Poet – Poetic Champions

Seasonal Love Song

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 shadow's 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.

Living in Florida has discombobulated my internal calendar. With none of the old familiar clues, autumn snuck up on me this year. I’ve resorted to flipping through old photos to get a sense of what fall feels like. Here’s a little sonnet from 2015 written when I was spending a lot of time away from home for work, and obviously missing my wife.

P.S.: Psychology Today says that our master circadian clock — the one that keeps track of the seasons is called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus, which contains about 20,000 nerve cells and is located in the hypothalamus. Gonna have to take their word for it.

Haiku Laundromat

I thought this place could
help iron out my verses.
False advertising.

A few years ago, while visiting Maui, I made a special drive to check out this village with an irresistible name. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

On the Eve of Independence Day

THAT DAY WE LAY UPON THE GRASS

That day we lay upon the grass,
    A luminescent green.
The sparks that arced from arm to arm
    Across the space between.

Our bodies quickened by the sun,
    The willow leaves aflush.
The sunlight sparkling on the lake,
    Our blood bestirred to rush.

Up and down the parkway, flowers
    Enticing with their blooms.
Our loveless winter ended there,
    Emerging from our tombs.

For we had slept as sleepers slept,
    Unmindful of the world.
Astonishingly we awoke,
    Much like a rose unfurled.

(2015)

Some 42 years ago I worked as a journalist for a community newspaper in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I still have my pocket appointment calendar from that time. Along with recording the times and dates of city council meetings, photo ops, and interviews, it documents the progress of an uncanny romance.

We were two weary pilgrims, up to that point unlucky at love, but brought together by providence.

The calendar entry for Saturday, July 3, 1982: “Bike ride, sunning.” And then, emphatically, “1ST KISS.”

I’m a big fan of July 4th, but July 3rd is my own personal holiday.

Blank Verse for Father’s Day

He Knew the Worth of Tools

He was a man who knew the worth of tools.
How having just the right one for the job
Was worth a lot, but clearly not as much
As knowing what to do with ones you had,
And what to do with tools he surely knew.

When just a boy on a Missouri farm,
He started hanging round the blacksmith shop
Whenever he could catch a ride to town.
Old Henry Ford’s new-fangled auto car
Had sparked a need for handy fix-it men.
He joined the revolution, then and there,
Brought by the horseless carriage on the land,
And learned mechanics on a Model T.
He mastered use of wrenches and of pliers,
Learned lessons he would use for decades hence.

To make it through the Great Depression’s dearth
He took whatever labor he could find.
He hoed bean rows and stripped bluegrass by hand,
With just the simplest tools to do the job.
His daily wage back then was just a buck,
But any honest work beat none at all.
To earn his daily bread he tilled the soil
Just like his male ancestors all before.

But he saw tools of farming changing too,
With tractors putting horses out of work.
He gambled on a combine harvester
That reaped and threshed and winnowed all at once.
Then hiring out his cutting-edge machine,
He saved enough to buy his own small farm,
And one by one he added to his tools.

In time he sold the farm and moved to town
To try his hand in the commercial world.
Still very much a Ford man in his heart,
He bought a dealership of farm machines—
The boldest speculation of his life.
But business wasn’t really his strong suit,
And when it failed, he carried on with tools.

He built a practice fixing implements —
Hay balers, corn pickers, tractors — all repaired
Right where they’d broken down out in the field.
And farmers round about began to say,
“If Ray can’t make’er run she can’t be fixed.”

When he was well past sixty years of age
He got a crazy notion in his head—
He’d always dreamed of having his own shop—
So he measured out the plan in the back yard.
And there he built the thing all by himself
With salvaged lumber gotten almost free.
Of course, it looked just like a barn.
Because, well, that’s only thing that he’d built before.
But he knew well enough the tools required.
Beneath his hammer, nails sunk into boards
With just two strokes, or maybe three.
His singing handsaw made the sawdust fly.
His level, plane and plumb line kept all true.
Out of a worthless demolition pile
He fashioned form where there was none before.
His barn still stands though many years have passed.
With paint and care could stand for many more.
It needs someone with tools to care again.

And when his wife of more than fifty years
Grew absent minded and began to fail,
He looked in vain for tools to fix her with.
Installed a cook-stove, gas-line, shut-off valve
When she began to start forgetting things,
Like if she’d turned the burners on or off.
Nowhere on all his cluttered workshop shelves
Was there a tool to fix her slipping mind.
The final years he’d visit every day
Ensuring that she ate her rest home meal.
The only tool of any use a spoon.
In time, the spoon was of no use as well.

My work today requires different tools.
I toil in neither soil nor wood nor stone.
Instead of grease my hands are stained with ink.
I polish common syllables to rhyme.
I calibrate my words to find a song,
Fine tuning—like a carburetor—lines,
To make them run not either rich nor lean,
To purr and roar without the gassy fumes,
Obscuring sense and choking with the smoke.

