Observation Poems
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Prologue
It has been said in various ways: “Life is what happens every day when you wake up in the morning until you wake up the next morning.” And measured by the clock, recorded in your brain as memories and experiences, absorbed by your senses, you are confronted each day with myriad episodes from split seconds to hours of “what happened.” And sometimes we have observations as we reflect on what happened and try to make sense of it all. Getting through a day is green fodder for a poem.
These poems are observations of “what is happening.”
The Rules of Engagement
We go through life
Pointing our finger at the moon
And hide the moon
Behind our finger.
Making the moon unseen and insignificant.
We telegraph the messages
Of the heart and the eye and the soul
And too often the messages
Are lost in transmission.
We live side by side with death
Living is terminal
Searching the endless mystery of faith
That sends us
In search of obscure dreams
Ill conceived hopes
To give us the courage
To spit out the unpalatable pieces of reality.
Life slaps us in the face
Or pats us on the back
Gives us a fist pump
Or kicks us in the ass
Some times for the wrong reasons
And sometimes we receive a bounty
Of undeserved grace
Those are some of the rules of engagement
There are more.
Primitive
Men of science have sifted
Through the word tracks of history
And surmised that among primitive people
There are no primitive languages.
Each language
Has demonstrated its proper share
Of grammar and syntax and words
For the things and ideas of life.
This is true
Because no man ever thought
Or felt
Or dreamed
Or loved primitively
But lived on the leading edge
Of the possibilities
Of that place
And that time
And all those experiences
We call living.
They took the next step into the future
And provided hope and shoulders to stand upon.
A Man Plants His Seed
A man plants his seed
Within the womb
And awaits the untempered son
That he must forge to finish dreams
That he has left undone.
And so the child becomes a man
And new dreams are begun
And again
He plants his seed within the womb
So endless dreams are spun.
Currency of My Life
The currency of my life
Was once counted in years
And now in the advanced seasons of my life
Some unknown fraction of my life has been consumed
And there is no desire or need to know the fraction
From the womb that suckled my seed
And the earth’s womb
Where I will perpetuate the dust to dust cycle
I have changed the currency of time
To smaller denominations of fewer days and seasons
Hopefully lived and cherished more carefully.
Now I find my pockets full of measured time
Less impatient to see the seasons pass
Or the last leaf fall and the first frost appear
There is a stronger kinship to the world
I will be more careful
To watch the transformations
Of the colors and smells of the seasons
And to take measure of the earth’s precise and careful tilt.
I will ask the earth to pulse more slowly
And to take its walk through the universe
As predictably as Einstein’s equations dictate
At a more deliberate pace
And some day
I may change the currency of my life
Into a denomination of hours
Or days each more precious
Than my youthful hours and days
As those days once enjoyed or pleasantly squandered
Grinding away at pieces of time that lay hidden
Between the teeth of the gears
That tick the seconds in a clock
To delay spending the last moment earthbound
And the first moment of eternity.
Things
We are surrounded by things
Places to be things
And things to do
There are house things
Car things
Work things
Comfort things
Entertainment things
Throw the garbage things
File the taxes things
Eat the food things
Talk to people things
Take a piss things
Read the newspaper things
Smile and cry things
And things things things.
We are owners of these things
And reciprocally owned by these things
We can both break things
When they are working
And fix things when they are broke
But as life squeezes the last morsel of time
Between relentless jaws of living
And the journey to eternal dust.
We must choose our things more carefully
With more purpose.
Not being slave to the gods of things
Knowing all of these things
Must be left behind
For others to cater to and care for
Knowing are legacy are these things.
Night and Day
The night reigns supreme
Content in its dominion
But the sun disagrees
With a more secure opinion
The nights resist the daylights presence
Pretending it does not matter
But knowing that its own existence
Is the absence of the latter.
For All of the Poems
For all the poems that are
Pulled and wrenched
Extruded and extricated
And gouged
From the poet
Each poem hides as much as it reveals.
Every definition
Perpetuates the need for new definitions
Every feeling and emotion
And unresolved passion
Makes demands for feelings
So deeply engraved inside the soul
And either intentionally or blindly not revealed.
