Güd wrtr

I like the way Brits say
half-four,

that time between hours
to signal the midpoint,
a sense of partly accomplished
and hope for what is to come.

Today I am half-65,
halfway to my next birthday—
for many of my adult years
not a date I marked,

though as a child, I counted
half birthdays like pearls,
the string lengthening a wee bit
as I inched my way to the next
precious number.

I can still hear my grandmother—
Ah, your years are your wealth, darlin’—

and with each passing one
adding another pearl,
becoming evermore clear

just how rich I am.

You know how sometimes you
make something harder than
it has to be,

which can feel like trying to
shovel packed snow hardened
into a giant ice cube?

Or, today, like futzing with
a simple poem to somehow
force it to sing

when all the damn thing wants
is to lie there with its awkwardly
mixed metaphors

and trying-too-hard similes
and have a good lie-down, not
struggle to its feet

and scamper gaily across wherever
it is you’re trying to make it dance.
Or sing.

The solution appears as you head
into the gift of a warm winter day:
Let the poem poem itself.

Stop trying to wrangle a tortured
comparison out of simple words
that don’t need fancifying,

which all by themselves trickle down
a grateful page into a wee poem
without any fuss and bother—

like this.

Keep a sharp eye out—
it’s your the last chance to see
the Claw in action for the season—

leaf season, that is, which in my city
runs from November to the end of January,

though some of the most stubborn
sycamore leaves will cling, brown and brittle,
refusing to fall until new green ones
bump them off their perch.

The Claw fleet retires after an intense
three-month season, ending a noisy run
of leaf scraping from city streets—
about 20,000 tons of green waste, I read.

Crews work rain or shine, including holidays,
the website says, and I wonder who gets
assigned to claw duty. Do they enjoy it
as much as those of us who delight in
seeing the two-vehicle operation in action—
the open-mouthed Claw scooping
and dumping leafy detritus into
a receptive truck?

And do the Claws themselves go into
hibernation till next fall when they’re
pressed into service?

I hope they get tucked into a loamy
Claw den for a good rest, as their
keepers wish them pleasant dreams—
with no piles awaiting pickup,
just leaves greening where they should,

nicely affixed to branches, waving
their happy hands in warm breeze.

Do not disturb

says the grass green sign
sprouting from blades
of a similar color,

tiny grass is dreaming

And if you peer closely,
squint a bit, you might
see tiny eyelids closed

on those leaves of grass,
infinitesimal lashes
fluttering in sleep,

growing as they rest,
babies not ready for
the weight of feet,

so for now, shhhhh!
Keep off, please—
tiny grass dreaming

mini dreams, growing
big and strong for
your soles to one day

walk upon.

It is no small thing to be
granted this time, to walk

into a long-ago classroom alive
in your mind, slide onto a hard

wooden chair attached to
a round-bottomed desk, open

the Formica’d lid, and pull out
a nearly full notebook of

swollen sheets brimming
with your words.

When it is full, you give it
to a classmate—not necessarily

one who understands how much
you live your life on the page—

but to someone who might
happily receive whatever they

find in your stuttering cursive,
which, decades later, you,

perennial student, wish you
could again hold in your hands,

run your fingers over loopy ink
poured from a young heart

onto paper, this slender
volume of you.

Everything—

every breath, every molecule
of sunshine, the deluge that caught you
yesterday, the morsel of gladness
in sharing a smile with a dear one,
that sharp taste of sweetness
down to the unfathomable weight
of yet another sorrow—

none of it will come again.

Not like this. The moment that just
vanished. That one. And the next.

That’s what memory is for, you say.
But memory is a leaky valve, dripping
away what we wish we could store
forever in our heartspace.

You vow to enshrine this instant
or that breath, tucking them
like smooth pebbles into your pockets,
as if you could preserve them.

But you can’t keep what is passing
through—this sigh, that line, this word
down to the last comma, always,
always heading to the full stop
of a period.

So pull the pebbles from your pocket,
the pretty and the ugly, each impossibly
precious. Thank them for coming.

Open your fingers and, one by one,
let them fall gently, returning to
the good earth from whence they came,

and let them go.

(For R.D. Schmidt, in memory of C.W. Schmidt)

You cannot take the measure of a man
from his ruler, the one that rested
in the dark of a slender desk drawer
until it was called into service,

then brought into squinty office light
by the hands of an accountant who
set the straight edge to paper
and drew a confident line

from there to there. Thousands
of feet of line, maybe miles of line,
penciled along the top ridge of that
18-inch artifact now treasured

by his beloved son—himself now
eight decades into a life made,
in no small part, by the hands
of the man who measured and

cared for the tools of his trade,
who had no idea what a treasure
this simple device would become.

(for birthday gal Shelley Burns)

It’s over 60 degrees on the 23rd day
of this new year as freezing friends
in the east express envy and a little

disbelief about Northern California
springlike conditions after (for us)
too many gray days and whomping rain.

As Shelley puts us through our paces
outdoors, we oldies in both song
and soul step lively to her music,

peel off layers, while our nearest star
plays hide-and-seek with scampering
woolly clouds. It’s not over, this winter

of our lives—we know there’s more
to come. But for now, we do what we
can as Sir Elton sings of the sun rolling

high through the sapphire sky. We feel
our backs warming, delighted to be
T-shirted and tennis-shoed in this

moment of possibility, evolving from
winter-bound creatures to ones
who can see their way into spring,

sending our dear ones in the cold
cozy blessings from our little
circle of life on this humble corner

of the only planet we’ll ever call
home.

Sometimes the gods of auto-correct
are your friend, like today,
as my fingers attempt to type—

in case you haven’t heard—

instead, before my fuzzy eyes
the editors behind the scenes
recast it as—

in case you haven’t heart—

which, of course, causes a jackpot
of lines to tumble down the
electronic page—

which you’re reading now—

unbidden by consciousness,
just plunking out of fingers
onto keys—

and I want to assure you—

that, of course, you have heart,
not only the blood-pumping
organ in your animate self—

but no small amount of moxie,
not to mention pluck and purpose,
in the core of your being—

that my own vascular engine
reaches for yours via paltry
words on this ephemeral page—

with great affection for the essence
of you, the nitty-gritty fortitude
and kindliness—

that you extend to so many others—

not least—thank you very much—
lucky, lucky me.

Lately my father has been riding in the backseat
on Momdays as I chauffeur my mother in her car.

He is, of course, belted in—the man who installed
seatbelts in our 1965 turquoise Rambler,

long before any law required them. He grins as
he listens to my mother chatter, something he did

for 47 years before he vanished into mystery.
His voice, garbled and unintelligible, still

answers the phone—my mother reluctant
to change the old message:

Hello, you have reached the Haag residence…

He’s been gone almost 20 years, and he catches
my eye in the rearview, winks now and then,

though I can’t tell if he’s commenting on Mother’s
running monologue, or if he’s giving me a version

of his “atta girl” whacks on the shoulder that
could leave the faintest purple splotch.

“Don’t hit the girls!” Mom would yell, that being
her job when she thought we needed it. But,

in truth, I loved feeling his amiable punch,
his you-can-do-this vote of confidence.

I catch his eye in the mirror as her monologue
washes over us like gentle rain, my hair nearly    

the same as his snowy shade in later years,
as mine when I’d sit tiny and trusting on his lap,

my small hand wrapped around his finger, each
of us delighted to be in the other’s presence.