Güd wrtr

for Mary Tsukamoto (1915–1998)

The sweet-faced older woman
sat with me for hours telling
the story she’d relayed hundreds
of times.

She taught me the word “redress”
the same year she testified before
Congress, quietly but firmly,
one of 120,000 sent into exile
in 1942 for the crime of being
of Japanese descent.

She, the wife of a Florin
strawberry farmer who
who bundled up husband and
daughter before being sent
to “camp” in Jerome, Arkansas.

We did nothing wrong.
Though the paper had not yet
been posted, we knew the order
was coming. We left strawberries
in the fields just before harvest.
If they’d given us more time,
we could have had that food
for people.

She spoke of it all her life,
after returning home, becoming
a teacher, speaking for many
who could not, offering the lesson
again and again:

We say,
Nidoto Nai Yoni:
Let It Not Happen Again.

Remember this day
when the order was given.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is for the birds.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(1919–2021, owner of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers)

But it is, Larry.

(Can I call you Larry? I’m sure I didn’t
when I interviewed you years ago at
your place—half bookstore, half writers’
shrine, bless you. Ever since I’ve
considered you a kindred spirit.)

Poetry is for the birds, if we call out lines
to them as they balance on sky wires
with their brethren, singing lines
back to us.

The wingéd ones I see sit on poems
every day, transmitting power
and voices (as good poems do),
communicating over miles and miles,
line to line to line.

Though I’ve heard that birds perch
there because the lines are warm,
I like to think that those little airplanes
of the heart absorb poetry through
their powerful clinging claws,

soaring lines, as you wrote them,
earthshaking lines by Alan and the Beats,
and you published them, Larry—
put them onto the page, into the world,
defended them against censorship—
you painted the city’s light.

And the wheeling angels still watching
over the bookstore, descendants of long ago
sky poets—how could they not carry lines
on their wings, words in their beaks?

Inside, people are still invited to sit
and read as long as they like. Outside,
on high wires, the birds safely rest, too,
electrons having no motivation to travel
through their small bodies.

Then, as if responding to a divine signal,
they wing away as you and your friends did,
trilling notes of poetry into the air,
leaving marvelous echoes behind.

(Quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Poetry As Insurgent Art” © 2007, New Directions Books)

C’mon, you can do it.
Put a little love in your heart.
Spread it around on this day
that celebrates the simple
act of being kind to others.

Let’s make the world
a little brighter, a little better
with a gentle gesture, a smile,
a friendly word or two,
an act of generosity.

Set your softheart loose
on the world today—
its tongue flopping as it runs
toward a stranger with
an affectionate greeting.

Go for bounteous, exude
compassionate goodness;
extend your great benevolence
of spirit, and see, just see,
if it doesn’t come bouncing

back to you because, not only
is kindness always possible,
as the Dalai Lama says, but it
also stretches from you to
this one and then to that one.

So go on—paint the planet
with big-heartedness, then
tell me about it so I can send
some of your glorious goodness
right back to you.

(Feb. 17 is National Acts of Kindness Day!)

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends
—Mary Oliver from “What Can I Say”


Of course, the river’s story never ends,
even if its bed lies dry and stony—
it is river still.

Of course, you are somewhere in it,
sometimes at river’s edge, sometimes
deep in bottom mulch.

And, of course, nothing—not river,
not you—truly ends, even when you
are no longer embodied.

Listen: In that hush of current you are
carried, in riffles and rapids, in the curve
of the placid meander.

Your story is ferried by water, the one you
are still writing, the one that will never
be, blessedly, finished.

you remember treasured liplocks,
moments of sweaty anticipation,
knowing that there is nothing else
but this instant, someone’s butterfly lips
meeting yours in frenzy or tenderness.

