Güd wrtr

There’ll be a sign. Of course, there’ll be a sign.
It’ll be subtle, but it will find you if you open

your heart and let the wind blow through.
Hope can look like winter-bare trees showing

tiny bumps of buds-to-be, or a bird beginning
to trill as you step outside. Or a kitty brushing

your calf or a doggy licking your hand. But hope
can also look like the man standing on the center

divider of the busy intersection with a sign that
simply says, Please. And you do not want to

pass up hope when a sign suddenly appears.
You think all hope is lost? That nothing can

overcome act after act of outrageous cruelty?
Let that exposed heart of yours respond

with tears, with outrage, and let that response
be a sign unto you: HOPE, it may say,

in gigantic, Second Coming type, the kind that
used to blast big news from newspapers.

Stop wherever you are. Look around. Extend
a kind hand to a stranger along with the rest

of your tender self. When you feel another’s
hand in yours, squeeze some lovingkindness

into it. Smile the tiniest bit of mutual hope into
each other’s eyes. Watch it burst into blossom.

(for Dick Schmidt, aka Uncle Duck,
in honor of National Rubber Ducky Day)

When, as little kids, your niece and nephew
christened you Uncle Duck, giggling over
the clever wordplay, you were stuck.

Forever after, ducks appeared for birthdays
and Christmases, many of them designed
for bathtubs that you did not use—

ducks sporting a variety of headwear—
baseball caps and police helmets,
ducks as pilots and nurses, pirates

and hard hatted workers. I acquired
some, too, by virtue of being your
duckly consort—Queen Elizaduck I

with her red hair and ruff is a favorite.
(I have passed on presidential ducks
and a gruesome zombie duck with its

eyeball hanging out.) But it is clear to
those who know you as The Duck that
you are unique among webbed ones,

one who, every spring, flies to his
neighborhood pond looking for those
of a feather who have flown in

seasonally, some of whom lay eggs
and produce ducklings that bob
down the waterways just like

the rubber versions of their kind,
un-hatted, fluffy balls with little
fast-paddling feet. You take their

photos, Uncle Duck, chronicling
the newest generation of waterfowl
that may not yet recognize you

as one of them, as one of us,
our favorite bird.

It never had a formal name
scripted across its stern.
It was just “the boat,”
or, since his demise,
“Dad’s boat,”

though it was Mom’s color,
turquoise across the broad
bow and interior with white
undercarriage,

late ’60s Silverline Rambler—
which shared the garage
with the turquoise Rambler
station wagon—

inboard/outboard engine
that moved all four of us
effortlessly over the lake
in the park across the road.

It’s still there in the garage,
now turned over, along with
the house, to the next generation.
And oh, how my breath

caught when my sister and I
walked in after the renovation
to see, hanging on the old brick
fireplace, a large art piece

created by the new woman
of the house—the boat
on the lake under stormy
skies, sun gleaming its sides

as bright and clean as the day
our parents trailered it home.
I stood, gobsmacked,
oh-oh-oh-ing, one hand

crossing my chest as if ready
to recite a pledge, feeling him
and her in that room with two
generations of family they made,

all their mutual unhappiness
washed away, just the love
shining on the old boat
rendered anew,

as if it had been there all
this time, just waiting
for my eyes to refocus
enough to see it.

•••

For Ashley Redfield Just, who created this marvelous rendering
of the boat, and Kevin Just, now caring for it in his grandfather’s stead,
with deep appreciation from the Haag sisters.

In memory of our father, Roger Haag, and our mother,
Dorothy/Darlene Haag, and the trusty Silverline Rambler,
still in the garage.

And for my sister Donna and her husband Eric, who grew this family to perfection!

Doesn’t have to be much,
just a few lines,

I often tell people trying
to write one.

Or in the words of a poet
I greatly admire, It doesn’t have

to be good—
it just has to be true.

So we set down the truest thing
we can say in this moment

on a page, watch it wriggle
and decide whether

to stay put or climb to its little feet
and leave. It’s not so much

up to us, as it is up to the words.
Nope, gonna get going,

or, I think I like it here. Gonna stay.
And when the latter happens,

we call it inspiration,
imagining that the poem flew in

on a whoosh, and we cleverly
grabbed it and set it down, when

really, it’s beyond our control.
Which, come to think of it,

might be the best definition
after all.

•••

• With thanks to poet Esther Cohen for the title borrowed from “Another Laundromat Poem”
https://overheardec.substack.com/p/another-laundromat-poem

• In this case (because I have many), the “poet I greatly admire” is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who publishes her daily poems here:
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/

As Jupiter reaches opposition—
when the giant of this solar system
lies between our blue marble and the sun—

I will look up at nightfall and track
its progress across the winter sky,
closer than ever to Earth,

bright as a star. And should I have
a telescope handy, as Galileo did,
I might be able to see the four

Galilean moons, named for
the Italian astronomer who
realized in 1610 that they orbit

Jupiter, not our planet, providing
solid evidence that, contrary to opinion,
everything is not Earth-centered.

That a narrow vision of control,
creating opposition where it
doesn’t need to exist,

is a human-centered fixation like
post-baptism bibles … plucked from
street corners from the meaty hands

of zealots, as a young poet wrote
six years ago, before her blood was
spilled on American pavement,

when she wondered if science
can coexist with faith and wonder.
As I continue to wonder and look

for evidence of what can and cannot
be easily seen on Earth
as it is in the heavens.

•••

(In memory of Renée Nicole Macklin Good, Oct. 7, 1980 – Jan. 7, 2026.
The words in italics are from her award-winning poem,
“On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which can be read here.)

