Güd wrtr

(for Lisa)

The Sunday we fall back,
after lunch and a play,
Lisa and I walk my

neighborhood with an eye
to the cloudy sky seeming
to darken faster than usual.

Time shifts always feel
jarring for the first few
bars—as we old band

people know well—going
from a predictable 4/4
(stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive)

to a waltzy 3/4 mixed
with a circular 6/8 time
(I like to be in A-mer-i-ca).

And our feet step in
rhythm as the afternoon
winds faster into evening,

not marching in time as
we once did across a
football field in fall,

but scuffing over leaves
suddenly painted scarlet
or brittled brown, not to

mention the ombres of
the Chinese pistache trees
reddening from the top down.

We walk and talk, pick up
the pace on the final block
home, darkness falling along

with the leaves waltzing
(1-2-3, 1-2-3) downward,
surprised, like us, to see

dark so early, as if we’ve
not experienced a time
change every autumn

of our blessedly long lives,
as if we don’t know
what’s coming.

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

—William Stafford, from “Being a Person”

•••

(for Deborah)

I, who have so many words,
as you do, too, when we arrive
at spots on the still-damp path
where the trees unfold their
arms in a ta-da! reveal,

we go silent, breathing in
the reflection of morning
on water, absorbing the stillness
of refracted light and mirrored
color. And we find ourselves
rooted, too,

awestruck by the tableau
across the river of blue heron
standing tall on a rocky sandbar
with an egret and five mallards
nearby—

until you pop up with a new take
on an old joke:
A heron, an egret and five
ducks walk onto a sandbar….

Then our laughter floats into this
inconstant season, changing by
the minute, as the birds well know,
undisturbed by human visitors
who have stopped, who listen,

all of us, before moving into
what comes next.

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Round”

•••

I’m with you, Stanley,
eager for the next day to unfold

like one of those cootie-catchers,
as kids in my day called them—
a nifty bit of origami folded
from a single sheet of paper
into four pyramid-shaped parts
upheld by a child’s fingers.

A friend would come to you
with one and invite you to pick
a color on an outside flap, then
open and close it (usually to
a catchy rhyme), then peel open
a flap it to reveal an answer to
your question.

It resembled a do-it-yourself
Magic 8 Ball, with answers like:

• Yes
• Mostly likely
• Without a doubt
• Signs point to yes
• Ask again later
• Don’t count on it
• My sources say no

But Stanley, what if the little paper
fortune tellers offered sweeter
predictions? Like:

• You will find coins under
the couch cushions.
Or
• You have a secret admirer.
Or
• Ignore previous fortunes.

Let’s head into each tomorrow
wide-eyed and smiling.
Every day’s a new day, my late
best friend used to say,
her pep talks still ping-ponging
through me:

• Life is a balance of holding on
and letting go.
• You’re off to great places.
• Now it’s time to try something new.

And oh, yes, yes, yes:

• Even when life throws you a detour,
behold the scenery. Shift your outlook.
Enjoy the ride.

•••

“It’s the aluminum rule: Thou shalt enjoy the ride.” Thanks, Antsy McClain and the Trailer Park Troubadours!

The country has just begun to put on her robe of tints. The earliest trees are decked in palest orange, working gradually into scarlet & crimson. It is like a sunset to see the earth & sky putting on the manners of the evening.

—Letter from Emily Dickinson to her friend Abiah Root, 1851

•••

Forgive the impolite use of your first name
when we have not been properly introduced,

though I feel that we have, thanks to another
belle of Amherst, a poet I knew who, some

120 years after your death, sent me walking
on my first visit to the town she shared with you,

pointed me to the cemetery where I could find
you, then to your house to stand in your bedroom

and look out the window into venerable trees
robing themselves in autumn tints,

shimmering in late afternoon light.
Later I gathered acorns from your lawn

to bring home, not to plant in the earth,
but cradle in a palm or pocket on a walk—

you two poets tucked into my heart—
poeting as we go,

always as we go.

