Güd wrtr

You must hear that all the time,
but you are, after all, a pumpkin. And no,
I’ve not come to carve your guts out
or wield a knife near your tough skin.
I’m a big fan of your shape and your
smooth texture, though your cousin
in the next bin over has the bumpies,
which are kinda witchy warty cool.

Tis the season, after all.

And yes, I’m one of those who not only likes
to fondle but also savors your flavor, too,
who buys pumpkin cookies and stocks
up on pumpkin ice cream. I fall for it every year.
Pumpkin butternut squash bisque. Apple
and pumpkin handpies. Pumpkin spice
rooibos tea. Pumpkin cream cheese spread
on a pumpkin bagel. Heaven. Throw in
a pumpkin spice cookie, some apple and
a slice of cheddar, and I’ll call that dinner.

So yeah, pumpkin, I’ll take you and
your sweet curves home and let your happy
orangeness infuse me when the costumed
hordes arrive seeking candy, not much
caring about you.

But I do. I’ll keep you as long as possible
on the porch, then plop you out in
the backyard by the fence, where you’ll
decompose like an old basketball,
enriching the soil to help next spring’s
flowers grow tall, where, with luck,
some of your seeds might take root
and pumpkin us all into another year.

39 years ago tonight
they let me into the frigid room
where they were keeping you

deeply sedated, your skin blue
and clammy, barely alive after
having trouble bringing you back,

with a wicked incision stitched
from collarbone to near navel
where deep inside a small device

ticked with every beat of your
ravaged heart. Tick. Tick. Tick.
How could you return from this

planned assault meant to prolong
your life with an artificial valve
ticking away the seconds?

You looked dead then, your face
waxy and ghoulish the day before
Halloween, a perfect fright. And

I, spooked beyond every scary
moment I’d known, felt myself
escape through my scalp,

hovering over the gruesome
scene. “He’s alive,” a masked nurse
assured me. “He’s alive.”

And I held your porcelain hand,
letting it chill my own, and, seeping
back into myself, I clung to

the word, eyes shut tight against
the horrific scene, listening:
Tick. Tick. Tick.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

For years, men did this for me—
my father, my husband, my partner.

I’d blame it on my weak upper body.
I can’t dig a hole for spit, especially

in the clay that masquerades as soil
in my back yard. And that’s true.

But when the dead squirrel appeared
on the deck as I cleaned up around

the downed pot, mysteriously broken,
that had gently cradled Dick’s

mother’s ficus for so many years,
I imagined a wild chase between

predator and prey that resulted in
the ends of two living things.

The ficus I could resurrect, plop into
a new pot, but the squirrel, I realized

upon closer examination, was long
dead, really more of a flattened pelt.

I ran through the list of hole-diggers
I might summon and decided to give

it a go myself, watering the hardpan
by the north fence for a while, letting

the water simmer and sink. Then,
taking up the small shovel and,

with no thought for my newish
lavender tennies, I began to dig.

You could, Clifford whispered,
just put it in a plastic bag, Toots.

Then in the garbage can, my father
echoed. But I remembered each

of them digging a spot in different
back yards to bury the dead things:

a beloved pet—usually a cat—or
sometimes a bird fallen from the sky

or a snake stopped in mid-slither
with tender placement, tucking it

gently into a blanket of soil. Did this
sprawled squirrel deserve any less?

So I muddied my shoes and applied
my sole to the shovel, digging slowly,

working around roots, not very deep,
but enough, setting the creature to rest,

an impromptu Day of the Dead ceremony
a few days early, a small blessing

for the remembered
from the rememberer.

(Interior live oak, Quercus wislizeni)

Hey, big fella—yeah, you big,
shaggy live oak—nice to see you

craggy-barked behemoth, you.
How’s your year been?

Sorry I haven’t been by to chat
lately. I’ve been walking other

parks, taking different avenues,
chatting with you elder statesmen.

