Güd wrtr

Fourth of July, River Park

As kids whiz by on their bicycles,
streamers floating from handlebars
like birds, like dreams,
grown-ups walking slowly behind,
heading for the parade that winds
through the neighborhood,
we oldies exercise as we do
weekly on Marilyn’s lawn.

We’re seeing more humanity,
along with canine and feline life
than we do most Tuesdays
as the neighbors on this
not-too-hot holiday morning
come out to celebrate.

Shelley has us on our toes bouncing,
squeezing squishy spheres with fingertips,
hoisting small hand weights overhead,
all to the sounds of American music,
not marches but old rock ‘n’ roll—
Aretha, the Righteous Brothers, the Stones,
a little twist and shout pre-Beatles.

We exercise our independence,
find joy in this coming together,
wave to the passersby,
the trees overhead beautifully leafy,
so different than the cold winter days
that found us out here well wrapped,
longing for shorts weather,
the opportunity to bare our knees freely,

on a perfect summer day just like this.

we were two
sticks rubbing,
creating heat
that 4th ,
igniting sparks
while far-away
flames danced
over serene
hills, charring
golden grasses,
blackening trunks
of venerable oaks

a fortnight later
I came to that land
swept clean,
all of us
starting over—
you & me,
oaks & grasses,
finding our way
into a fresh world
ripened by
heat & light
&, yes,
love

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

—Naomi Shihab Nye from “The Art of Disappearing”

•••

And they did.
She did. He did.
Tumbled into gone-ness.
Leaving us heart-heavy.
Leaving us.

Leaving
as the leaves do.

Impossible to imagine
now, when we see
the new ones leafing
greenly, at the beginning.

So chartreuse, reflecting
so much radiance;
we squint into sky blue
as we look up.

Not all will last till
autumn. Even the newest
can fall into what
feels to us like
end.

It is not;
they have transformed.
though into what
we cannot know.
We will one day,
too, of course,
even if we don’t
like to imagine it.

So we look up
into the abundance,
into the new.
We mourn.
We remember.
We miss the fallen.

We live leaf-like,
forever fragile.
We flutter in the breeze.
We live.

Sculling faceup in the pool,
the increasing moon climbing
heavily into the sky,

I float under dozens anchored
high in the trees, like a flock
of white doves stilled by sleep,

not a coo from any of them,
guardians observing my slow
laps. Or are they petaled angels,

ones I fail to notice during the day,
silently gleaming, brilliant in pool
light, a heavenly host of helpers

keeping watch by night?

I awaken with a headache—
not unusual as the pressure rises—
when the H on the weather maps
means high, which we all feel,

including the cats, who, despite all
that fur, morph into feline lizards,
typically flopping onto too-hot cement,
sponging up sun.

But today, they are inside by choice,
because, it turns out, they are smarter
than they look, and even 80 degrees
inside feels cool on this first day

of this month when, near the end,
I become officially senior, someone
of advanced years, all of 65, which,
as so many report, feels not all that old.

Here I am, demonstrating a lack
of common sense, outdoors watering,
though I know the day will suck up
moisture almost as soon as it leaves
the hose.

Here I am, sprinkling the tops of my feet,
as I did on long-ago summer days
walking a high school pool deck—
flip-flopped, red bikini’d, shades on,
red hatted and nose zinc oxided—

mornings teaching little kids how to
push off the side, glide, stroke, breathe,
do it again,

afternoons on the tall lifeguard chair,
whistle around my neck, scanning the pool
like a raptor watching for the vulnerable,
unlike the Mulligan brothers gyrating off
the high dive almost 10 feet up,
climbing out, climbing up,
doing it again,

evenings coaching the synchro team,
girls with ballet legs extended long into
the dusk, droplets glistening on their calves,
sculling to keep themselves at the surface,
not showing effort in their calm faces,

cool in the water, despite the air temp,
which, we always hoped, would
sink with the sun, blesséd rest,
before rising again, all of us,
to swim another day.

