit by my field of limited vision,
a big whoosh of her—light and lovely,
warm and wingéd—

what she aspired to in human form,
what she may have cocooned into
and broken out of, emerging from
her chrysalis with soft, crumpled
wings, fluttering into a new life

like that one there, resting on
a floribunda rose before
lifting off again into the light.

•••

(In memory of my mother and all the
companion spirits on this Day of the Dead.)

This is one more way I know that I’m old:
every year getting a bigger kick out of
kids’ costumes on Halloween.

Younger me would spend the evening
somewhat annoyed when the old-fashioned
doorbell (truly a bell) shrilled,

forcing me to rise from the sofa and
some engaging TV program to deliver
candy to strangers. But this, too,

is one more way that the man I married
changed me: He, a pushover for cuteness,
would answer the bell and beckon me

to the door, insisting, “You gotta see this,
Toots.” And there’d stand a trio of tiny witches
or a mini Luke Skywalker or a toddler

in a doggie onesie. And he was right—
they charmed me, so much so that now
I greet every Halloween doorbell

with a big grin, even the too-cool teens
half-slouching on the porch, but who
light up when I offer chocolate.

The day before Halloween 42 years ago,
he had his chest opened and his aortic valve
replaced, leaving him with a wicked,

ghoulish scar and a lifesaving device that
tick-tick-ticked as it opened and closed,
opened and closed, as his damaged one

had not, buying him 17 more Halloweens.
Every year since, as I close the door on
some exceptional cuteness, I will say, more

than once, “Didja see that one, Clifford?”
not expecting an answer. Though neither
will I be surprised, later in the night

to awaken to a familiar tick-tick-tick
and take that as a whispered,
“You betcha, Toots.”

Joy to the fishes
in the deep blue sea,
joy to you and me

—from “Joy to the World,” Three Dog Night, 1970

•••

And so we sit on the pier,
over a deep blue sea of fishes,
eating some of their brethren,

tasty joy for us, if not the fishes,
for which we are grateful, along
with some of their yummy

invertebrate sister shrimp,
and cousins from farther away,
like ono from Hawaii or

the Gulf of Mexico and halibut
from Alaska along with
the closer-to-home swordfish

of our west coast—we two
happy humans imbibing in
sea and sun and fishes,

joy to you and me.

•••

(for Dick Schmidt—with thanks and love for the sweet
SoCal getaway to warm ocean)

(T Street Beach, San Clemente, California)

He’s standing solo on the beach,
holding his board vertically,
its fin buried in the sand,
trying to take a selfie,

and on my morning walk,
even from a distance, I can see
him struggling to get it all
in the frame.

There’s no one around to admire
his effort or take the photo, so I walk
over and offer. And the smile that
thanks me beams broad and bright.

“Really? Thank you,” says, it turns out,
Jesse, the surfer from Texas.

After I snap a good number of photos
on his phone, we stand and survey
the baby waves that don’t amount
to much for someone who’s
come so far hoping to surf them.

But, I point out, he’ll have them
to himself. No local guys hogging
the lineup.

“You can tell people that you surfed
in Southern California,” I say.
“And being on your board
in the ocean on a lovely day
is never a bad thing, right?”

Jesse grins, hefts his board under
an armpit and heads for the blue.

And later, when I return on my walk,
I see him not far offshore, tummy down
on his board, waiting, in the tradition
of those hoping to catch a wave.

He sits and throws an arm up
in the air, a wave of recognition,
if not a surfable one.

And, offering a prayer to the gods
for one clean crest that Jesse
might ride into shore,
I do the only thing I can—

I send him a wave back.