Neither pick nor shovel
Nor God
Nor any caliber of man
Nor the most careful surgeon’s hand
Can separate the pulp from the core
To find what lies hidden.
Poems plough and extricate
The deep vein of the soul
To reveal fool’s gold
Or the dream that put the gleam
In Dante’s cultured hand
And Michelangelo’s perceptive eye.
Pieces
I will give you goldenrods and acorns
The corrugated cones sent airborne
Pines whose singular masts
Scratch the belly of the sky
I will offer stones
Not one the same among themselves
Or among the world
And moss that tickles your fingers
And bunches of violets
And green tongued leaves
Cool water from a cupped hand
I will give you handfuls of the earth
And if you choose
All the pieces of me.
The Day
We journeyed through the day
And the day traveled with us easily and softly
We explored each other
With eyes and words
We played with silence
Without silence how will we ever know each other.
You tell me you are a day- to- dayer
With a single-minded journey to tomorrow
The blue denim-ed shadows
Of your yesterdays sometimes fill your face
As with my Pisces inquisitiveness
I search the footprints of your life
You must be a dreamer
Because dreams live
On the tomorrow side of today.
We walked to the edge of the sea
The first time the three of us have been together
The sun crawled behind the clouds
And I wished it had stayed
To kiss your face as the sea looked on
You searched for the missing piece of me
That will complete the puzzle
That you invented or found
As you have pushed the disparate pieces of me
Around in your mind
As we crossed the line of revealing too much
And you held me back with your more patient eye.
We used the day with a careless carefulness
We tasted the day
And it left us full of each other
And hungry for another day.
Small Blessings
We are all benefactors of small blessings
Detecting a crumpled twenty-dollar bill secreted
In a pocket of a pair of long closeted summer jeans
Revealing itself
In preparation for seasonal washing.
A small prayer for a minor need
Is answered with some embarrassment
That such a trivial expectation
Was expeditiously rewarded.
In surfing the depths of cable channels
Instant pleasure is dispensed as
Fred Astaire appears gliding lean and elegant
Across a black and white screen
Every hair in place
Gracefully defying gravity
And maneuvering Ginger Rogers backwards
And on her heels.
A book long lost and missed and not forgotten
Appears magically in the recesses of a drawer
Selected pages embedded with dog eared post-its
And underlined phrases revealing
Half remembered and now so pleasantly re-discovered
Sentences and phrases of interest
And renewing once silent memories.
A new poem in an eclectic anthology
Succinctly describes a feeling once felt
But never expressed so poignantly
And with words evoking profound simplicity
And reminding us of the chasm
Between the emotions we experience
And the ability to describe them.
Small blessings
Embedded in one’s life
Serendipitously
Will not impact human tectonics
Nor expedite the search for nirvana
But creates small and unexpected wonderment
Of unpredictable and possibly undeserved joy.
The Moon
The moon is in our service
Obeying gravity and cosmological equations
Dictated by Relativity and Quantum
Describing the web of space carved about the Earth
Defying all the sciences
And extending my arm
I hold the lunar globe balanced on a single finger tip
And gently maneuver the thumb
As a sextant
Balancing the moon as precisely as a surveyor’s astute hand.
The moon is carpeted in meringue white
Its surface speckled as a plover’s breast
I flip and juggle the moon
Gently with a Pythagorean lever
My Thumb flings the moon across the ebony sky
And catch it in the other hand
Gently and safely
Never having put it at risk
Then gently set it on its course again
So it can proceed about its business.
Earn Our Way to Heaven
We can earn our way to heaven
With good deeds
Walking old ladies across threatening streets
Paying tithes or a little less if no one is counting
Having unquestioning faith
As solid and strong and impervious as walnuts not shucked
Commit ourselves to saving the manatees
Possibly un-endanger an endangered species.
But we might just as soon
Consider achieving the destination
With coupons and free rides
And crossing our fingers
Providing bribes and promises
Acts of unlimited contrition
Endless Hail Mary’s
And devious deals with the devil
Except that an omnipotent God
Would know our ways
And possibly not hesitate to undermine the fakery.
