Güd wrtr

The night before I never saw
most of my students again—
only some of their framed faces
via a newfangled form of online
communication—

I watched a massive synchronized
cloud, thousands of starlings
zooming as a collective whole
over a fall-harvested field, looking east
over the stubble into the setting sun
of a promised spring,

bird ribbons whirling and pirouetting,
tiny ballerinas in silhouette
dancing as a single breathing,
wing- and heart-beating organism.

All this as crows cawed to their
brethren from not-yet-leafed trees
against the hazy sky,
end-of-day tangerine seeping
into blue-gray.

I did not see the murmuration as a sign
of what was coming, of the millions
about to be flung into chaos,
thrown into the air,
ready to fly or not.

Instead I stood in the parking lot,
unaware that this would be the
final in-person college class
I would ever teach, thinking

that it takes only one starling to copy
the behavior of seven of its neighbors,
then those nearby copy seven of theirs
and so on until the entire group
swoops as one to avoid a predator
or catch insects in flight
before finding someplace safe
to roost for the night.

I watched that evening sky show,
enthralled not for the first time
and certainly not the last,
by nature’s special effects
that astonish mere humans,

phenomena that transport us
out of our little lives for
a breathtaking moment
if only we stop, look up
and allow ourselves
to marvel.

A woman, filled with the gladness of living,
put the purse of her body on the table
and began to unpack it.

“I have no need of this,” she said to no one
in particular, though the fluffy black cat
watched her, as he often did.

And she withdrew the bones of her feet
and arranged them prettily on the table,
as though from an archaeological site,

the phlanges and metatarsals, names
she had long ago learned in anatomy class,
and above them, from her purse,

emerged the bones of her legs—the long
tibias and fibulas—and above them
the patellas that underlaid her knees,

anchors for the strong femurs that locked
like baseballs into the glove of hip sockets
around the pubis, the coccyx and the sacrum.

She stood back, admiring her arrangement,
mindful that it was not truly hers, that
the framework of her existence was a gift

from the ancestors, so she murmured her
thanks into the ether, trusting that it would be
received as she hoped to be. Resuming her task,

the vertebrae tumbled out of the purse of
her body like dice, and she chuckled as she
gathered them up and studied them carefully

before putting them in the correct order.
“You’ve been such a good body,” she said then,
assembling the cage of her sternum,

the humerus of her arms, the ulna and radius
of her hands, then moving upward to arrange
the long collarbones and stacking the cervical

vertebrae of her once elegant neck. And there
she paused, as the cat cried and she smiled.
“Thank you for the good life,” she said,

retrieving the heavy ball of her skull
to top the horizontal sculpture on the table,
just before her boneless skin suit fell to the floor,

and the cat walked over to it to sit on the last
bits of her warmth, curling up, as he so often did,
for a good nap.

•••

With thanks for the inspiration from the first line of the poem “Table” by Edip Cansever (translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast). And thanks to Phyllis Cole-Dai, Author for the prompt and her joyous Joysters group.

(for Dickie)

I drive toward you under playful
fluffy clouds doing the sidestroke
through rain-washed blue,

thinking about the little ginkgo
in my front yard that years ago was
on its way to being a proper tree

when someone accidentally broke it,
and it became a bush. Just before
I got in the car, I stood next to it,

now a foot taller than me, the little
gilt-edged fans hinting of color
to come. Its larger cousins

in the neighborhood have already
shimmied into their fall wardrobes.
But my little tree is taking its time.

I don’t mind. I can wait.
And in the meantime, on my way
to make you a rare breakfast, I glory

in our city’s plethora of trees,
the ones that keep their clothes on
year round as well as the ones

that remain green until—
shameless strippers that they are,
and oh, how we love to ogle—

they drop it all, trusting the cycle
of the seasons to dress them again
when it’s time for their next act.

The poetry inside you
is a chalice
and it is golden.

—”Chalice” by Kathryn Hohlwein,
May 18, 1930 – Nov. 18, 2024

•••

I sat in the poetry center waiting to
read a few of your poems on the eve
of the anniversary of your death,
holding a honey lozenge in my mouth
hoping to quell a seasonal cough.

Of course, you were there,
alive in the eyes of your children
who miss you terribly, coming
from the tender mouths of others
giving voice to your words.

And I thought of you who often found
new poems arriving at night in bed,
even in your final days in the hospital,
honeyed lines that you held in your mouth,
allowing them to melt into you, able
to recite them the next morning.

And in my own waiting, I felt your
sweetness against my own palate.
The cough did not arise, though
your words did from my mouth
at just the right time.

•••

For Laura Hohlwein and Reinhard Hohlwein
in memory of their mother, Kathryn Hohlwein

•••

“Chalice” is from the “Dear Poem” series, in Kathryn Hohlwein’s
collected works, The Little Chapel in Donegal © 2021, Random Lane Press.

says the message on the screen,
by clicking here, checking the box,
identifying all the stoplights,

because only we bipedal ones
with big brains can do so.
What of the whales with

their outsized hearts the
size of a Volkswagen bug,
or our ape relatives who,

as Jane Goodall taught us,
not only use tools but
invent them? What of

the instinct of caterpillars,
who willingly create and
wrap themselves in their

own shrouds, turn to liquid
and re-emerge as winged
creatures with a job to do?