He is that friend who presents a book we’ve never seen
wrapped in soft tissue like a gift from the divine,

which it is, in a way, coming from the long-gone pen
of Langston Hughes, jazz poet of 1920s Harlem:

“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,
and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

In the book Hughes spools out a story to accompany
Roy DeCarava’s photos of African Americans in 1950s Harlem:

“But almost everywhere there is something to set on or lean on,”
someone is setting or leaning. In what few parks there is,

some just set on a park bench… and hold their hands.”
And there on the page are a pair of dark clasped hands

contrasting with those hands’ white nail beds,
the kind of photo our friend might make,

whether the hands belong to the famous, the wealthy,
the common man, the dying. And we read the small book,

touched by the fiction of the real people in the photos,
whose protagonist, Miss Mary, says, “I done got my feet

caught in the flypaper of life—and I’ll be dogged
if I want to get loose.” And that, too, is our friend,

snagged by the sticky flypaper of life and loving
every bit—even the heart-tugging sorrows of it—

this poet photographer content to set on a park bench
and lean in to a stranger whose hands jitterbug

their way through a story, our friend the listener
nodding and smiling, uttering the kindest prayer:

“Tell me more.”

•••

For Genaro Molina, with our thanks for the present of your presence,
as well as the book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” by Langston Hughes
and Roy DeCarava.

There is in Celtic mythology the notion of “thin places”
in the universe where the visible and the invisible world
come into their closest proximity. …
—Rev. Peter Gomes

Perhaps this is why my feet need to meet ocean,
sink into ankle-deep sand, as the water eddies
around my knees,

why I stand with arms up, hands blocking
the insistent sun from my shaded eyes,
because I do not need to see this to feel it—

the thin places where temporal meets eternal,
this horizontal sea plane that extends to forever,
way out there, past sky and rule-straight horizon.

I do not want to leave; I could stand here
beyond time, calmed by swoosh of gentle surf
turning over on itself, by the company of gulls

hunkered down nearby, along with a cluster
of sanderlings moving in concert like an
avian corps de ballet, chasing receding waves,

pecking wet sand for tiny sand crabs
and crustaceans, then sprinting back up
the sand, pursued by incoming froth.

Each spring the small birds migrate to their
Arctic breeding grounds, returning by fall
to these wide, soft, golden sands.

There is no greater prayer than this—
standing in the notch between this side and that—
in communion with the here and gone,

with eternity, this ocean, this sky,
where all is calm,
where all is truly bright.

It rolled in the swells,
tossed up toward the surf line,
then dragged back into the froth

of crumbling waves, a buff-colored
prolate spheroid, slightly
torpedo-shaped, as I stood

on the damp sand, the tide
playing peek-a-boo with my toes,
watching it spiral like a kid’s

foam football tossed around
by the pixies of the sea. I tried
to reach it, hoping that it might

have once been a living sea sponge.
But the pixies pulled it tantalizingly
out of reach again and again,

so I continued my splashy walk.
On my way back, perhaps tired
of the game, the pixies having

abandoned their plaything on damp
sand, I picked it up, felt its slight
crunch, squeezed, waded deeper,

rinsing and rinsing, watching it drip
sandily, imagining its invertebrate life
on the sea floor, wondering how long

it had lived, how it came to be here.
And feeling for the creature
I’d decided it was, I touched it

to my cheek, its gentle roughness
like the few-days-old growth
across jaws I have kissed,

this one smelling of sea and salt,
holding its mysteries tight within
its precious, porous little body.

(San Clemente Pier City Beach,
San Clemente, California)

“But it’s the same ocean,” he pointed out
before we got here. “And there’s sand.”

And no hurricane has decimated this
place like the one that recently ravaged

an island we love in the middle of the sea.
And today, out on the quarter-mile-long pier

that extends its planked arm over the water,
fishermen (and women and kids)

hang their hopeful lines over the edge
of the pier, praying for a fresh catch

as we eat ours nearby at a sunny table
at a place called Fisherman’s.

And afterward, we tourists walk the pier,
indulge in a heap of shave ice

drenched in passion-orange-guava
syrup over vanilla ice cream,

all of which puts us as close to Hawaii
as we can be on a splendid blue-sky day

in late October, looking out at a ruler-
straight horizon, my flip-flopped feet

on damp sand where the ocean’s
warm froth delights my happy toes.