Just Another Day
Endless magnitudes of dew drops
Anoint the morning grass
A sky full of clouds
Massages the fingered mountain tops
Baptizing them in sunlight.
The eastern sun
Peeks over the shoulder of the horizon
As a cacophony of birds
Chirp the darkness into dawn
And as the nocturnal silence dissipates
Dabs of purple and gold and crimson and yellow
Wallpaper the sky
Like a van Gogh palette.
With morning eyes
We sit in silence
Except for the rocking chair syncopation
Hidden from the world
We maneuver our shadowed porch chairs
And together we are
Flying with the butterflies
To a South American sanctuary
Barging down the Nile
Sailing tall ships to China
Traversing the distant Poles in a single day
Making small talk with Jefferson at Monticello
About crops and liberty
Dancing with Balanchine
Turning our backs to Everest in victory
Making speculative calculations with Hawking
About the mysteries of Black Holes.
Just another day!
I Must Do Something of Importance
I must do something of importance
Like chasing lightening bugs
Or at least counting them
Fantasize meeting the Pope
Waste a perfectly good day rewriting old poems
Salvaging old poems with retrofitted nuances
Or disposing of poems with courage
In fact possibly this poem.
Perusing the simple elegance of a plastic fork
That delivers the most delicious prosciutto
Hand clasping a piece of melon
Coating a crostini wall to wall
With dark pungent olive oil
Watching a child capture an ant or
Exploring a spider web
Sing off key to Sinatra’s special phrasing
Of songs forged into my memory
Search clouds for the shapes of faces.
I must do something of importance.
Not Being Alone
Two pieces of toast
Stand back to back
Until properly tanned
Popping their crusted heads from the toaster
One piece shall be eaten
The other ignored and not eaten.
The radio whispers talk show nonsense
Decibels too low to be understood
But offering a presence
Of corporal white noise
To nurture the silence.
A fantasy memory tip toes through the mind
Of a contrived conflict of two events
Competing for the same hour this day
And the anxiety of feigned busyness.
The table is set in tandem for two
Chairs perched at facing angles to encourage
A robust conversation
Across the vacant space
That shall hear the thunder of silence
Bounded and surrounded by loneliness
Under the pretense of not being alone.
Forty Mile Wide Day
Every love is one day at a time long
Hopefully a day that lasts forever
Until the day it ends
Slipping into eternity
The loss is a day conceived in blinding sunlight
That ends in the darkest
Blackest of all nights.
Every love is forty miles wide
It is as wide as all the dreams
And fantasies it manufactures
Laid side by side
And love can be as narrow
As the distance between the
Eyes of a caterpillar
And through which no love
Can maneuver or survive.
Then one fearless day your fears are aroused
You are singing to the moon
And balancing the sun
On the tip of a finger.
With no sense of threat or danger
And as fast as a single flap
Of a hummingbird’s wing
The forty-mile-wide day is gone.
Rain
As children
We are told to get out of the rain
With its promise of wet clothes and colds
Thinking: rain rain go away please come back another day
The admonitions follow us through life
As we defend ourselves
With wrinkled raincoats and contorted umbrellas
Peeking from beneath covered structures
And monitoring the ubiquitous weather reports
Afraid we shall be melted by the rain
As certain as the wicked witch faced that destiny.
Why didn’t someone tell us
To turn our faces skyward
To open our mouths
To suckle the skies
Partake of the clouds
Overflowing with H2O
As we drink the nectar of the heavens
Bathe our skin and our souls
Watch barren earth bloom again
Nurse the farrowed land into germination and growth
Wash the face of the earth clean
As rain participates in the endless
Cycles of life.
Sweet Silent Solitude
I have stumbled on your
Sweet silent solitude
As your eyes survey a bright day
With butterflies winging their staccato flights
Geckoes posing their silent pantomimes
Egrets tip toeing through silent circles of water.
I cannot trespass on your quiet thoughts
You are not earth bound
Or mind bound
But travel beyond the bounds of gravity and consciousness
In a deep thoughtful solitude.
The sun does a soft tarantella
On the pond
As you gaze across the foxgloves
Stroke the petunias with your keen eye
Genuflects to the oleanders
That you have so carefully nurtured
To bound and bond the pond to our home.
