Poems happen quick
then get lost in the rushed
onslaught of a day and
I’ve gotten enough practice
to be able to (sometimes) see a poem
as it moves past me, as it pauses and my attention
glazes to the world around me for a breath and
the poem might as well be waving a white sign
that says, I Am A Poem in big blocky letters
because it’s that obvious. So some days
I get fooled into believing I’ll remember it.
But that’s not the way of a poem.
So here I am, hours later, frustrated,
tapping my forehead like my father does
when he can’t remember a name, as if tapping
might dislodge that name or this
poem and tumble them into our waiting hands.
But They Don’t Come Back.
Gone Is Gone. So pay attention and
take good notes or you’ll be left playing
with whatever words are lying around when
your actual subject has gone
wherever all those names go when my father forgets
and you’ll be left with no poem at all
like me, today.
My Father Forgets
Questions Who Go Out Searching For Answers
knock on doors in early morning
when the sky is the same gray as
mourning doves who love this hour
and the questions stop to talk
to any sleepy soul in rumpled pajamas
who answers the door and the questions
Ask, Which takes longer, to
pay bills or write a poem
dress for work or write a poem
pack lunch or write a poem
?
Plenty of smart, well-rested people
don’t answer the door so early.
Those awake are no wiser than
their sleeping, dreaming neighbors.
None of us knows the answer.
But here’s the new plan: Next time
the questions knock, let’s turn
their quizzical selves right back around,
grab our shoes and say we don’t know
but we’ll be happy to keep them company
while they walk.
Spring Crop
I come to compliment you on
loading the dishwasher without being asked,
proud of my continued efforts in the field of
Positive Reinforcement,
only to wind up yelling at you
for putting your muddy boots on the couch.
But why take them off, you ask, mystified–
when I’m leaving any minute now?
These are the conversations
that will
soon
walk out the door with you
and I’ll wait,
a hopeful, nervous gardener
to see how what I planted mingles with
what grows wild in this soil.
Watered with praise and benign neglect
and exasperation, I wait to see if
the spring crop sprouts into kindness
or tolerance, skill at negotiation
or laziness
or just mud on all your furniture.
The Recently Learned Difference Between Haiku and Senryu
Senryu: According to Merriam-Webster, “a 3-line unrhymed Japanese poem structurally similar to haiku but treating human nature usually in an ironic or satiric vein.”
Haiku
Goodbye to brown hills,
trees who scrubbed the spring blue sky
bristled like hedgehogs.
**********************************
Senryu
There are things I’ll miss:
Burping contests at dinner
isn’t one of them.
Abandoned
Here in this school
of bullies, prom queens,
ordinary kids still dazed by life,
and tragedies, both true and
imagined by fourteen-year-old girls,
Abandoned is the saddest story.
Here in this school
where we struggle with
grades and prom night,
illiteracy, the big game,
pregnant teens and faculty evaluations
his head with his floppy clean hair
is filled with where to sleep tonight.
Here in this school
where bells tell us when to
switch from chemistry to symbolism in
Shakespeare, forty-one minutes
to pack it neatly into uninterested minds
behind his shy, scraggly smile
he is learning about existence in a vacuum.
Here in this school
homeless, but not aimless,
he studies hard the art of absence
practicing how to disappear.
He is barely visible by the time we
remember to teach him this:
Every Body gets a space in this world
and people to notice them in it.
Senryu For Moms Too Tired To Count
City street at dusk
Eyes closed, she holds her sleeping
daughter in her arms.
Through the rain, I pray,
mother to mother, to ease
the long, cranky night ahead.
Talkable
You won’t be good at living alone,
my son tells me, because
you are too talkable,
his word combining
talkative and sociable.
And I am.
Talkable
describes me, plunging
into any conversation,
dipping my toes, paddling around,
always these same waters.
Now scared but almost ready
for the hidden pool
behind the waterfall
where the surface is still
and I am able
but do not talk.
The Moon’s Report
She writes:
You asked about humans.They are easy to describe, since I see everything in my light—with some small help from the Sun. I’ve watched and I know. I can tell You all about humans. As You hoped, they are very wise.
But, really, how could they not be filled with wisdom? You handed them understanding on a silver moonlit platter. Honestly, not that it’s my place to criticize, but their world is a little too obvious. Look at the hints You gave—on their round home, with their round heads and round babies, they couldn’t possibly miss the point. Then, all those wheels and spirals everywhere—seashells, seasons, nests, rings buried in tree trunks. And besides that, all the going and returning—tides, of course, but flowers, blizzards, leaves…oh, the list goes on and on.
How lovely it is for them, how clear. My advice: It would have been more interesting to give them a challenge, or at least a tiny puzzle. A static world, or one where all movement was linear. It would have given them something to figure out, instead of surrounding them with answers.
Look how they dance, how they gather together for births and weddings and deaths, living their circled lives on their round planet, calm and joyful, with so much evidence to show them the difference between finished and unfinished.
Mechanical
sounds cold, no
humor or passion.
Instead, see
precision
as ballet—perfect timing,
gears in pink tutus.
Casting Spells
In that moment I glanced away, some witch cast a spell on my children. I remember one golden flash of light. I blinked against the dazzle while they grew tall and secretive, lean with a hunger to be Away. Now there are whole days when they are strangers, sweet or surly, prowling this world we shared, looking for a way out.
What else can I do but study every spell I find? With luck and diligence, and so much time now that I’ve worked myself out of this job, each day is patched together with spells I cast myself. They are listed in the book we all received, along with Dr. Spock in his serious dark cover. The other book at every baby shower is Spells For Moms, with teething, tantrums, and chicken pox full of notes in the margin, recipes adjusted to taste. But now I’ve reached the back of the book, with all its untested spells. One marked Acceptance, another called New Chapters Blossom Like Wild Violets. And the last spell, the one I practice every day, titled Good Fortune For Their Roads.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 