•••

(for Pat Schneider, one of the belles of Amherst, and, of course, for Emily Dickinson)

Her sunglasses, Faye told me before
she introduced herself, were Jimmy Choos,
which sounded snazzy enough, but also

sported gold bejeweled upper corners,
which drew my eyes to hers. We sat in
adjoining chairs behind matching counters

across from two optical technicians
adjusting each of our specs, Faye outlining
a shopping plan to find me a winter

coat because, girl, it’s got cold all of
a sudden, me agreeing that nighttime
temps have dropped, it being the first

of November. Winter’s comin’, Faye
said, as a round-faced young man worked
on her shades, and an optical genius named

Eddie fiddled with mine, Faye chatting about
her favorite black boots as if we compared
fashion notes all the time. Finished, the tech

gently placed Faye’s glasses on her nose,
and she turned in my direction, my pupils
riveted to her sparkling smile over which

her luminous Jimmy Choos dazzled. I’ve
never developed much of a personal style
or fashion sense, much less tried to carry off

any manner of bling, but I admire others
who wear the bright, the shiny, the sparkle
with the kind of aplomb that comes from

knowing they look good. You are stylin’,
I told Faye, who shot me a brilliant grin
and an Mmm hmmm, laughing as if

we’d known each other for years.
You’ve made my day, she said.
Ditto, I told her.

And thanking the men who’d tweaked
our spectacles, we rose in tandem,
Faye reaching for my hand, transferring

a bit of her self-assurance into my palm
with a squeeze before she floated off into
the bright midday of a brand new month.

You write them every day?
How do you write one every day?
I read them every day, and I tell my wife
that we’ve got another one from the little
poet lady. She reads ’em, too.

Where do you get your ideas for poems?
Whaddya mean, they just come to you?
Are you “channeling” them?
How can you have the nerve to publish
them when you’ve just dashed them off?
I’d never have the guts to put out
such new pieces. Not that yours
aren’t good, but… wow. That takes
some nerve.

That’s amazing—a poem a day.
I couldn’t do that.
Do you mind that a lot of days you
don’t get many “likes” on Facebook?
Sure, you say you don’t mind, but…
How do you know who’s reading them?
The point is to write them and let
’em go? Like those monks who labor
over the sand mandalas and then
blow them away?

I don’t really get poetry. But I liked
the one about your big dumb boy cat.
I read them every day because your
mother sends them to me. She says
she knew you were a poet when you
could barely hold a pencil.
And look at you, still poeting all
these years later.

Are you going to continue?
How long can you keep this up?
I don’t know how you do it,
but poet on, little poet lady.
Give us another.

•••

It’s been a year today since I started this experiment of writing and putting a poem a day into the world. Honestly, I don’t know how I do it. But I do know that the more I stay open to images and lines, the more they show up. (Thank you to the creative gods for that!) My job is to pay attention and write ’em down.

Thanks to all of you who’ve liked/loved them or commented or even just read ’em. But even on days when there are few reactions to the poems, the point is to write ’em, put their unpolished selves out there, let ’em go and keep writing. It’s a practice—like meditation or walking or yoga—and the idea is not to be attached to outcomes.

Having said that, I’ve heard/read all these questions over the past year, all good questions with not great answers from me. But I appreciate them.

Mahalo nui loa. 🌺💜

•••

You must hear that all the time,
but you are, after all, a pumpkin. And no,
I’ve not come to carve your guts out
or wield a knife near your tough skin.
I’m a big fan of your shape and your
smooth texture, though your cousin
in the next bin over has the bumpies,
which are kinda witchy warty cool.

Tis the season, after all.

And yes, I’m one of those who not only likes
to fondle but also savors your flavor, too,
who buys pumpkin cookies and stocks
up on pumpkin ice cream. I fall for it every year.
Pumpkin butternut squash bisque. Apple
and pumpkin handpies. Pumpkin spice
rooibos tea. Pumpkin cream cheese spread
on a pumpkin bagel. Heaven. Throw in
a pumpkin spice cookie, some apple and
a slice of cheddar, and I’ll call that dinner.

So yeah, pumpkin, I’ll take you and
your sweet curves home and let your happy
orangeness infuse me when the costumed
hordes arrive seeking candy, not much
caring about you.