I tip toe away not to disturb your thoughts
Hoping one day
You will share
The fountainhead of your sweet silent solitude.
Colors
Your skin absorbs the colors of the day
Reflecting from the vessel of your skin
In our early morning bed you are chalk white
And in the afternoon
Your canvass of skin
Shimmers with freckles
Seeming to join in unique reticulated patterns.
At night you are luminous by your reading
As a sixty-watt bulb
Bathes you in soft pastels
Until you disappear and blend into the pillow
Bathed in soft shadows as you sleep.
Lines
I peruse the mirror inspecting the lines
Traveling in myriad courses across the face
Longitudinally and latitudinally
Intersecting at unusual and disparate places
Crawling beneath the eyes
And hiking across the crest of the forehead
Surrounding the nose with explanation marks.
No need to rationalize the source of the lines
Caused by songs not sung
Loves pursued and lost
Annoyances both real and imagined
Battles lost with some remorse
And the wasted energy of encounters never fought
The constant wear and the occasional tears
Of living hard and losing hard
Sometimes with rancor and sometimes with exultation
Leaving its imprints on this lined façade
Redefining itself through time
And the wear and tear leaving their faceprints.
Some lines surprisingly are slightly smoothed
By the endless joys of life
Nurtured in the heart and soul
And displayed in the hills and valleys
Of this aging face.
Can Botox or collagen sway the battles
Of past worries and the endless voyages of life
Sometimes finding a port
And others lines going from nowhere to nowhere
The book of life is engraved on this facade
The face has lived these chapters
And not a nip and not a tuck
Can rewrite the history
Which is imprinted and is both aged and ageless
And as revealing and unknown as hieroglyphics.
The dermatologist says: Years of sun damage
And repeats: Years of sun damage
Either for emphasis or to make his case
He does not see my face as the archaeological ruins
Of a life lived both biologically and emotionally
With copious amounts of passion and pain
Tempered by doses of solace
He does not see the history of anxiety and joy
And surprise that have written
Countless troughs on this lined face
Only
He sees an epidermis in need of repair.
To the dermatologist I say:
Bless the lines
Bless every fucking one of them
They were well earned!
Dreamer's Manifesto
An elephant dreams of boundless forests
To roam and search and travel in herds
Conjuring dreams larger than one hundred elephant ears
Larger than the dreams of a thousand chipmunks
An elephant dreams of forests.
The seagull dreams of fathomless sky
As it flies its one endless flight
Riding the ridges of the horizon
Meandering to the edge of the clouds
The seagull dreams of sky.
The windmill dreams of the everlasting wind
Decisively constant and certain
As it circumscribes paddled circles through the sky
With its outstretched arms
Bruising and suckling the ocean of air
The windmill dreams of wind.
Dreamers must dream their dreams
More boundless than the elephant’s forests
More fathomless than the seagull’s sky
More everlasting than the windmill’s wind.
The dreamer must dream without definition
With lust and hankering
And hunger
And yearning
And unrequited desire
And unbounded definition
Of the breath and scope of the dreamer’s dream.
Fate Plays Games of Chance with Our Lives
Fate plays games of chance with our lives
Indiscriminately
Randomly
Beyond our control and understanding
With no concern for the outcomes.
There are all of the unpredictable circumstances
And diabolical workings of fate:
A corner turned in a hallway
A new road walked
A spoken word to a stranger
Being thirty seconds or so late or early to be at that spot at that time
A head turned one way rather than another
The careless turn of the knob on a radio station
A page in a book indiscriminately turned to
An eye contact avoided or made
A word spoken or not
An appointment made or possibly forgotten
A dream pursued or neglected
A trip made or canceled or re-routed
A class or concert or movie attended
A book randomly selected in a library
A website selected by the careless click of a mouse
A bump into a stranger in a mall.
As with the random roll of dice
Or a card selected by chance
Our lives are changed forever
And completely with no recourse
And with no judgment or appeal
No opportunity to run the movie in reverse
No appeal for the wellbeing or the ill-being of those so judged.
