Month: August 2016

Late summer sonnet

The once green grain gone golden in its rows
Late Summer’s Sun

Late summer’s sun has baked the grass to brown.
The days grow shorter with each passing day,
Soon, autumn’s chill will make the leaves fall down.
All of this aching beauty will decay.

And yet I love the shadows’ slanting trace,
The once green grain gone golden in its rows,
And how I love the lines etched in your face.
It’s funny, as love ripens how it grows.

The number of our days we do not know.
No sleeper knows if he will ever wake.
So come, let’s join above, between, below.
My dear, let’s cause our fragile clay to quake.
Let us make love as if it’s our last go.
Let us embrace like dawn will never break.

Notes:

It’s that time again to haul this old one out of the vault.

Among other things, God was the first poet.  The world is full of rhyme and rhythm, image and metaphor.

In our own small, imperfect way, we just catch glimpses.

 

Hot car haiku

Raymond Ball and Ralph Ball

Strategic brothers,
knew the key to a girl’s heart
involved a hot car.

Notes:

My father  got in on the ground floor of the automobile revolution.  He learned auto  mechanics by hanging around the only garage in his small Missouri farm town.  He cut his teeth fixing Ford Model Ts, and kept learning from there.

Although he spent years trying to make a living as a farmer, and then as a businessman, he ultimately returned to mechanic work.  It was really his true calling.

He could fix things, and make them run. He didn’t buy new cars.  He bought old cars in need of work and fixed them up.

When it became clear to him that he was going to be a mechanic for the rest of his life he went out in his back yard, and proceeded to build himself a proper workspace.  It looked just like a barn, because that is what he had built before during his days on the farm.

But he built it himself from scratch when he was well past 60 years old.  Of course, he used reclaimed lumber scavenged from various tear-downs.

In his later years he ran a mechanic repair business out of his new garage.  He was the only mechanic for miles around who would make house calls.  The farmers all over Saline County knew that he could be depended on to fix their tractor, hay baler, or corn picker.

The photo at the top of this post shows my father, left, and his brother, Ralph, in front of one of the hot cars of the day.

Love sonnet

Orson Welles, fat and famous wine spokesman
“We’ll Sell No Wine”

“We’ll sell no wine before its time,” we’re told.
The fat and famous spokesman made it clear,
Each vintage has its period of gold.
(You must assess the pressing and the year.)

So, likewise, for each vintage comes a time
The point past which there’s no return at all.
Decay and oxidation work their crime,
And turn your sweetest nectar into gall.

So come, my dear, what are we waiting for?
Our cellar holds a few more bottles still.
Pick one and brush away the dust before
Time turns its contents back to must — time will.
Cast off our caution and our clothes and pour,
And drink with joy until we’ve had our fill.

Notes:

I’m old enough to remember when Orson Welles became a television pitchman for a sort-of-good American wine.

Welles had been the genius who panicked the nation in 1938 with his faux-documentary radio broadcast, “War of the Worlds.”  In 1941, he directed and starred in “Citizen Kane,” considered to be among the best — if not the best film of all time.

By the late 1970s, Welles was making commercials.  His Paul Masson spots are still classics.

“We will sell no wine before its time,” was a magnificent slogan.

 

 

 

 

 

Suburban sonnet

Suburban neighborhood
Our Paradise

Wafting comes the mower’s comforting hum,
Assuring all is just as it should be.
Our gates and fences all are rightly plumb,
We celebrate our capability.

New curbs and gutters sluice away wild rain,
Alarms and locks protect our doors from breach,
Our lives arranged to minimize our pain,
Designed to keep us safely out of reach.

But wreaking roots upheave the sidewalk path,
And worms devour our precious woolen thread,
The black and red mold creep into our bath,
Insomnia disturbs our peace in bed.
Despite our engineering and our math,
Our paradise is something less instead.

Notes:

Don’t get me wrong.  I appreciate material comforts and modern conveniences.  Probably even more than most of my friends and colleagues.

I was born in the middle of the last century, and started out life on a farm that was primitive, even for that time.

How primitive?  Well, we milked our own cow, raised our own chickens for eggs, butchered our own hogs, and raised our own vegetables in the garden.

For special occasions and Sunday dinners, Mother would grab one of the slower chickens, chop off her head, and fry her up.

When we sold our farm to the Amish, they took one look at the house, and commenced on an immediate upgrading and remodeling project.

As for me, I was delighted in my new home in a Missouri farm town of 12 thousand souls.  For the first time in my life I had my own room, central heat, and indoor plumbing.

I could take a bath in something that wasn’t a galvanized wash tub in the middle of the kitchen floor.  In freshly drawn water that hadn’t been previously used by other members of the family.

I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I didn’t even notice that we didn’t have air conditioning, even when the Missouri summer visited its triple digit heat and humidity  upon us.

So, I am thankful for many things.  I am so  thankful I can enjoy sardines from Norway and wine from France.

I am grateful for antibiotics, and the miracles of modern medicine.  I missed the polio epidemic, but just barely.  Had I been just a couple of years older, I could have suffered withered limbs or worse, like the older brothers and sisters of some of my friends who were not so fortunate.

All of my ancestors as far back as I can research were dirt farmers.  I am grateful for a professional job in a meaningful enterprise.  (Inside work.  No heavy lifting.)

Many years ago, when I moved out to Seattle, we settled in the suburbs because — even then — the city was too expensive.  We made a serendipitous choice, because our little suburb has become a highly desirable place for Microsoft employees coming here to live from all over the world.

Heck, in one of those specious magazine “Top 15” lists, our little suburb was once ranked the “Most Friendly Town in America.”

Crime is low.  Violent crime is virtually non-existent.  The weather is temperate.  People take care of their property.  Unemployment is not really an issue.  You can walk or jog without fear.

Yet, sometimes it is good to remember that even heaven on earth is not really heaven.

 

 

 

 

 

Midsummer Haiku

Blonde girl walks a black dog
Ah! Midsummer sun.
Blonde girl walking a black dog.
All downhill from here.

Notes: Something about the light and smell in the air this afternoon made me think of this little poem from last year.

R.I.P. Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016)

I just learned a month late that poet Geoffrey Hill has died.

I was paging through an issue of the Economist, and just about to toss it when the story of Hill’s death caught my eye.

“The Discomfort of Words. Geoffrey Hill, an English poet, died on June 30th at 84” the headline read.

The story filled an entire page.

I did not know much about his work, but the first line of the story told me I needed to get to know him.

Hill was given a book of Victorian verse at age 10.

“It was, he said, like falling in love.”

He had the reputation of being different and difficult.  A poet who scorned the modern trend towards confessional poetry, and who tackled age-old moral concerns.

You knew Hill was bound to make a stir from the opening lines of his first book.  In For the Unfallen, he wrote,

Against the burly air I strode,
Crying the miracles of God.

My favorite poem of Hill’s — so far — is In Memory of Jane Fraser. It’s wonderful elegy in just four haunting verses.

I’m looking forward to discovering more of his jewels.