I’ve read that your genus can live
a couple hundred years, that your

bark gets more furrowed with age,
though you hang onto your glossy

green leaves, your full crown. Now
that I’m officially in my senior years,

I’m taking notes in the company
of trees, sheltering in your sanctuaries,

you deep listeners, you poems that
the earth writes upon the sky.*

I look to you and your kindred spirits
for tips on living long, staying upright,

remaining vital to friends—not least
to butterflies with delightful names:

from the California Sister, the Golden
Hairstreak and the Mournful Duskywing

to the Western Tiger Swallowtail.
I’ve come tonight to stand under your

generous canopy watching the rise
of a Hunter Moon, Jupiter hanging

like a winking earring below, me
humming the Holst theme, a majestic

piece of symphonic genius befitting
your grandeur. Teach me patience

with all that arrives, not least
the coming winter. What you have

weathered I can only imagine. Yet
look at you, standing tall, poised in

your vitality, your abundance of life.

•••

*poet Kahlil Gibran

•••

You can listen to the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 performance of “The Planets—IV,
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” by Gustav Holst, Susanna Mälkki, conductor.

At the VFW hall on a damp Wednesday night,
Ma sings tenor with the gals and the guys,
with approximately 1,800 years of barbershop
harmony in their hearts.

They sing the oldies—the real oldies—
for the cowboy-themed recital:
“Home on the Range,” “Don’t Fence Me In,”
“Back in the Saddle Again,” and, of course,
“I’m an Old Cowhand.”

With some twists and a nod to local history,
the wild Irish rose morphs into the beautiful
Roseville rose (after “the 39th largest city in California,”
notes the narrator). And Roger with his Magic Rope
(the father of one of my high school percussion
buddies) spins his lariat for the admiring audience
of mostly family members ready with camera
phones, even if, Roger says, he can no longer hop
through the circling loop,

My mother, the slight one with the blaze
of white hair, stands tall at the end of the row
of ladies, singing out her tenor part
to “Country Roads” with a substitution:
“California, mountain mama, take me home,
country roads.”

I watch from my place near the back, thinking,
in the inimitable words of Harold Hill,
“Singing is just sustained talking,” offering
a little prayer to the gods of harmony:

Please, you daddies who sang bass,
you mamas who sang tenor, let my mama
keep singing till she sails off to join that big
chorus in the sky. And please let her find her
dearest Sweet Adeline

buddies who’ve gone
before her standing tall on the risers, in
fringed flapper dresses and an abundance
of blue eye shadow, singing their heavenly
hearts out:

How can there be any sin in sincere
Where is the good in goodbye?
Tell me what can be fair in farewell, dear
While one single star shines above

How can there be any sin in sincere?
Aren’t we sincerely in love?
Oh, we’re in love!

•••

•••

The Buffalo Bills sing “Sincere” in “The Music Man” (1962 movie starring Robert Preston as Harold Hill):

(Sacramento, California)

We still have roses.
we still have pale asters,
and the neighbors’ leaping
cosmos and white azaleas

roses in fall yellow and orange
are blooming as if they think
it’s April. At this latitude in late
October, some of us think it’s spring,

never a bad thing, especially after
a little bit of rain and cool have
given us a taste of what’s on its way.
My hollyhocks still haven’t gotten

the message, growing tall, sporting
frilly tutu blossoms and fresh
leaves the size of saucers, showing
no intention of giving up.

I imagine them stunned into
withering when frost comes,
when I will go outside and
croon as I clip the dead bits,

You’ll be back, you self-seeders,
have a nice sleep now, see you soon,
you morning glories, you glorious
poppies.

You head outside and walk past
the ruler-straight line of the front
yard where it meets the sidewalk,

and there, atop the profusion of
lava rock not far from the bush
of the same name, lies an errant

chunk of lavender sidewalk chalk.
You stop, look around for a child
or an artistic adult who might have

wandered by and lost a stick from
a fist or a pocket. But you see
no one, so you pick up the gift

and chalk the first thing you think
of onto the sidewalk between
a few crusty sycamore leaves.

You stand back, admiring the
sentiment, and put the chalk
back on the nearby rocks,

hoping that another passer-by
might just pass by and feel
inclined to respond with

whatever offering they’re
holding in their heart.
Like this.

(for Walt Wiley)

Mr. Wiley used to call me now and then
from his desk at the local newspaper.
Good reporter that he was, he knew just
when to catch me between classes, often

sitting in my office with a student journalist
editing the third draft of a sports story—
me asking dumb questions like, “Will
people know what an inside cut is?”