Fate happens again and again relentlessly
We have no recourse and there is no escape from its gravity
And the journey and way station
Always ends at an unknown port and undefined destination
Fate delivers suffering and joy with indifference
Fate plays games of chance with our lives
Fate makes life complete
Fate’s unpredictability is predictable
We must accept and love the people and events that fate delivers.
The "A" Train
Duke Ellington provided directions
To Billy Strayhorn in 1939
“Take the A Train”
The Subway delivered Billy to Harlem
And a song title and song were given birth.
Dying is the one-way ticket to eternity
When the journey really begins
One can wait for plagues or wars
Or pestilence
Or accidents or illness
And endless circumstances that are the byproduct of living
Or the final tick of the biological clock
That runs us out of time
Transporting us to
Take the A Train to eternity.
Bok Tower
(Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales, FL)
On this highest of hills
On an island mountain
Protruding from the breast of Florida
Sits the gleaming tower
Laminated in lime as pink as a flamingo
And cloaked in coquina
Cut from the newborn soul of Florida
More millenniums ago
Then the grains in two hand filled with sand.
Live oaks stand composed and certain
As if extruded from the earth
Their gentle swirling branches
As delicate as a van Gogh rendering
Encircle the tower
Genuflecting arm in arm
As if in silent prayer to the tower.
Gardens in haphazard symmetry
Splattered about the hammocks
Kneel at the feet of the live oaks
And meandering paths
Defined by camellias and azaleas
Framing the gardens
As petunias and impatience and daffodils
Pay homage in seasonal tribute.
The carillons nestle in the warm breast of the tower
Shoulder to shoulder
Holding their now silent voices
Until the carillonneur commences maneuvering
The levers and pedals
Energizing and choreographing a choir of carillons
Each precisely on key
As the singing tower vibrates
Like a long sunlit tuning fork.
A crescendo of music
Cascades from the tower
And Mozart sings from this Floridian hill
As fervent and majestic
When first heard
From the valleys of Austria.
The carillonneur coaxes tears and smiles
From the five dozen carillons
Now breathing as one
Inhaling and exhaling the melodic breaths
Of Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Della Penna and Gershwin
The music engulfs the hills and gardens
Cascades through the live oaks
While large handfuls of breezes
Engage the live oak leaves in polite applause.
At day’s end
The sun sets luminous on the marble and tiles
Extruding earth tones form the coquina
And under the blanket of constellations
In the still night
The tranquil tower and hushed carillons sleep deeply
Awaiting the gentle touch of a new sunrise.
The Brownstones of Manhattan
These now dilapidated homes were once a paradise
Of Brownstones leaning one upon another
Their cascading outside stairs and landings like giant paws
Reaching out to scratch the backs of the sidewalks
The brass door knobs
Shiny and new and reflecting sunlight
The windows like rectangular eyes
Peeking out at newly planted maples
Embedded in beds carved out of the pavement
Standing surveyor straight like sentinels along the street
The floors when laid mint new
Wait to taste their first soapy scrubbing
There is not a creak in a stair
Nor a hinge groaning under its burden
Of large paneled doors.
It was on either side of the cusp of two centuries
In which new wealth built new Brownstones elbow to elbow
Strung avenue after avenue
Into Harlem and Manhattan
Massive steam breathing engines
Brought the stone from distant quarries
The stone that once demarcated a distant ridge
In Upstate New York
Defined the stairway edifices in brocaded streets
Where architects and builders created new ridges of buildings
Outlining the ubiquitous rising skyline
Forests were fell for those massive doors
And chiseled beams
And endless fields of wood floorings
Hauled by boat and wagon
From distant woods to the side walked streets of Manhattan.
Some Brownstones thrived with people
Living in them robustly and breathing life
For some Brownstones
Location and trends and
Fluctuations in urbanization
Have redefined the Brownstones
The wood floors are stained
With myriad generations of humanity
And tears and neglect and changes in fortunes
The doors creak to the same tune as the floors
The brass knobs are duct taped
The windows are shuttered with curtains and dust
By people not wanting to look out
And forbidding the world to look in.
The massacred quarries and forests are quiet now
And those brownstones await a new day
But certainly not the wrecking ball
And for these Brownstones
They shall come alive again
There will be redemption and renovation.
