Güd wrtr

Did the first one come with me
at birth? Or did I just began
poeting without one as
soon as my mother put
a pencil in my hand?

Certainly I didn’t wait until
I was sixteen to careen
into metaphor, stomp
on alliteration, speed
into images that, with luck,
might evoke some emotion
in a reader.

What made me think I could poet?
For years I deferred to male
colleagues who were well
published, confident,
matter of fact about
their admirable
abilities.

I hid my proverbial light under
a journalistic bushel until,
licensed or not, lines
burst out of my pen,
onto electronic paper,
not necessarily good
but true, like these,
I hope.

Come to think of it, my
best friend bestowed
my poetic license
upon my old
baby car—

GUD WRTR—

as she assured me that it
wouldn’t seem like
bragging to have it
emblazoned on
my car—

“not spelled like that”—
and she was right.
Though she and
that car have long
vanished into
the who-knows-where,

they remain right here,
tucked into a poem,
which may or may
not be good, but,
I promise, it sure
is true.

•••

Poetic license / by the fabulously prolific poet/story writer/author/lyricist
and, of course, artist Sandra Boynton
(with decades of appreciation and admiration)

(for Ed Cole)

I walk by the ceramic vase by the window
with a myriad of feathers emerging
like the tail of a hastily assembled bird—

as if God had grabbed a brown-and-white
variegated tail feather from a turkey,
and the curving tiger stripes ending

in the white tip of a red-tailed hawk,
along with the black-banded
feathers of pheasants

and mashed them together in
a funky flying creature that has
dropped a feather here and there

for you to retrieve on your walks
through farmers’ fields and by
your riverside. And, knowing

of my affection for the plumage
of birds I rarely see in my city,
you’ve been adding

to this bouquet you didn’t know
you started years ago, my friend,
which reminds me of you

every time I walk by, as I reach
out to touch one of your
feathered friends’ offerings

that they once wore as they flew
through the highest blue,
as we wingless ones wish

that we might do, too.

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body,
to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you.
—John O’Donohue

•••

We talk about the re- (as in incarnation)
with great hope (even if we’re mostly joking)
about perhaps getting another body,
another chance to do it again,
get it right, maybe.

But haven’t you already gotten
your money’s worth out of this body,
despite its trials? Apparently,
thankfully, the warrantee’s not up yet.

Who could’ve predicted, when you
were a tiny person fresh out of the egg,
precisely how this body would grow
and change, would love and be loved,
would stumble and bumble
and become so humbly human?

Sure, you look in the mirror and don’t
recognize that gray-haired woman
or thinning-haired man, a far cry from
the younger you still deeply imbedded
in your bones—no matter how much
they ache. You may wish for a do-over,
another incarnation.

But not so fast, my friend.

These bodies, each one a garage for our souls,
with our beating hearts and breathing lungs,
contain a whole world inside us,
moving through the world outside us.

And if we’re here, organs still breathing
and beating, it means that this incarnation—
when you’ve gotten so much of it right—
isn’t over yet.

There’s more to this wild ride,
as frustrating, bumfuzzling, mystifyingly
joy-filled as it is—such a marvel,
this strange and wonderful adventure,
indeed.

•••

(Wishing Guy Howard Klopp a most happy birthday,
with love and gratitude from his fans, including me.)

Cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up.
—Father Greg Boyle

I circle the labyrinth on an overcast morning
the first week of fall as fifteen pilgrims make
their way along the single circuitous path,

many new to walking this singular path
to the center, though it always leads where
pilgrims need to go follow—and yes,
everything on the labyrinth is a metaphor,
and yes, there are gifts along the way.

So I walk the perimeter of the great circle,
holding space for fifteen pairs of feet in motion,
fifteen pairs of eyes looking down, their steps
slowing with the weight of what they carry—

tension and stress, anguish and grief—
which without effort often falls away
with each breath, so that when they reach
the heart of the labyrinth, they can rest, receive,
reflect before retracing their steps.