It’s been decades since I lusted
after a particular pool. My sister and I,
young synchronized swimmers,

fell hard for the Neptune pool
on our first visit to Hearst Castle,
and dreamed of doing ballet legs

in that aqua water surrounded
by a pseudo-Greek temple. How
glorious, we imagined, to swim

in that ginormous pool with its
classic, black-patterned bottom and
Art Deco sculptures on the rim.

Now my heart longs for a much
smaller pool, mid-mod like me,
shaped like a champagne cork

at a 1950s hotel-turned-condo
in the desert. For five winter days—
all oddly cool for these parts—

I’ve had the pool all to myself.
And on my last swim down
the middle of what has

become the pool of future
wet dreams—the one with
the just-right temperature

and the just-right fluffy
clouds overhead—I was
pleased at the way

the old body memory
breast stroked and sculled me
up and down, up and down,

alive and well, if heavier
and not nearly as lithe
as those long-ago summers,

but oh, to pause, to float and float
held in all that blue beneath,
in the endless heavens above.

•••

(for Donna Gail)

(at the Ocotillo Lodge, Palm Springs, California)

Here, they negotiate the wicked thorns
to perch in earth-toned camouflage

on the spears arrowing out of the ground
at the corner of our building.

One moment I catch the zip of a tiny
winged being, and my slow eyes

try to follow it to its landing place.
It takes a bit, but there it is in profile,

the hummer’s long beak coming
to a perfect point, its eye spying

mine through the protection of
wicked thorns. I can’t help myself:

I talk to it softly, as I do around wild
things, trying to reassure them that

I’m only looking, that I mean no harm.
And this little bird sits, seemingly

calm, though I’ve read that its resting
heart beats 250 times a minute.

So, I figure, its little engine runs
about four times faster than mine

in the 60ish seconds we study
each other, creature to creature,

we marvels of engineering, before
each of us wings off to wherever

our adventurous hearts take us.

Indian Canyons, Palm Springs, California

•••

The shaggy elders in this oasis
bring to mind winterized buffalo
on the Great Plains, their snow-coated
hides bulked up against the cold.

But, more appropriately in this warm
climate, the dead fronds feathering
their lower regions look to us
like thick hula skirts

adorning the desert canyon’s 3,000
fan palms, an impressive assembly
of dancers that, as we walk
among them, might—

should the wind pick up
and birdsong migrate into
gentle guitar fingerpicking—
start to sway,

the ancestral spirits coming
alive, perhaps accompanied
by drumming and singing
of the original peoples,

after we visitors quietly
depart, returning this ancient
rocky cathedral to their
sacred care.

•••

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has called the Palm Springs
area home for eons. Indian Canyon is part of their ancestral tribal lands,
and Palm Canyon is the world’s largest oasis of California fan palms
(Washingtonia filifera). Though the trail can go much farther,
you can take an easy walk about a mile through the palms along
a seasonal creek.

They used to say about informing on
someone, about ratting someone out,
the ten-cent piece being the cost
to make a call on a pay phone.

Only now, only here, in this tram station
on a craggy mountain, it’s two quarters,
which puzzles the young lad staring at
the long rectangular box on the wall,
asking his bemused parents, “¿Para qué?”

He holds the receiver to his ear as one
of them says something about “teléfono,”
which befuddles the boy even more,
now listening intently to, as we used
to say, dead air.

Nothing like any phone he’s ever seen.
Standing nearby watching, I smile,
ask if I can take his photo, and he grins,
his parents nod, as I try to remember
at what age I first confronted a pay phone,

who taught me to drop the dime in the slot
at the top and wait for the (do they call it
this anymore?) dial tone. Are there operators
still standing by when you dial—oops, tap—0?
Is there still a 0 on the phone in my pocket?

And this, again, is one more way that my status
as a relic in the making smacks me upside the head,
another arcane piece of knowledge that is more
historical than useful—

like a newspaper delivered at home every day.
Or cursive handwriting. Or film. Typewriters,
manual and electric. My Rolodex filled with
little cards on which I’d typed precious
phone numbers that, if I was out and about
working for that old-fashioned newspaper,
I might dial into a pay phone.

Similar to the one with numbers inscribed
on silvery buttons that this boy pushes.
None of these are needed now, except
as artifacts of entertainment,

which—I have to admit looking into
the boy’s merry eyes—is not
a bad use of such an antique.
Even if it does cost 50 cents.

Even if the only number I can still dial
by heart is no longer imprinted on
an olive green phone affixed to
a kitchen wall.

Even if the voices of the ones
who used to pick up
fade away a little more
every day.

less than 100 feet north
from the center of the walkway
leading to the art museum
to a nearby grove of palms

where her white skirt
famously flares high over
the heads of thousands
who come to see her

in a desert town where
people have for years
protested her gigantic
presence as sexist, tacky,

not art. But goofy tourists
come by the tens of thousands
to look at the undercarriage
of the 26-foot-tall Marilyn—

seen by some as a perversity,
by others as a fond tribute
to a mid-century feminist
icon or abused sex symbol.

Or both. She’s kitschy in
her immensity, far prettier
in photos. But still, she soars,
her blonde head visible

to birds in flight and planes
taking off, her chin up,
forever smiling more than
six decades after this

“small girl in a big world”
left it, as she said,
“trying to find someone
to love.”

•••

“Forever Marilyn,” the Marilyn Monroe statue in Palm Springs, stands 26 feet tall and weighs 15 tons. It was created in 2011 by Seward Johnson and temporarily installed in Palm Springs from 2012–2014, where it became a popular landmark. It was reintroduced in 2021 but was controversial for many reasons, not least that it blocked direct access to the Palm Springs Art Museum. It was moved in February 2025 to its nearby location in Downtown Park.