My father’s tools lie idle on the bench.
The workman will not use them anymore.
With all the craftsmanship I can bestow,
I carry on instead with tools I know.

(2019)

I’m living proof that mechanical aptitude is not necessarily hereditary. You can’t say my Dad didn’t try to teach me automobile repair and maintenance. For years after I had moved out on my own, I dutifully changed my own oil and even greased the suspension as needed.

But my heart never was really in it. As soon as I learned I could pay someone to do that job for me and I could afford it, I gladly hung up my oil filter wrench and drain pan.

If he were still alive, I imagine my Dad would be quietly shaking his head at his spendthrift son paying good money for something I should be doing myself.

Dad didn’t really succeed in turning me into a shade tree mechanic, but he taught me something much more valuable. Lessons about loyalty, service, and love.

When my Mother began her slow descent into dementia, he took care of her at home until his own doctor told him it was killing him and ordered him to have her moved to a nursing home.

Thereafter, every day he was physically able until she died, Dad went to the nursing home to feed his wife her lunch. He did that year after year, long after she could no longer communicate or even recognize him.

These days, when I get a little frazzled taking care of my own wheelchair-bound wife, I remember how my Dad navigated his much, much more daunting challenge.

THE BACKSTORY

If you look up the term “blue collar” in an illustrated dictionary, you might find a picture of my father. Coming of age during the Great Depression, he never finished high school. He had to find a job and bring in some sort of income, pitifully small as it was.

He was raised on a farm, so after he married my Mother, they set out to be dirt farmers like their ancestors before them. It was a tough go, but he kept his family fed and managed to acquire 80 acres of so-so farmland in north Missouri. Along the way, he learned quite a bit about how to keep his farm machines running and in good repair.

After a quarter century of farming, he decided there had to be a better way to earn a living, and he tried to make a go as a partner in a farm implement dealership. But, as the narrative goes in the poem, That didn’t work out.

So he went fell back on his mechanic skills and earned a living keeping machines operating.

His hands were stained with grease and crankcase oil. And neither the Goop grease cutter, nor the green, grainy, Lava soap he used every day got them completely clean.

That’s about as blue collar as you can get.

But he also had a sharp and curious mind. He subscribed to magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics because he wanted to know how things worked. He once told me that he had been pretty good at math in school. He said he wished sometimes that he had been able to continue his studies. He figured he could have been a pretty good engineer.

I knew he thought I was in danger of wasting my college scholarship by majoring in philosophy.

“Be sure to take something practical,” was his main advice to me as I left for school.

Perhaps he indulged my intellectual pursuits because he had a curious hobby for a dirt-farmer-mechanic. He was a student of the Bible and Biblical history. He ordered books by mail and built up a decent library of ancient historians, commentaries, apocryphal literature, alternate translations of scripture.

I still have the bible that he read every day. Fittingly, it is literally held together with duct tape.

By the time he was 80 he had lived to see his two oldest sons die in fluke accidents, and he had been forced to place my mother in a nursing home. He would soon go in for a multiple heart-bypass surgery himself.

I believe that as he increasingly saw the end of his life approaching, he focused more and more on things that really matter. I could do worse.

Love and flowers and happy birthday

FLOWER TIME

I saw you first in jonquil time,
When you were bathed in grace.
You sat aglow with fire sublime,
And golden shone your face.

I loved you first in lilac time.
A bloom I plucked for you.
I wrote you verse with song and rhyme.
I hoped you loved me too.

I kissed you first in tulip time,
It must have been a sign.
The buds and we were in our prime
When your two lips met mine.

I married you in daisy time
One summer's longest day.
We traded rings and heard bells chime,
We pledged always to stay.

Too soon we've come to aster time.
The days are shorter now.
Would stealing some be such a crime?
We'll make it right somehow.

Should we endure 'til wintertime,
The time when flowers sleep, 
Dreams we'll share of a gentler clime
Where we no more shall weep.

(2016)

Notes: My love was born on D-Day, and I don’t think I’ve ever failed to remember her birthday. It’s an appropriate date because she conquered me from the beginning. I didn’t stand a chance.

Flowers did play a significant role in our courtship. I really did pull over and pick some roadside lilacs before our first date. (And she really was glowing the very first time I saw her. A story for another time.)

Poem for Mother’s Day

She Knew the Names of Things

She knew the names of things, knew them by heart.
Not just the farmwife flowers of the yard,
But the wild ones in the hidden woods.
And in the woods, she knew the names of trees.
She knew quaint sayings about country ways.
“That’s no sign of a duck’s nest,” she would say,
Defying explanation even then.