May they remember that they are cherished,
that they belong here, embodied prayer,
in this moment.

They stand, often with closed eyes,
so much dripping from them like new rain.
I feel their hearts rising, pain giving way
to what feels like a peace-full presence.
And then, heeding some unknown signal,
each begins the return, their footsteps
tracing the same path.

But, as every pilgrim discovers, it never
looks the same. No one takes the same
journey; each heart opens differently.

But they do open, and as their feet
and mine connect with the earth
that gives us life, I feel the widening
into something that could be joy.

And as they come off the path,
I am there to greet them.
Welcome back, I say, looking
into their newly softened eyes,

reminded that all of these souls,
each on their own journey,
have been holding me, too.

•••

With thanks to Christie Braziel for her excellent seminars on the labyrinth
through the Renaissance Society Sacramento.

(for Dickie)

I count aloud like a kid
learning her numbers—
one, two three, four, five

pairs of specs on his table,
not counting his shades,
which are who knows where?

I, who usually has more of
everything, own just one pair
for the everyday along with

a second pair of shades.
But he has close and middle
distance, progressives and

bifocals and single distance.
I envy him—not only his
array of eyewear, but his

actual eyes, which, since his
cataract removals, can see for
days, or at least tens of yards.

I’ll never have his kind of vision
that this still-got-it photographer
has, whose point and shoot prowess

on his phone many of us envy.
When people ask what camera
he uses, he’s been known

to respond, “It’s not the camera.”
No, it’s his perceptive eyes,
though he’d never say that.

How lucky am I, decades after
he discarded film and long lenses,
to see the world through the pixels

he produces, this fellow with
interchangeable lenses of
a different sort, a man with

extraordinary vision, one
who consistently, kindly
sees the world—and me—

in the best possible light.

We walked the local auction
grounds on weekends with
a taste of teenage freedom,
setting up shop for a fundraiser,

the high school pep band
assembled to play some rousing
’70s hits—oh, that lower brass
opening of “25 or 6 to 4,” trumpets
joining five bars in, drummers
rocking out on an improvised
trap set.

In between sets, high on hormones
and crunchy ground beef tacos
dusted with parmesan cradled
in greasy paper, we’d happily
stand in line for this dollar
culinary masterpiece

born only four years before
we were, dubbed by its creator
an American taco, which Jim sold
out of a small trailer in Lake Tahoe
where few folks in town had
heard of such a delicacy.

A half century later, in our city
23 miles from my hometown,
my fella loves him some Jimboy’s,
and on occasion I indulge—mostly
to transport myself with the first crunch
of that too-hot taco, parmesan dusting
my cheeks,

back to my beginnings as a budding
writer, the girl pep band director
fond of a song with obscure lyrics
that turned out to be about someone
writing deep into the night—

waiting for the break of day,
searching for something to say…—

a place I sometimes still find
myself, looking for words
at 25 or 26 minutes to 4 a.m.,
wondering how much I can take.
And oh, yes, should I try to do
some more?

•••

With thanks to Robert Lamm, who wrote it in 1969, and Peter Cetera, who sang it, and the band Chicago for the song’s stunning guitar riff, guitar solo and amazing horn section parts… and my Oakmont High School pep band friends playing their hearts out. Who cared if we couldn’t make head nor tail of the lyrics? We had the music and the tacos…

•••

If you’d like to hear the more seasoned version of Chicago play “25 or 6 to 4” in 2016 with the surviving members of the band when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, give this a look (it still rocks!).

What if, instead of imagining that
you happen to pluck a moment
out of the air, your word-thirsty
tongue snagging it like a tasty bug
and tucking it into a pocket of memory—
what if that darting insect of a flash
instead taps you on the shoulder?

Here I am, it whispers, yours to notice,
and, if you’re clever, you pause, write it,
maybe paint it, capturing in words
or watercolors the way light silvers
her hair or how his chuckle rumbles
through your ribs.

