Güd wrtr

I imagine the man whose name has
filtered through the centuries—not
the master printer with his innovative

press, but that of Henricus Cremer,
the rubricator who inked red capital
letters onto delicate paper,

whose hands bound and inscribed
that Bible in August 1456. He could
not have known, nor could Gutenberg,

that the first run of 180 copies would
launch a great communications
revolution, sending extraordinary

amounts of written knowledge into
the hands of ordinary people, which
trickled through 502 years to a baby

girl born in a land of citrus and sunshine
(not to mention Disneyland), who would
grow into a writer whose father would

bring home her first printing press and
a mother who’d type the girl’s words
onto a stencil to make her first newspaper.

She had no idea about the great tradition
she was carrying on, had not yet learned
of Gutenberg or those who toiled to create

the famous Bibles, though she loved the heft
of thick metal type in her palms, individual
letters and numbers and pieces of punctuation

that, when combined, gave voice to the unspoken,
gave the gift of reading to those who
previously could not, and gave the power

of word after mighty word to mute paper,
which the printers in Mainz certainly did,
making book after book with their clever

minds and gloriously ink-stained hands.

Scorching is what it is, 105 this afternoon—
no biggie to desert dwellers basking
in 118—but most humans were not made

for such stupid hot temperatures.
And we’re getting hotter, thanks to
hotheads boiling over, which makes

my internal thermometer rise. To cool
down, I slip my feet into old flip-flops
that summer by the back door. I head

straight for the hose, remembering
long-gone days of filling the blow-up pool
for small ones who are now bona fide

grownups with their own kiddie pools
in their own yards. And before that, hot
afternoons at the high school pool,

climbing down from the lifeguard
tower to dunk myself, hat and sunglasses
and zinc oxide’d nose and all, then

hoisting myself up on the concrete lip
of the huge tank, emerging again into
the overhead sun while keeping an eye

on the gyrations of teenage boys off
the high dive. And now, hose in hand,
I do what we did at the pool—

spray my feet that practically steam
when drops hit them—before
training the stream on the thirsty souls

on my deck, eager for dampness to reach
their little blooming faces, their leaves
only slightly droopy. I swear I hear

their “ahhh”s—or maybe those
are mine—when the blessing of water
hits their rooty feet, just before

I squirt my own again.

the night before the big blue truck comes to swallow
the contents of the green bin, where the compostables
join thousands of early sycamore leaves browned
by summer,

I think, not for the first time, how could I have
forgotten those peaches I was so looking forward
to? And why did I leave them in the vegetable bin
with the past-their-prime green onions?

Peaches belong in a pretty bowl on the counter
so I’ll see them and eat them. Perhaps leaning over
the sink, or cutting them up to plop on yogurt,
or putting then in a bowl with blueberries.

After dark I set all five of the gooshy things into
a green compostable bag, along with the onions,
and walk them out to the green bin on the curb,
apologizing to the fruit for my forgetfulness,

shaking my head at my wastefulness. Then
I head back inside, open the fridge to find
the blueberries, sprinkle a handful atop some
yogurt, still thinking how good peaches

would taste. I add them to the grocery list
in my sieve of a brain, the cranial hard drive
so full that odds and ends, smiles and voices
I’d prefer to keep, spill out and roll away

like, yes, sweet, ripe peaches.

Though I am not a beet person,
I admire the color and shape,
the just-pulled-from-the-earthiness
aroma of the spherical roots
with their curly tails.

But when I touch the frilly leaves,
I see his hands on them, tugging
them out of inhospitable dirt.

Somehow he got them to grow
in our back yard, after trucking home
pickup beds full of “soil amendments”
smelling of rotting matter that he
promised would make the seeds grow.

And they did: Somehow he coaxed
gangly beans to crawl up the fence
and tomatoes to sprout, hanging
like red globes in wire cages
stuck in half a wine barrel.

He said he could help me learn
to love the flavor of heavy-as-baseballs,
deep crimson beets, which I didn’t,
though I told him I did.

Like the hops he boiled on the stove
to turn into beer, like the wine
aging in the basement, the handmade
pasta hanging in ribbons from
open cupboard doors,

I found myself gobsmacked by
this husband who somehow knew
how to help things become themselves
and make it look easy,

just as he did, I’ve come
to realize all these years later,
with me.