Hammondsport
It was a Sunday morning
Feeling the way Sunday mornings feel
The morning air was still exhaling
The coolness of the night
As the warm breath
Of the morning sun was filling the streets
The long hands of large maples reached out
From both sides of the streets
And touched finger tips.
The gazebo in the village square
In the lap of the village center
Shaded by trees sitting side by side
Surrounded by shops with windowed eyes
All inviting walkers and browsers and bench sitters.
Park benches worn by thousands of conversations
Sit like content cats on their haunches.
People walk about with Sunday newspapers
Dressed in their Sunday finest
With Sunday thoughts
Sharing Sunday conversations
Entering white steepled churches
It is a town that is old and ageless
Young and reborn
Refreshed by every spin of the earth.
One can imagine that living there
Time would go slowly
Inconsistent with Einstein equations
And the distances to the outside world
Would be tenfold and more as measured
By the most careful surveyor’s mark.
There is no recollection
Of arriving or leaving but only being there
There is gnawing urge
To return on another Sunday morning
But there is no going back
And why tamper with a beautiful memory
They are hard to come by
And in the eye of one’s memory
That Sunday morning can be relived forever.
The Wood Stove
The wood stove stands tall and alert
Its black paws straddling the hearth
This four-legged fire breathing dragon
Is an engaging winter roommate
Providing a generous perimeter of heat
So did the stove partake with a generous appetite
Starting with an appetizer of kindling
Gulping pine voraciously
Consuming oak and birch with delight
Producing pleasant and pungent odors
And when satisfied
The stove chattered to its own cadence
Contently burping and crackling.
It’s broad black top
Warmed seasoned tomato sauces
Simmered soups with engaging aromas
And garlic bread teasingly pungent
Appropriately bathed in olive oil and salt.
The stove is the way station
From kitchen to table
Inviting chilled observers back seductively
With its golden blinking eye peaking though the door
Providing warmed food
Coupled with slightly chilled wine
The stove created a pleasant refuge
Of safety and warmth in the cold winter night.
Pasta e Fagioli
Remembrance of Angie Nannariello and Her Famous Pasta e Fagioli
Pasta fazoola is slang Italian
For the more correct pasta e fagioli
Literally pasta and beans
In this recipe
All measurements are not specific
It is not a teaspoon of this or that
But the less precise and abstract definition
Of some of this but not too much of that
And certainly not too little of something else.
The olive oil is pungent and green and luminous
Like the color of a new born frog
The single medium minced onion
Breathes and succors the olive oil
As they symbiotically savor each other
Canned diced tomatoes immersed in olive oil
Baptizing the now sautéed onions relentlessly
Joined by cannelloni beans
Vibrantly and valiantly seasoned
With unmeasured basil and oregano and black pepper
And crunched bay leaves
Some unregulated dashes of salt and parsley
All permeating the air and delighting the nose
And tearing the eyes.
The Ditalini pasta
Is bunched into three or possibly four
Hand measured quantities
Farfalle or elbows can be mixed or substitute for the Ditalini
Bathed in foamy boiling salt water
Soothed with olive oil
And at a precise though not timed moment
The pasta is delivered from the pot
And now swishes around in the colander
Delectably and delightfully al dente
Not allowed to stay a moment too long
And saving every drop of the drained water
The pasta splashes into the tomatoes and condiments
While the saved salty water
Is incrementally added and not measured
Turning the thick mass
Into a soupier consistency.
I never make pasta e fagioli
That Mom does not come to mind
Her patient commitment to the possibilities
Of a fine pasta e fagioli
Her good senses and lack of preciseness
In measuring ingredients
The joy of watching her across the table
Laughing with her head slightly held back
The strong features of her face
Defined by her prominent Roman nose
The arthritic hands that relentlessly and tirelessly
Choreographed a thousand dishes
As she breathed in the aroma
Of the pasta e fagioli
Her hands in a prayer like gesture.