And, no matter what follows—recalling
your lips brushing your grandmother’s papery
cheek, the joyful leaping licks of a dog
delighted by your mere existence,
the affectionate peck a friend bestows
upon you or you upon them,

or, if you’re lucky, the routine exchange
of lips on lips with a beloved with whom
you share your life, or a child you adore—

you realize that there is nothing ordinary
in a kiss, the quickest shorthand to a heart,
telegraphing an i-love-you message with
such immediacy, such power, no wonder
these lip salutations can leave you
stunned, breathless, amazed
to find yourself so beloved.

We know that they walk with us
every day—or maybe they flit,

fly, flutter by in the wingéd things
or in winking bits of light.

We feel them more often than
we speak of them, the dearly

departed, because who wants
to hear one more time how

much we miss them? Which
is contradictory, we know,

when they’re here—right
here—whenever we think

of them, little lightning strikes
of recognition that, if we’re

lucky, still prompt a tiny
flutter inside, these

forever beloveds, just
popping in with a quick,

sweet hi.

The former dead guy
resurrected four years ago
eats his favorite crab
sandwich in Bodega Bay,
on his 80th birthday,

then drives us up the coast
on an afternoon so blustery
it knocks us sideways
as we maneuver rugged
steps down to the black
sand of Shell Beach

where we watch wicked
waves explode onto
seastacked rocks, as
fine grains pepper our
otherwise white hair.

On the way back up,
he lurches left, but quickly
regains his balance, his
plumb line swinging back
to vertical.

We pause, take a breath
and turn to look at
the thundering sea in
all its glory doing what
it has for eons, what it
will do long after we are
no longer.

Windswept, we turn
and, mindful of every
precious step, walk
together into the rest
of our lives.

We all want to belong
to someone, something,
sometime,

and the deft eyewink of
the apostrophe affirms
connection:

the girl’s notebook
the girls’ soccer team
the boy’s piano
the boys’ campout

the art of belonging to one
or more than one.

But it’s more than that:
A bit of magic lies in
morphing two words
into one,

forming a contraction
that twines letters
into a new form,
bringing them closer,
like birds on a wire,
giving them a kind
of belonging they’d
never have had
alone.

Without that bit of
punctuational
confetti,

I’d not be me;
you’d not be you,
we who’ve loved
each other into
us.

2/13/23, for Dick Schmidt’s 80th birthday

He long ago dubbed the day
before we leave on a trip
for the rushing, the packing,
the cleaning, the last-minuteness
before departure, when,

if we’re going to board a plane,
the imperative of packing tightly
results in late-night fussing
and too-little sleep.

But, when driving, say, to the coast,
eager to inhale restorative ocean,
I can mash three pillows into
a duffel to prop me up in sleep,

and extra snacks, because you
never know what craving might
hit you late at night,

and if we leave a bit later than
planned, seized by the sudden
need to water the plants on
the porch before we go,

so be it. And once we cross
the rubicon that is the mighty
Sacramento River, we know
that we are on our way to
familiar crab sandwiches
and clam chowder,

but we also know that
surprises await, the kind
found when we let go of
the woulda-coulda-shoulda
and embrace the why not?

When all the heebie-jeebies
evaporate until there’s
just us once again on
a tiny adventure in this
great one that we share.

Been trimming his hair since
it was dark brown, thick, straight,
easy to cut for an amateur like me,

though after all these years,
I suppose I’m a semi-pro, and my
fee has never gone up: a penny

or a kiss, as established by little
boys whose hair I cut as a favor to
their mom (can it be?) 40 years ago.

They offered the penny; I pointed to
my cheek and, blushing, they delivered
sweet pecks I still carry with me.

But this guy—he’s gonna be 80
in a couple of days, and though he
bemoans the appearance of his

sweet scalp, he still rocks thick
white fringe that grows heartily,
which I treasure, especially on a

warm February day when we can
haul the tall chair out to my backyard,
where he can perch and we chat

as I trim, thankful for every hair
on that head, for every cut I can
do, every day we have together,

which I plan to carry with me
for all the rest of mine.
Amene.