She knew the names of birds, common and rare:
The Red Wing, Meadow Lark and Mourning Dove,
Brown Thrush and Gold Finch and sad Whippoorwill.
She knew them by their call as well as sight.

She knew the names of lonely widowed aunts,
And she knew dates and anniversaries,
And surely, she recalled that doleful day
When the son who called her “Mother” was fished
By divers out of San Diego Bay.
For grief, she never spoke of it again.

And though she’d barely gone to school, she
Had sense enough to hang a dishrag up,
She knew her Whitman and her Bible well.
And when the door-yard Lilacs bloomed she paused
Amidst the sweet perfume, breathed, and recalled
The poem and soft fragrance that she loved,
Sweet messenger of spring—but not too sweet,
Not like the syrupy Petunias
That she also loved, but differently.
She always favored the modest flowers
That had a tinge of tragedy and loss
Like Lilacs and Lilies of the Valley,
Named for the suffering Savior of mankind.
She knew the things she loved, and she could name them.

But winter of the mind came drifting in
And names of things were slowly covered up,
As when the snow erases hue and shape
And leaves the garden white, formless and blank.

The soaring Hollyhocks were overcome,
Begonias, Honeysuckle, Marigolds,
The Morning Glories high atop the gate
Were covered, as was Aunt Minerva, too,
(Whom she loved like the mother she had lost),
And cousin Gene undone at Normandy,
And buried there amidst a cross-white field.

Peonies bowed their heavy heads beneath
The heavy snow and disappeared away.
So too, the old folks’ graves that she adorned
With their bouquets each Decoration Day.

Wild Lady Slipper too did not escape,
Entombed beneath its own soft shroud of white
With Buttercup, Catalpa, Trumpet Vine,
With Thistle, Jimsonweed and Columbine.
And covered too were Maples, Elms and Oaks,
The Willow tree we started from a branch,
The stately Cottonwood that soared above
The old farm woods, completely covered up.

And covered too were barefoot childhood days
On Clear Creek growing up carefree, before
Her still-young mother died of Spanish Flu,
And left five other kids for her to raise.
Those days she loved them, and she knew their names:
Hayward, Walden (though others called him Joe)
Jesse, Vivian, and the youngest Bill.
All these names buried and forgotten now.

Gone was her motto written out longhand
Held by a magnet to the old icebox
With wise and frugal counsel: “Use it up
Wear it out. Make it do, or do without.”

Old photographs stuck in a musty book
Assembled even as the blizzard blew,
A vain attempt to thwart the mounting snow,
The names obliterated anyway
By endless pitiless nameless white.

I walk now through the fiery leaves of fall
And ponder piles of faded photographs,
Repeating names I learned so long ago,
Recalling things and places I have loved

In hopes this recitation will forestall
My own impending blanketing of snow.
Perhaps my winter will be mild—or not.
Perhaps I will become snowbound as well.

But I shall say the names of things ’til then
And recall her who taught them first to me.
Remembering, turn my face to winter’s blast,
Defying it to dare to land a blow.
For I shall sing the names of things until
I lie here frozen stiff beneath the snow.

(2019)

NOTES: I thought I hated Alzheimer’s Disease before when it robbed us of Mother far too soon. But just a few years ago it also took my dear friend and schoolmate, Clyde Smith. It’s a horrible, cruel disease. Cruel to the victim and cruel to the loved ones.

The poems I learned at my mother’s knee employed meter and rhyme. So it’s only natural that I’m most comfortable with forms like ballads and sonnets. They speak my heart language. I’ve long agreed with Robert Frost that writing in free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. It may do wonders for the self esteem, but it’s hardly sporting.

A few years ago, I had the itch to write something longer than a sonnet, or something more ambitious than eight lines of rhyming couplets. In hindsight, I believe that I needed to wrestle with the grief of losing two people so close to me to such a dreadful disease. It was going to be a protracted struggle, and a mere sonnet just couldn’t do.

I settled on blank verse, which sticks with meter, but dispenses with the need for rhyme. Sort of like playing tennis with the net lowered a couple of feet. I suppose if it was good enough for Marlowe and Shakespeare, it should be good enough for me.

Anniversary Poem

Flowers and love in bloom

That Day We Lay Upon the Grass

That day we lay upon the grass,
+++A luminescent green.
The sparks that arced from arm to arm
+++Across the space between.

Our bodies quickened by the sun,
+++The willow leaves aflush,
The sunlight sparkling on the lake,
+++Our blood bestirred to rush.

Up and down the parkway, flowers
+++Enticing with their blooms,
Our loveless winter ended there,
+++Emerging from our tombs

For we had slept as sleepers sleep,
+++Unmindful of the world,
Astonishingly we awoke,
+++Much like a rose unfurled.