And Walt’s voice would twang in my ear:
“I’m suckin’ wind here—whaddya got
there on the campus?” He always made
me chuckle, and I’d run my hyped-up

brain over stories the students had done—
or should have—to offer to the local
columnist looking for items. I think of
Walt often now, happily retired from

the newspaper game and living nearby,
especially on afternoons like this one
when I lace up my tennies and head out
into the day for a walk, eyes peeled for

items of interest that might find their
way into poems. I’m suckin’ wind, too,
Walt, but you taught me to trust that
there’s always something out there

that’s news to someone, that a snippet
or an anecdote just might prompt
a smile or a shake of the head
to someone reading this very piece,

and saying to a some other one in their
vicinity, “Well, wouldja listen to this,
Erma. The little poet lady has gone
and given us another poem.”

You’re walking along a sidewalk,
scuffing over divebombed leaves,
more of them every day, and your
feet brush an ordinary page,

white, dirty, a piece of clear tape
affixed to the top, and you stop,
look down, to see faint writing
there, in wobbly pencil:

miny market
←

with a definitive, left-pointing
arrow, and you bend to pick
it up, to puzzle it out. Was this
the work of a young (you imagine)

entrepreneur with a tiny sidewalk
grocery store? Was it staking a
bold claim as “mine” with a wee
misspelling?

You fold it in half, put it in a pocket,
carry it home, thinking that you will
dispose of it properly. But days later
it sits on the counter by the phone,

your old-fashioned, plugged-in-the-
wall device that only a few people
think to call you on these days, and
the sign catches your eye every

time you walk by, imagining a girl
behind an upended cardboard box
parked on that sidewalk, offering,
say, apples on a fall day. You hope

that kind passers-by stopped at
her mini market, hefted an apple
and paid her with bright coins,
just to see her gap-toothed smile,

to hear her small voice thank them
as the charmed grownups grinned
at her clever sales strategy, and,
not least, her creatively spelled sign.

(for Henry)

So once upon a time, before there was Aunt Jan,
there was just Jan… no, wait, there was her sister,
Just, Donna, who married Just, Eric, and they

wanted to have a little Just or two, and they did—
first Lauren (who little brother Kevin called Nonen
because he could not say l’s or n’s for a long time)

and then Kevin (who became Kebbin Kebbin
Bo Bebbin). You know these two as Mama and Uncle
Kev, but they were the people who made Aunt Jan,

well, Aunt Jan. Little Nonen and Kebbin had an
Unca Kiff, too, who was married to Aunt Jan, and
we miss him muchly, as we do the grandma

and two grandpas who are no longer with us,
though GG, your great-grandma, is (I know, this gets
complicated), your grandma’s mama. And after your

mama grew up and married your papa, oh, how
they wanted a you, but you took a long time to show
up, my boy. We weren’t sure there would ever be a you.

But there you were one day, growing inside your mama,
as babies do, and there were a whole lot of friends
and relatives of your mama and papa’s waiting

to see you. And now you’re here, and I know this
is a whole lotta people passing you around
and smiling at you and holding and feeding you.

Like Aunt Ashy, married to Uncle Kev, who
seems to be one of your favorite people, along
with third cousin Charlotte and her dad Johnny,

whose lap you slept in this afternoon. And cousin
Dede, who is Charlotte’s grandma and mother to
Robyn, who is Charlotte’s mama. Not to worry.

You don’t have to keep track of who’s who and
who goes with whom. That’ll come later.
This is all to say that I’m Aunt Jan—actually,

Great Aunt Jan who goes with Great Uncle Dick—
and, as I told your mama when she was born
on my 29^th birthday:

You’re gonna love me. I’m gonna buy you things.

But mostly I want you to know that some people
(and you are a people) believe that we choose
our families before we land in these bodies,

and if so, you picked a really good one. Yeah,
I’m a bit biased, but look at you on the floor,
rolling from your back to your tummy.

You go, Henry. Keep on rollin’, little guy.
You gotta whole bunch of fans
here cheering you on.