Why Not

The vase of daffodils

sunshine in a jar

lasted a week on the countertop.

The red tulips matched her dress

and his bow tie.

Easter finery and greening grass

matted and soft underfoot

await the resurrection.

The cemetery

awaits a footing and a stone.

Why not believe as Camus did in French verse—

that two can become reunited as one.

Inspired to breathe by the Tuesday Platform, and in need of music and garden toads,

I ask, why not?

Memories Of Snow

The snowfall that fell in the night

left footprints by my door,

across the porch and through the shrubs.
They snaked around the bird feeder

like a fox and goose game

you know....the one children no longer play. 

Some see this as proof and tabulate gains,

justified in their belief that all stays the same.

But whether man or beast, the intrusion

is plain, how close these things creep

up in the night.  

Did they look in my window

like the cat on the sill? 

Sniff under the shrubbery for grass green there still?

For snow doesn't stay here anymore.

As the drip in the eaves to the bird on a branch,

footprints dissolve like a good man’s intent.

The snow never lasts anymore.

Oh! Tiger burning bright

trapped outside your pleasant home

learn new ways or lose the game.

What good were you anyway?

For Poets United, Climate Change Motif 

The Wake

I met a man at a wake who knows

the highest point in the Great Lakes Basin

is a bluff where water drops nine hundred feet

to the untrespassed river bottom,

where the remains of the last wolverine were found

and where wolves crossed.

Others eat shrimp, drink wine and toast the deceased

and don’t know they don’t know

I’m pinned in place like a butterfly in a classroom

while he takes me into the forest to listen for loons.

I met this man who goes to Isle Royale for the silence

not for the call of the wolf

because in spite of what some say,

they might not be there anymore.

A man who pays attention to words

like a craftsman to the tile cutter slicing through water.

When I talk I feel his eyes

listening, listening.

And I want to go on and on about something

so he'll keep looking, and looking.

Was it the sound of water falling

or the warble of a water bird that infected

his story of kayaking on Lake Superior in a storm?

The cry of the loon is interrupted

by the clap of the skeet outside the yacht club.

They punctuate our conversation like a grammarian.

Shooters send their targets flying across the water

with no mind to the wake inside. Life goes on.

You only ever hit what you aim at.

The first time you hear a loon, you know what it is,

like the first time you meet someone

who could draw a map on a napkin you would follow,
but only the loon in lonely decibel can take you there.


Linked also to The Garden's Tuesday Platform 
as we remember Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet who recently died. From my favorite poem of hers  The Summer Day:  "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Hauling Water

“It takes a heap of livin’

                                                            to make a house a home.”

                                                                        -Edgar Guest

Their door is locked

as they would never have it.

Curtains drawn

as they would never have it.

We dug her roses,

worms clinging to the root ball,

transplanted to where

they will be seen and tended.

Locked doors and drawn curtains

lead one to wonder

what’s going on in there.

It’s all a big secret kept from those

with no need to know what’s going on.

The old flowerbeds are choked with the weeds

she tamped down with the tip of her cane—

chives under the branching daffodils,

dirt soft and loamy from years of tending.

Mums in there somewhere, waiting their turn.

The footing is set for the headstone

and plastic flowers adorn graves

for Memorial Day.

But we hauled milk cartons of water

to and fro for the red geraniums planted there.

One foundation laid, another taken away.

New cement may be poured over mums

and sleeping tulips but we have pictures.

We know what was there.

For Father

The homeless man
stands on the exit ramp
with his sign for help.
We roll down the window
with a five dollar bill,
as dad would have done.


Rosy-cheeked in winter plaid
gave to us all that he had
Now snow blankets his shroud of boughs.

Back Home

This is linked with Imaginary Garden with Real Toads mono-no-aware , the challenge to write about change or loss, not full blown depression but a subtle, wistful sadness in the Haibun format (which includes a Haiku at the end) 

The Art of Doing Nothing (or how the little dog died)

Oh, my. How long it's been. What can be discovered in the predawn hours and must be shared,  shared when others sleep but you can't.