Are we not all here to
pollinate and create
some kind of beauty

with our sizable hearts,
the ones that, if we are
lucky, expand with time,

with love given and received,
the best confirmation
of humanity after all?

The next generation lives there now,
their motion cam picking up all manner

of wildlife in the backyard, the one
that used to be our backyard when

my sister and I were growing up.
My nephew and his wife show us

photos of a little gray fox peering
into the sliding glass door—

one staring at the orange cat inside—
this caller who comes to visit.

In the nearly 60 years that our
family has occupied that house,

we’ve never seen a fox, though we’d
heard they were our neighbors

living in the state park across the road.
This one with such a sweet face

lingers as if it’s checking out the place,
perhaps knowing it well. As if she—

who died in the room on the other side
of that glass, whose essence may have

seeped through it as she headed into
mystery, she who so wished for

reincarnation—has returned to see
who’s coming for Thanksgiving

and what might be for dinner.

He heard it at least weekly from bosses
looking for something striking to anchor

A1 or a section header: Get us a weather
picture. And the photographers would

sigh as they headed out of the office,
into the world, to fulfill the always

challenging assignment. How many
umbrellas, the brighter the better,

and puddles, the splashier the better,
did they scope out, never knowing if

one of their shots would make the next
day’s paper? All these decades later,

the force still runs strong in him,
so, sitting at a stoplight in the rain,

the camera nowadays tucked
into his phone makes it easy

to grab a quick weather shot.
He’s made this picture more than

once, but the drops on the driver’s
side window always render

a unique abstract, and the blurred
lights of a gas station provide

a nice contrast against the gray
day. Through the magic of the air

he sends it to me, a once-upon-a-time
editor who responds that, even

retired for 22 years, he’s still got it,
and if it were up to me,

that baby’d go on A1 tomorrow
with a snappy headline and his byline.

Your maroon nails accent the new blue pen
as it scoots across the pages of a petite

notebook, one each for you and your
classmates brought by two visiting

writing ladies who have set you all
to making lists of possibilities.

You do not hesitate; you dive into
the cool water, into that bubble

where all sound vanishes and almost
without effort, letters spill from

your fingers, turn into words, into
sentences, stories, poems. What

you see on the page surprises you.
Creativity pulses to the surface like

lava, burbling hot as the sun, explodes
with joy, sometimes fountains with rage,

rising and falling, eventually settling,
cooling into rugged mountains of

potential that call you to explore
with pen in hand, to trust this

endless source always within you,
with luck, for the rest of your

wonderfully wide-eyed writerly life.

•••

(for the writing workshop students at Bradshaw Christian High School,
Sacramento, California—from the writing ladies, Jan Haag and Jill Batiansila)

Has rolled off the U.S. Mint
assembly line in Philadelphia,
presumably with others
of its kind, though, as its
New York Times obituary
noted, it was more or less
worthless.

“Not even penny candy” can
be purchased any more with
the thin pseudo-copper coin,
having long since given up
up most of its precious metal
in favor of zinc-coated steel.

Still, the penny “was the going
rate for thoughts,” its obit said.
“It could sometimes be pretty
and other times arrive
from heaven.”

And though some 250 billion
of the Lincoln-faced discs
still exist, that they cost more
than 3 cents each to make
spelled their doom at age 232.

I think of you, my dear, jingling
the once-ubiquitous pennies
in your pocket, sidelining
a particularly shiny one
to place in my palm each time
I cut your hair. It’s still my
going rate—a penny or a kiss.
Nowadays you generously
deliver both.

And I, along with so many of
my fellow Americans, have
mostly taken for granted
this tiny bit of legal tender
like so much of what is fast
disappearing from our world.

I vow to stop each time I spy
a penny on the pavement
and pick it up, regardless of
how much in-God-we-trust luck
it might or might not deliver
for the rest of the day.

I promise to cherish its
enduring legacy—Liberty—
embossed near the spot on
Mr. Lincoln’s head where
the bullet must’ve gone in.

Long may equality, freedom
and justice for all somehow
survive in this land still
filled with so many of the tired,
the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.

(for Katie O’Rourke)

The Garden Goddess on the corner
is collecting the fallen, arranging
the downed and brown around
the base of a tree and allowing it
to do what comes naturally—
turn itself into compost.

“You make your own dirt,”
observes a woman who likes
to periodically drive by
the GG’s corner to appreciate
the profusion of plant life, as I do,
awed by year-round cosmos,
by hydrangea blossoms
in November.

The GG nods and smiles.
“Yes, I do,” she says, citing
the money-saving benefits
of homemade dirt.

But I think she is offering
more than beauty on her corner.
She reminds us that, in this
season of releasing, of letting go,
the fallen become compost
for new growth later.

And that, if we can be persuaded
to loosen our tight grips,
if we can interrupt hate with love,
we can watch life grow from decay—
someday participating in that
bit of recycling ourselves—

if we just get out of the way.