Since she last made her pasta e fagioli
It has never tasted as good
Or smelled as aromatic
But I will continue to make it
As a way of saying a silent prayer
To the legacy of her gift and her mentoring
Her mystic mastery of the ancient process
But it shall always be less than perfect than her pasta e fagioli
And her perfect love.
Olive Oil
The olive oil as green as khaki
Deposited in a low saucer
Its pungency lathers the saucer and the air
With its amiable aroma
A dexterous index finger gently skims the oil
Lubricating the finger which now
Anoints the tongue
Which now bathes the palate
With the essence of the mountains
And soil and the sun
Of the long verdant valleys of Italy.
The finger then double dips
For a second blessing
Followed by the thrust of a slice of crusty Italian bread
As brittle as potato chips
Tasting as if the wheat was thrashed this very day
Skimming the olive oil
The bread is anointed
Breathing deeply as the oil seeps through the crust
And now lounges on the tongue
For a long lazy moment.
We must thank God and ancient artisans
For the blessings of olive oil.
Forgeting and Forgiving
A container of delicious vanilla flavored almond milk
Is left opened and forgotten and deserted
On the table rather than returned to the refrigerator
You hold it in hand and remind me
There is a place for everything and everything it its place.
Returning from the store with
A list of five or possibly six items
To purchase
One item has been forgotten
And a second is the wrong item
We review the list together
And you gently fail to admonish me
And rationalize that we can do without those items today.
A brief power failure this afternoon
And though you reminded about the need for clock re-setting
I neglected to reset one clocks properly
Though reminded by way of a note on the kitchen table
And in the deep darkness of the night
The alarm goes off and chatters in the night
In the untimely midst of a deep morning sleep
You swallowed your irritation
Though your silence thundered
And now followed by a long but patient exasperated sigh.
The better part of a day unfolded
And I failed to share an I Love You
You smiled
You kissed me tenderly
You reminded me
I am forgiven of the episodes
With milk and lists and alarms and such
All is well again
And tomorrow I shall remember to remember
As best I can
But never forget your loving touch and your love.
Forgetting and Forgiving
A container of delicious vanilla flavored almond milk
Is left opened and forgotten and deserted
On the table rather than returned to the refrigerator
You hold it in hand and remind me
There is a place for everything and everything it its place.
Returning from the store with
A list of five or possibly six items
To purchase
One item has been forgotten
And a second is the wrong item
We review the list together
And you gently fail to admonish me
And rationalize that we can do without those items today.
A brief power failure this afternoon
And though you reminded about the need for clock re-setting
I neglected to reset one clocks properly
Though reminded by way of a note on the kitchen table
And in the deep darkness of the night
The alarm goes off and chatters in the night
In the untimely midst of a deep morning sleep
You swallowed your irritation
Though your silence thundered
And now followed by a long but patient exasperated sigh.
The better part of a day unfolded
And I failed to share an I Love You
You smiled
You kissed me tenderly
You reminded me
I am forgiven of the episodes
With milk and lists and alarms and such
All is well again
And tomorrow I shall remember to remember
As best I can
But never forget your loving touch and your love.
Morning Sounds
There are those impetuous unchoreographed morning sounds
That shake the world awake
The sound of a teapot screeching and whistling for attention
As the early morning silence
Greets the growing cacophony of the day
Flowing into the windows
As living things commence their living
And filling the air waves.
The strained slam of a door thirsting for an oiling
Breezes gushing through a choir of trees
And the wind whistling through a screen door
Playing the door like a harp
A bee makes staccato stops as it buzzes
And defines its journey
With modest decibels of sound
A dog barks in the distance
Either annoyed or trying to be annoying.
Your slippers flip flop across the floor
The symphony continues
With your soft slightly raspy early morning voice
Grumbles something unintelligible
As you rub away the sleep from your eyes and mind.
Together we listen to the world awakening
As acclimated and surprised and certain
As the first time we have heard
Each morning sings old and new songs
And the world must hum or sing or whistle along
Or respond in silence
As we measure the tempo and harmony and sounds
And circumstance of this new day.
