I used to notice so much in the sky, airliners writing travelogues in white contrail ink, birds penning songs in feathered bunting strung tree to tree, castles and dragons and here and there your face sculpted in billowing vapor, even the poorly cleaned blackboard ceiling upon which crows would scratch their calls. After sundown I’d watch the winter moon rise working hard to escape from the net of limbs the maples tossed skyward to no avail, watch the escapee glide behind windblown clouds, follow stars as they ran their courses as if the gods were twisting the dial on the firmament, and wonder if I was hearing the invisible vee calling the cadence as it sky-marched from Canada to the Chesapeake. I don’t sense so much anymore as I wander alone beneath that world flying above since my neck doesn’t bend back far enough to scan the great dome covering 360 degrees of horizontal wonder. But over there an empty bag of chips is chasing a squirrel up that oak, at dawn the neighborhood windows glow like apricots or 65-inch rainbows, and then there’s this flat me-shaped guy who tripped me the other day when he caught me while I tried sky-gazing again.
nature
Trying For a Mountain When a Molehill Will Do
I’m sitting at my window watching a mountain being born upon the swatch of ground between me and the shed. Something out there wiggled, distracting my eye from this sheet of white, which lies as flat and dormant as my inspiration and the near-frozen ground from which -obviously - mountains can happen. Again it shakes and an eruption of fresh earth spews forth, cascading down its conical form like I wish great words would from my pointy head. And I spit curses at myself and Nature because there She goes making perfect molehills again while I’m stuck trying to make mountains. True happening. Too true failing.
Anything Worth Doing Well Is Worth Doing Slowly
I’m sitting here watching the oaks slowly shed their ragged russet costumes. They tease me like a stripper might, dropping one leaf from way up there, only to stop the drop on a well-placed limb just below. Maybe this tall lady outside my window is like one of those Gypsy Rose Lee talkative strippers. Where a big part of the act is the teasing patter as much as the ecdysiastic matter. I can’t really hear the leaves fall, though. Not from behind this window. I just remember the lyrics of the song they sang when I was a kid, and I’d look upwards along the trunk and watch oak leaves big as catcher’s mitts drift like tulle all the way down atop me there in the first row while the north wind band blew and, just like today, I thought I heard the leaves whisper, Let me entertain you… Combined two prompts today, because I’m running behind. Had to write poems based on Nature and Memory. The title is a quote from Louise Hovick, Gypsy herself.
Call It
I don’t think the trees care if the leaves they flip come up heads or tails. They just let them fall, like coins into an old toll booth basket, something you must do to get from here to there, from Summer to Winter. Sometimes I feel like one of those leaves, flipped from the branch closest to the sky, where I could sometimes feel as if I was flying, only I’m actually tripping my way down the oaken stairway, ultimately jumping into the void between Up and Down. I know the ground's coming, cold and sad as another broken heart, but for a moment or two, I’m defiant, ignoring gravity upon an October breeze, enjoying a freedom I’ve only felt for so short a time before. It’s not the sky in which I fly, but, soon enough, the bare trees won’t block my view of that blue. Unless… Heads!
Fallen Again
From their highest branch perch upon us they’ll spy, in this sylvan church on whose floor they’ll all lie. But some have yet to fall, though look at them sway, like bold paintings on the wall of a windy gallery display. They must know come their ends, colors bright as beacons, as cold North Wind portends and their grip weakens. There goes another I see I’d hoped might be staying. Nature’s iconography at which I’d been praying. But all we can do is sigh as they wave ‘bye and fly, remember, when most leaves fall and die come dark mid-November. And that’s how it goes, as years and we grow old. Winter’s silver snows will plate even autumn’s gold. My prayers cannot stop the passage of time. Like leaves we’ll drop when we drop, with or without silly rhyme. It’s October and I’ve fallen, dear, and I don’t care if you’re an oak or birch. Labels don’t matter to me here, leaf’s a leaf, love’s love in my church. Photo ©2015, Joseph Hesch
Come As You Are
Lake George, Autumn, 1927 by Georgia O'Keeffe Conflicted leaves hang between summer slick and autumn tweed, at this place on the lake where your heart stays and my invitation says come as you are. And we stand on the deck behind this place, while the setting light upon your face says it’s all right, you saved some space where I can lay my head. And that’s where we are, behind that locked door, you’ve opened in your heart and I don’t need any more than a dream on your pillow. I’ll even sleep on the floor. ‘Cause the invitation reads come as you are. And I’m yours. Sorry for the disappearing act. I haven’t been feeling well. I’ll tell you the story in a week or so. But I was inspired to write this today by looking out my window and into a heart.
Within the Poems of Autumn
Photo by S. Zeilenga When autumn comes, I look back on the trail I’ve just followed, hoping to find out where I’m going while becoming lost in the loneliness of where I’ve been. Here and there I see my footprint pages, those wandering thoughts and feelings about this, that, me and you I didn’t know I’d left behind until I looked back. Back where I was lost. The maples, in their majestic magic, drop their poems, too, allowing today’s skies to grow within their branches with each beat of the wind, showering us with the color and aroma of something leaving the trail toward tomorrow to a leaf-lined tomorrow, shushing our sad memories to wind-swept whispers, and keeping our secrets between the journal pages they safeguard beneath their shadowy hands.
Their Together Just Is
Through the window, rabbit browses on clover by the shed, framed thus in her garden as her companion, robin, attends her. Rabbit sits, her ears and nose a’twitch to every switch in robin’s bearing and song. Meanwhile, her confidant, sharing secrets in a rhyming trill only these two truly understand, snaps ‘round his head to catch each waver in wind and light. When Rabbit hops for her treeline shadowland, robin leaps to his sky world. So different, yet so in tune. I don’t wonder why they’re a pair anymore. It doesn’t matter if their partnering provides some symbiotic synchronicity or not. They’re just better together and their together just is. True story.
Golden
I think it would be nice to spend an evening together. We could wax poetic about the waning play of light behind the trees, the houses, the curve of Earth, while watching the sun take its leave of us. There’s a lot going on in that word… evening. We say it and understand it means sunset, dusk, gloaming, but also when twilight balances in its hands those even shares of day and night and the golden hour takes the field, but gives you a gift I’ve seen only in my imaginings. It would be nice to see you resplendent in such a setting, of place, of sun, of gold, a sunlit echo of days spent together, nights apart, and moments when you were the jewel in evening’s crown. Day 29 makeup for NaPoWriMo. And Evening poem. As I noted, if you put that word on the table and pick at its parts from all angles, evening will tell you a lot. It can give a poet lonely for what was and for what wasn't, except in his imagination, the kind of image that'll last inside his eyelids all night long.
If We Only Listened
When I could hear again, I listened. I listened to the wind whoosh its breath past my ears. I listened as it roiled the river to a chop of a million mirrored suns. I listened to our shadows scrape their chains across the pavement. I listened to traffic hum its song on an interstate I could not see but believed knew the words. I listened as a gull shouted into the wind that it found it easier to fight river currents but loved the sky too much. I listened to you tell me how angry our world was, though never heard you say that word. And then I listened to my voice speak of what it didn’t understand because I never tried to say these things before. So I listened to the river once more. The constant river, never changing, spilling truths in teaspoons or torrents, if we’ll only listen. Combined Writer's Digest's prompt for an "unchanged" poem and NaPoWriMo's to find inspiration from a favorite line of poetry. It's from William Stafford's "Ask Me," probably my favorite poem.
A Thing for Words 