But I do. I’ll keep you as long as possible
on the porch, then plop you out in
the backyard by the fence, where you’ll
decompose like an old basketball,
enriching the soil to help next spring’s
flowers grow tall, where, with luck,
some of your seeds might take root
and pumpkin us all into another year.

39 years ago tonight
they let me into the frigid room
where they were keeping you

deeply sedated, your skin blue
and clammy, barely alive after
having trouble bringing you back,

with a wicked incision stitched
from collarbone to near navel
where deep inside a small device

ticked with every beat of your
ravaged heart. Tick. Tick. Tick.
How could you return from this

planned assault meant to prolong
your life with an artificial valve
ticking away the seconds?

You looked dead then, your face
waxy and ghoulish the day before
Halloween, a perfect fright. And

I, spooked beyond every scary
moment I’d known, felt myself
escape through my scalp,

hovering over the gruesome
scene. “He’s alive,” a masked nurse
assured me. “He’s alive.”

And I held your porcelain hand,
letting it chill my own, and, seeping
back into myself, I clung to

the word, eyes shut tight against
the horrific scene, listening:
Tick. Tick. Tick.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

For years, men did this for me—
my father, my husband, my partner.

I’d blame it on my weak upper body.
I can’t dig a hole for spit, especially

in the clay that masquerades as soil
in my back yard. And that’s true.

But when the dead squirrel appeared
on the deck as I cleaned up around

the downed pot, mysteriously broken,
that had gently cradled Dick’s

mother’s ficus for so many years,
I imagined a wild chase between

predator and prey that resulted in
the ends of two living things.

The ficus I could resurrect, plop into
a new pot, but the squirrel, I realized

upon closer examination, was long
dead, really more of a flattened pelt.

I ran through the list of hole-diggers
I might summon and decided to give

it a go myself, watering the hardpan
by the north fence for a while, letting

the water simmer and sink. Then,
taking up the small shovel and,

with no thought for my newish
lavender tennies, I began to dig.

You could, Clifford whispered,
just put it in a plastic bag, Toots.

Then in the garbage can, my father
echoed. But I remembered each

of them digging a spot in different
back yards to bury the dead things:

a beloved pet—usually a cat—or
sometimes a bird fallen from the sky

or a snake stopped in mid-slither
with tender placement, tucking it

gently into a blanket of soil. Did this
sprawled squirrel deserve any less?

So I muddied my shoes and applied
my sole to the shovel, digging slowly,

working around roots, not very deep,
but enough, setting the creature to rest,

an impromptu Day of the Dead ceremony
a few days early, a small blessing

for the remembered
from the rememberer.

(Interior live oak, Quercus wislizeni)

Hey, big fella—yeah, you big,
shaggy live oak—nice to see you

craggy-barked behemoth, you.
How’s your year been?

Sorry I haven’t been by to chat
lately. I’ve been walking other

parks, taking different avenues,
chatting with you elder statesmen.

I’ve read that your genus can live
a couple hundred years, that your

bark gets more furrowed with age,
though you hang onto your glossy

green leaves, your full crown. Now
that I’m officially in my senior years,

I’m taking notes in the company
of trees, sheltering in your sanctuaries,

you deep listeners, you poems that
the earth writes upon the sky.*

I look to you and your kindred spirits
for tips on living long, staying upright,

remaining vital to friends—not least
to butterflies with delightful names:

from the California Sister, the Golden
Hairstreak and the Mournful Duskywing

to the Western Tiger Swallowtail.
I’ve come tonight to stand under your

generous canopy watching the rise
of a Hunter Moon, Jupiter hanging

like a winking earring below, me
humming the Holst theme, a majestic

piece of symphonic genius befitting
your grandeur. Teach me patience

with all that arrives, not least
the coming winter. What you have

weathered I can only imagine. Yet
look at you, standing tall, poised in

your vitality, your abundance of life.

•••

*poet Kahlil Gibran

•••

You can listen to the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 performance of “The Planets—IV,
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” by Gustav Holst, Susanna Mälkki, conductor.