Perhaps such moments present
sweet gifts that, while fleeting,
become part of the mystery that you,
baby mystic, live every day.
Tomorrow you will be offered
another and another and another,
too quickly whizzing by, but they
snag you more often than you realize.

Floaters, you think. Glimmers.
Sparks. Exactly.

Did you imagine them to be random
accidents? What if these expansive
snippets select the unsuspecting,
wait to see if you bite?

And when you think to
commemorate them, hang them
in your museum of memory,
enlivening them with breath as you
speak of them, you make them live
again.

These ecstatic moments out of time
choose us, the little buggers
vying for our attention,
snippets of what-was-that?
winks presenting themselves
for our wide-eyed astonishment,
our hey-look-at-that! delight.

Autumnal equinox, Sept. 22, 2025,
Northern hemisphere

Today I imagine Western monarchs
born in late summer packing their
tiny bags, preparing to head south

for Mexico or Southern California,
seeking warm spots, trusting their
spot-on radar to guide them to

just-right trees where their fellow
travelers have begun to cluster,
piling on in a massive wingéd cuddle,

not eating or mating, conserving
energy through the cold months.
I prepare for the inward turn

as both hemispheres are equally
brightened by sun today, grateful
to those harvesting the fruits of fall,

apples and pears still ripening,
the figs and late-season plums
and melons, the trees preparing

to release their canopies. But,
like the butterflies, the trees,
the hibernators, humans, too,

must move into dormancy, wait
till our star stretches its rays
and our home planet tilts

sunward again. Then we’ll
shake out our wings, make
test flights to survey how

the world has changed
before making our way back
to where we started, which,

no matter how tidy we left it,
never looks exactly as we
remember, but, with luck,

welcomes our fluttering hearts,
the place all the more beautiful
for the coming home.

Driving home in the September dark,
I see a shadow of leafy something
affixed to the windshield, but,

since it’s not impairing my vision,
I zip up the onramp for the brief
hop on the freeway to my exit,

a swift 65 for a mile, then off,
then home in a trice. Pulling into
the driveway, the porch light

catches the leafy something’s
legs moving. Legs? Pushing my own
out of my four-wheeled cocoon,

I stand and bend and peer at
the darkened glass to find a mantis
of significant size that has not only

hitched a ride but hung on at speed,
only to be relocated a few miles
from, quite possibly, its native habitat.

Horrified, I gently scoop it up,
whispering apologies, deposit it
carefully atop the crawling viney

groundcover next to the driveway.
I do not see it leave, feel only
a slight tickle on my palm as it

leapfrogs to, I pray, safety,
relieved to have preserved this
one small life, knowing that it

cannot make up for all the others
I have not, will not,
ever be able to save.

A past that’s sprinkled with the blues
A few old dreams that I can’t use
Who’ll buy my memories of things that used to be?

—Laminated into the table in Willie‘s Corner at Texas Roadhouse in Elk Grove, CA
From Willie Nelson’s song, “Who’ll buy my memories?” 1984 on “The IRS Tapes”

•••

No one wants your old stuff,
we hear again and again as we
go through our old stuff,

the stuff getting older every day,
as are we. But some memories,
depending on what they are,

or whose they belong to, they
might be worth something.
Willie’s memories must be gold

shrouded in a fragrance of good
weed, and given what he’s done
and who he is, plenty of folks’d

be pleased to buy his memories.
Which, of course, they already do,
in every song, every twang on that

beaten-up old guitar, every word
from those creased lips that you just
know have kissed more than a few

others in their time. I played Willie
nonstop for Julie in her final weeks,
shrunk to a little cocoon of ribs,

no longer singing, mostly gone, her
determined 80-something heart still
keeping time to the raspy baritone.

I held her limp hand, wishing she could
lay into “On the Road” one more time,
or better yet, “Always on My Mind,”

which she still is—one of the many
diamonds in my overfull storehouse
of memories that nobody will want,

every one a gem
that I’ll never trade or sell.