•••

(In memory of Cliff Polland, 1952–2001)

The delicate corpse
rendered in ivory
rather than its familiar

green, the mantis’s
praying days are over,
cradled in the veins

of a milkweed leaf,
which itself will all too
soon expire and fall.

We tend to quickly
bury or burn our dead,
or, in some cases,

strip them to the
essence of bone,
morphing from

cadaver to artifact,
allowing the living
to gaze upon

the scaffolding
on which our skin
selves once draped.

The calm of what
has passed, the beauty
that we may not

have taken the time
to admire when
this sculpture

lived and breathed.
Now we notice.
Now we remember.

Now we go on.

The man who said, Who loves me, loves my dog,
would have the name of one—and a saint at that.

On the day of Bernard’s death in 1153, we recall this
prolific writer of 530 letters and 300 sermons,

the man who said, Believe me, you will find
more lessons in the woods than in books.

Trees and stones will teach you what
you cannot learn from masters.

He also wrote, What we love
we shall grow to resemble.

May we resemble trees. May we
take on the characteristics of stones.

May we find that solidity within and feel
ourselves growing and bending with the wind.

I envisioned two rows running
alongside my driveway, though
Earnest, who came to install them,

anchored them three abreast,
settling the new red bricks into
a long, sandy bed, the smooth

border a first step in the front yard
resculpture, the beginning of a taking
apart and a putting back together.

Unlike the old bricks I liberated
later that day from a downtown
demolition site, the once-smooth

rectangles chunky with concrete,
heavy with history, laden with
memory, not meant for reuse,

bound instead for landfill.
Why I felt I needed to bring
them home I’m not sure.

Perhaps as proof, a testament
of something substantial, a tribute
to so many of us who made that

once-solid structure thrum with life,
like the huge underground presses
the neighbors could feel rumbling

through every night, unfurling
enormous rolls of blank newsprint
that came alive with words,

stories, photos, ads, illustrations,
so much humanity reflected
on some of the world’s thinnest

paper. Which turned out to be
far more perishable than we
thought, so easily thrown away.

Said the guy towing a small trailer
behind his bike on a Friday
garbage morning, after he stopped,
opened the blue bin in front
of my house, searching for cans.

And I thought—as I installed
a new little flag on my front yard
with two fingers waving a peace sign—
That’s the flag I want, one that says,
Peace, Love and Bagels.

And make it an everything bagel
to reflect everyone,
especially those who come along
behind us and quietly clean up
what we so casually discard.

I insert the key into the venerable door
behind which home has sat, solid
as an old oak, for 103 summers now,

though I have spent a mere 38 of them
as its owner. I like to think of myself
as the caretaker for now, though

on sticky summer days I wish for
a property manager to call when
the front door will not budge,

when I stand and turn the key
from right to left, and back again,
wondering if my aging brain

has forgotten how to operate a lock,
when I am literally locked out, and
I do not have a key to the back door,

which the devoted housekeepers,
bless their protective hearts, have
locked, though I asked them not to.

When all that conspires to keep
me out of house and home,
I consider my options for entry,

until it comes to me that heat
and humidity make the old door
swell, and that, combined

with a damp wood floor, means
that, with luck, a good shove might
open it. Two good shoves later,

it gives way, and once inside, I
inhale the scent of the long-gone one
whose presence gently lingers.

“Thank you, Clifford,” I say, smiling
at his husbandly voice in my head
suggesting that I hunt down

that back door key and hide it
in a place where I might be able
to locate it in a future pinch.

Because inevitably sticky
situations call for resourceful
solutions, perhaps even

a little force instead of our
inclination toward a gentle push
as we make our way back

into the familiar, the place
of memories, one that we
think of, for now, as home.

Some days we have a lot of it—
the pre-9 a.m. walk for me with Deb
by the river, a good 3 1/2 miler,

later a haircut with Susan,
then a massage with Kat,
and later still, a hearing aid
appointment for the beloved.

And in between all that,
a pedicure for Maxi, followed by
a squirt of flea medication
from dear Chris, the vet tech,

who comes to the house
and gently wrangles this
still-learning-to-be-held boycat
into her lap for a gentle snip snip
of the toenails,

so that all of us emerge, tidier,
shorn, tuned up and massaged,
downright pampered, as all of us
marvelous beasts should be.