(2015)

Some 38 years ago two wanderers, unlucky at love, stumbled upon each other. Magic ensued.

It took me three years, but I finally persuaded her to marry me. I’m now a lucky guy, blessed beyond measure.

One More for Poetry Month

Obviously destined to write poetry

I Sing Not for Glory

I sing not for glory nor for bread,
Nor for the praise of the credentialed clique.
But for hire more valuable instead,
To touch the honest kindred heart I seek.

I sing for lovers when love is green,
When time stops for a solitary kiss.
When light shines anew as with new eyes seen,
I celebrate your fey and fragile bliss.

I sing for the lonely, lovelorn heart,
When light grows cold and aching will not cease,
When your enchanted world falls all apart,
I offer modest salve to give you peace.

I sing for the pilgrim searching soul
Pursuing the heart’s true cause and treasure.
May Heaven’s Hound, you hasten to your goal,
And propel you to your proper pleasure.

I sing for the wise who see their end,
And, too, for those who have not yet awoke.
For to a common home we all descend,
With common dirt for all our common cloak.

I sing not for money nor for art,
Nor to amuse curators of our trade.
The simple wages of the simple heart
Will satisfy when my accounts are weighed.

(2017)

A few years ago a friend asked me, “Why poetry?”

I didn’t really have a snappy answer. Actually, I hadn’t analyzed it very much. I’d grown up reading poetry. Some of my earliest memories of nursery thymes, and a bit later later the delightful poems of Eugene Field and the stirring tales of Longfellow. My mother loved Frost. In high school, our teachers introduced us to Shakespeare, Whitman, and William Cullen Bryant, and many others.

A few years later, when I hit a patch where life didn’t seem to make sense, it only seemed natural to express the distress in poetry. It was if putting things in order with some sort of design helped achieve a measure of equilibrium, if only for a little while.

And I’ve been doing that off and on ever sense.

That question from my friend set me to wondering. And the result was this modest poem.

The photo is from a time when I fancied myself wise, but still didn’t have enough experience to know very much at all.

Sonnet composed before corona

Flowering tree in April

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.

(2016)

Today was almost perfect in our little suburb. The spring sun was shining, the flowering trees were peaking, it was not too hot and not too cool. The night before, the moon was still almost full and it was splendid.

This afternoon few cars were out in the streets. Homeowners were gardening and mowing and washing their windows. Couples were out walking their dogs. When you met a neighbor you nodded and smiled.

Yet all was not well.

When you met that neighbor you veered several feet away so as not to breathe any air they may have exhaled from their lungs. There were no close or extended conversations. Some walkers are wearing face masks.

You see so many people in the neighborhood because their schools and businesses are closed. We are home bound and quarantined.

There is a plague in the land.

So much of what filled our time just four weeks ago is now unavailable. It’s been unlike any Lenten period in my lifetime. We have given up, albeit involuntarily, all gatherings for entertainment, sports, parties, dining, drinking or carousing. I’m unsure if I’m any wiser or if my heart is any softer for it.

I didn’t have anything like our current pandemic in mind when I wrote this a few years ago. But I thought of it today on my walk.

Love in the time of corona

Familiar Ways

I choose to walk the old familiar ways,
To wend ways where I’ve put my foot before,
To gaze anew on views seen other days,
Which, though familiar, never seem to bore.

The changing light and seasons have their ways
Of making old things new: The light-laced hoar,
The first-flush, green-glow, bursting-forth spring days,
The growing tinge of gold we can’t ignore.

Each day, my dear, I choose afresh our trail,
The one we blazed so many years ago,
Eschewing other routes that might avail,
And hewing to the well-worn way we know.
Forsaking novelty need be no jail
With your face bathed in sunset’s golden glow.

(2016)

NOTES: March is arguable the most beautiful time in the Pacific Northwest. The days are growing longer. Yellow daffodils are rampant. And the ornamental plum and pear and cherry trees are exploding with pink blossoms.

In normal times, my only quibble with March is that it also brings on the dusting of alder pollen, which makes me sneeze. (Has anyone ever established a good reason for alder trees to have been created? I am skeptical.)

But these are not normal times. As with the rest of America and most of the world, we are in the grip of the global coronavirus pandemic. As a result, most of us have been largely confined to our homes, venturing out on only the most urgent matters. We are taking shelter in our homes like characters in some post-apocalyptic movie, waiting for the worst to pass.

We can still get out and take walks (as long as we observe the proper “social distancing” by moving 10 feet away when we meet passers-by.) Given our current semi-quarantined status, I don’t care how high the pollen count. I’m going for a walk to look at the scenery!

As I walk, I almost always take the same routes through our semi-rural suburban neighborhood making sure to include as many hills as possible. I’ve been walking it for years but it never gets boring.

In times like this, you take stock of what’s really important.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

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