In memory of Ruth Rita Nelson

Every year you’d send me a card
aimed to arrive on the 30th of June,

rosy with floral sentiment and your
familiar signature, Love, Mom II,

because you took it upon yourself
to mother the new girl reporter

on the local paper who’d suffered
one too many beestings on assignment

with your son, the photographer.
He brought me home; you tucked my

puffed-up face into the guest bed with tea
and Benadryl, quietly coming in to check

on one who imagined herself a bona fide
grownup instead of one who needed

tending in a tender way that day.
And for decades after, your cards

often arrived a month ahead of my
actual day—no one in your family

got the day right—but I didn’t care.
I still have those cards celebrating

the anniversary of my arrival on
the planet a bit early, and now,

when I come across them, I smile,
remembering your strong nurse’s

hands placing cool cloths on my
stung forehead, taking me into

your heart long before I realized
I’d landed there.

for RDS

On the same day I’m given a dummy typewriter—
tin, hollow inside, perhaps a movie prop—
from a long-ago student who has never
forgotten my affection for old-fashioned
typing machines,

you and I head for the fancy computer store
named for a fruit to pick up a lighter-than-air
laptop to replace my old workhorse that,
bless its little hard drivin’ RAM, is ready
to spend its days

in the electronic equivalent of a grassy pasture.
And so we bring home a shiny new model
that I approach as gingerly as a new cat,
trying to let it gradually warm up to me,
remaining patient when it sends

testy messages like invalid access code,
when it really wants me to withdraw my
excited fingertips, leave it alone so it can
breathe a bit, close its electronic eyes, begin
to feel at home in this strange environment.

I get it.

Whether century-old technology or
the newest of the new, four-footed or
no-footed, sometimes you just need to curl
up in a soft place and shut down for a while.
And when you awaken,

blinking and bright-screened, you have
more patience as your new person learns
more about you, getting to know you,
what to say and how to touch you in that
just-right way.

This lust hits me every year about this time,
as the temperature soars toward the century
mark, as kids unwrap from school and take
to their bikes to freewheel their way wherever
they want to go.

Though I don’t recall asking for a pink two-wheeler,
it’s what I tooled around on in my youth. Sissy
pink girlie bike that embarrassed my budding
feminist self. But now, my heart annually yearns
for such a bike, a fat-tired cruiser,

and when I saw one in a store today—
shopping for cat food, not transportation—
I felt the familiar swoon of the unattainable.
Wobbly for years, strongly advised to
avoid wheels and heels, I have walked away
from such temptation again and again.

Today I paused next to a blushing bike,
complete with perky basket and a swooping V
angling up to its cushy wide seat, practically
begging me to swing a leg over and take it
for a spin, zipping through all seven speeds,
and oh, yes, thumbing the lever on that
creamy bell.

And for the rest of the day I am twelve again,
hopping on my pink two-wheeler to catch up
with my best friend and my sister, calling to
each other as we pedal wherever we want to go:

This way! Over here! It’s summer, girls,
and we have the whole day ahead of us.
Let’s go see what we can see.

The path that is new to you
is familiar to others, clearly worn by feet
walking it minutes, days, decades,
centuries before you.

You know this, of course, but walking
with a friend — who used to regularly tread
this path with her beloved — it feels new,
as it did the last time you were here,
which was the first time,
or was it?

Three grand oaks lean over the path
at the same angle, as if by agreement,
shaggier now, canopied with dark leaves
against the heat, which is coming,
as it does.

Both of you pause in the shade,
listen to the swift river running high and green
masked by thick foliage, remember others
with whom you walked paths like this,
ones seemingly vanished into mystery.

Rest in the moment, admiring
the poetry of storied trunks and reaching branches,
before walking a bit more, moving back
into the light, and going on.

I want to be fully here. Tonight I will sleep
between two streams of water, under stars that move
from what I don’t know to what I don’t know.

—Pat Schneider from “If I Were God” in “The Patience of Ordinary Things”

•••

Every night the stars shift overhead,
or, if we think like astronomers,
this blue marble we call home
revolves slowly amid a sea

of pure black, dotted with pinpoints
of stars light years away. How can
we be anywhere else but here?
This is the only here we have.

But then, sleeping as I do
between two streams of water
that surround my city like blood-
carrying veins, my dreams

turn me into a cosmic fish, riding
the blast of supernovas whose
light will not reach this planet
for eons, swimming through

the I-don’t-know-what of space
time, a finning set of particles
of recycled energy that cannot
be destroyed. I swim with

the light, into the light, until,
traveling in waves, I am light,
the only form of energy visible
to the human eye, which

you might see as I rise
to catch a breath, then dive,
fully here—wherever that
might be.