One Christmas, a while back, we had to put our dog to sleep. I wasn’t going to write about it but then I thought about how she liked to sleep curled up beside my chair with her nose on the heat register, content to be doing nothing, which brought to mind a book my son gave me one Christmas called The Art of Doing Nothing which made me remember a poem I wrote when she was a puppy . . . and so it goes.

Sunny was twelve but spry until the week after Christmas when her belly suddenly bloated and overnight she could barely walk. It seemed her legs would no longer support her stomach. We thought she was constipated and the vet said to give her pumpkin and if she wasn’t better in a few days to call back. We gave her pumpkin. She ate it; she would eat anything. 

But Sunny didn’t get better. She could manage the porch steps down, but when she finished her business she couldn’t climb back up. She just stood there looking up with her mournful little shih tzu eyes.  So there we were, carrying her inside and out, up and down, like a puppy. My laptop sits on a table beside the heat register and it was always her favorite place, but she wouldn’t leave her bed. I put part of a fried egg in her dish. She ignored it.  

The next morning, she lost control of her bladder, legs splayed in a widening pool of discolored urine. I looked down at her in horror. My husband took her to the vet. The prognosis? Possible kidney failure or a tumor or any number of other age-related ailments. The cost? $120.00 for a diagnostic blood test and $80.00 for an X-ray, and this just to find out what was wrong. Surgery, recovery . . . who knows? The vet said she could still die in six months.  Our other option was $58.00 for euthanasia and $120.00 for cremation if we wanted the ashes. If not, they would “group” cremate her for $50.00. 

  “My God!” my daughter said. “That would be like Auschwitz!” The kids didn’t want her cremated. They want her buried on the farm with a cross above her grave.  

My husband carried her home in a bag while I was at work. The problem? The ground is frozen. This dilemma makes me think of the burial-delayed funerals in the U.P. They have a no-shovel season from November 15^th to March 1^st. Digging into the ground would be like trying to penetrate 8 inches of concrete. Most cemeteries have thinly-walled buildings that rely on Mother Nature not refrigeration to keep the corpses cool. The caskets are tagged and slid into racks in the storage facility until the spring ceremony, which is no different than a regular burial. They’re used to this up there. There’s a large Finnish-American population in the U.P. Back in the old country, bodies were stored  in the church’s bell tower until they could be buried. 

We don’t have a bell tower but we have mounds of rich, organic compost.  So as of now she’s nestled under a mound of compost, and next summer she’ll be spread over the farm. Is that so bad?  Do the kids know this? No. They want her buried with her blanket and her stuffed animal with a cross over her head, or a marker on which would be inscribed: Here lies Sunny, a good dog.  She never peed on the floor until the day she died. She liked carrots and lettuce, eggs and pumpkin. She liked people.

And this is the poem that is about more than a dog but you know how one thing reminds you of another and then another because everything is connected.

THE ART OF DOING NOTHING

The mercury outside my window

is covered with ice

and frost breached the inside of the glass.

I scrape it off with my nail—

it falls into the sink.

The furnace drones without pause

and my summersick dog lies on the register.

A draft runs through the house.

It sets chimes ringing and makes her nervous.

I inventory things not to do.

It’s in a book—The Art of Doing Nothing.

Meditate and you can see things that aren’t there—

brandied cakes and a bottle of wine

set out on the sideboard as if for a friend.

I look behind doors and pause at the stairs

come full circle to see myself sitting there—

in a winged-back chair, out of window’s view,

back to the wall, like a shell-shocked soldier.

Night blankets the house in a mantilla of doubt

but only cold comes in from under the door.

Connected with and inspired by poetry friends at: The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads for the Tuesday Platform. Add a poem of your choosing for feedback if you are a poet and a writer.