Category: Poems

The doors of my house repaired
working properly now
opening closing latching
as doors are meant to do.
There is a metaphor I know
in my joy over this simple
home improvement, a sense
of contentment that now 
what and whom I want 
can be let in to my various 
rooms and house itself and
kept out as well.  
One must have doors.
Doors that open wide
and doors that shut.

Wind gathers and blusters
Cold rain falls just so
Gutters gurgle with their catch
The bones of this house creak
like an old man’s
Here under the covers I am
loving the mood of it
anticipating a wet walk
cakes in the oven
a pot of tea
the (imaginary) fireplace ablaze.
A writer’s day if ever there was one.

All in one woodland ramble along the creek
I saw a pileated woodpecker through my binoculars,
a pair of kingfishers swooping and a great blue heron
startled by me and my dogs into taking off over the creek.
Just one of those would have felt like great good luck.
But all three?  Riches riches riches!
I leave the woods feeling as if gold coins jingle
merrily in my pocket.  
O yes I am extravagantly wealthy!
I have the time to wander
two legs to carry me
two eyes to see
the sky above 
the ground below
and all the wonders a person 
could ever care to see.

Heard a funny sound up in the trees, stopped, looked.
Not ten feet from me sat two flickers, facing 
each other inches apart.  Engaged in some sort of ritual.
Beaks up, bobbing and wagging their heads, an odd
lilting call uttered in unison.  Then stopping sltogether.
Then again the dance of their two heads, the calling
and together again stopping.  Over and over as I stood 
mesmerized, my two dogs at my feet, those two birds 
carried out that mysterious ritual, their big speckled 
breasts, black bibs, a scarlet patch on each of their heads.
When at last they went their own ways I went mine
a thrill of delight bouncing my feet along the path.

Bright autumn morning
My dogs lie across my lap
I can’t bear to move.

This well-mannered morning lies still and deep with dark
holding the secrets of the new day close to her breast.
What stands poised to happen?  
Anything at all and all a mystery 
until it’s come and gone
and sometimes even after that.

Senior choir regaled us with tunes
a collision of rickety voices
embracing a variety of keys
faltering at times
the next few words a mystery
even to the accompanist
sudden impromptu solos 
rising in falsetto tones
all of which thrust me
suddenly thirty years hence
one nursing home resident 
among my inmates 
a captive audience.  And yet
those old standards 
could not fail to stir me to song
as will likely be the case
then as well.

The thousand words for love
tumbling in jumbles fall
softly piling on slipping from 
lips ever kissing as whispers
murmured secrets sliding
by floating on in streams
semi-conscious humming 
your name without saying
its beaming daydreaming
clamoring enamored hand
over handed up offered up
no stopping no sticking but
saying and staying and playing
and maying I tipping my hat I
topping up tripping delightly
tossing roses at toeses
asking a question of whose 
eyes listen & glisten at risking
and risking again for the sake
of cheeks and eyelashes and
freckles and passes with the
thousand words for love.

O wretched night, get thee behind me!
Lying sleepless on and on and eons on
ridiculous parade of thoughts endlessly 
looping through my brain followed by 
the horrible terrible miserable dream of
menacing Others pursuing on and on
no matter that I roused myself and shook
my head to jar it loose again and again
the awful thing onwent ‘til dawn and then
an hour or two of blessed peaceful lovely
longed for sweet curative happy sleep
before the horrifying jangle of the 
smugly self-righteous alarm.

My mind is an empty room.
A darkened room I thought to say
but no.  The room is light with perhaps
too many windows.  Thus I sit blankly
mesmerized looking out and noting only
that my mind is an empty room.