The White House on the Hill
The white house sits on the hill
Comfortably postured
Between a large oak that is older than the house
A contoured field of wild flowers on the west
And on the east side runs a stone wall
Pleasantly dilapidated and ramshackled by time and intervention
Running perpendicular to the road that faces the house
A red barn aged and wise
That preceded the building of the house
Remarkably all built many generations ago
With a life line encompassing two hundred years
The house was lived in continuously
Originally by the builder and following a litany of owners.
The front windows of the white house
Are narrow and high and squint to view
The distant meandering brook
Below a road running parallel to the brook
The road mimicking every turn of the brook
At the foot of the hill are numerous boulders
Apparently thrown awry in asymmetric fashion
By glaciers millenniums ago
Now posturing like sentinels in pleasant harmony
The boulders seem to belong there and with purpose
So be it that they rest in peace
Each boulder gathering a façade of moss and aging with grace.
The white house on the hill
Accommodates and suits the hill well
Its dimensions define some architectural eccentricities
That are however pleasant and soothing to perceive
The authentic and original red barn
Fifty yards or so to its west
Once was populated with horses and cows and chickens
Protesting tales of cold winters and sun burnt summers
Once defined and approached by dirt ruts and bumps
Of horse drawn wagons and cows returning from pastures
Wild flowers populate the boundary of the roads
Aggressively carpeting sunlit hills
Displaying natures random definition of beauty.
The house was conceived and built in the 1820’s
When an elegant James Monroe would
Soon hand the reigns of a newly defined democracy
To a wily John Quincy Adams
The house is not far from the original Post Road
Where hard riding horsemen
Carried letters posted to and from New York City
To northern places like the Connecticut village
Where the white house on the hill sits.
Villages were often purposefully established
Based on the ride a postman could make in one day
Rewarding the patience and exhilaration of villagers
Welcoming and hungry for news both good and bad
The Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in the village
Two weeks after the glorious day in Philadelphia
The Postman was no competition for today’s emails
Piercing the skies and wires in digitized micro seconds
Faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings.
The white house on the hill
Sits on a foundation and cellar with hewn beams
The walls populated with random field stones
From the forests and fields around the house
Pulled there by horse and man
Drawn and hauled with brute strength
Stained with the sweat of man and horse
Deposited and mortared one upon another
In the low ceiling basement.
Cellar ceiling beams
Cut from the timber of nearby forests
And milled downstream from the brook
The beams are fine cut on two opposite sides
And the other two sides displaying traces of ancient bark
That have not seen sunshine or rain for two centuries
Beams that once breathed wintered frosts
And tasted long hot summer suns
Once providing cellar coolness
To bottled foods and cider and salted meats.
In recent events a water leak
Appeared unwelcomed and intrusive
In what was once the only bathroom
And after etching in the wall a perfect one-foot square
As sacrilegiously invasive as opening King Tuts tomb
Not to find ancient bones and treasure
But revealing pine needles and acorns and hay
The limited choice for providing insulation
When the newly milled wall joists and plastered walls were new.
Local folks would reminisce
About the white house on the hill
Saying “That house has good bones”
And “They don’t build houses like that anymore”
We must contemplate and imagine the joys and sorrows
And the dreams and love
The laughter and tears
The work and play that came to pass
Through the families and for all those myriad seasons that transpired
In the white house on the hill.
Footprints in the Sand
(Recollections of the Jersey Shore)
We leave footprints in the sand
Walking across a sunburnt beach to seek
The ocean lapping at the heels of the shore
And chasing the retreating sands
Navigating from a distant path to the sea
With beach paraphernalia
Leaving erratic and meandering foot prints
In the hot sand.
There are times that urge us to the sea
Just as newly born turtles vacate nests
Making a desperate journey to the sea
The beach is a place
To examine life’s issues and challenges
To throw unpleasant memories
To the waves breaking on the shore
And see them wash away into the endless sea
The sea and sky and sand are cosmic and vast
Thus one’s body and spirit seem small and inconsequential
And provides a more proper scale and measure
For our problems and disappointments and endangered dreams
The beach is a place to think and contemplate.
Our eyes scan the expanse of beach
Populated by several umbrellas and
A child robustly tossing sand into the wind
Vigorously and robustly digging a sand hole
And searching for China
Building sandcastles and anticipating
For the steady hand of waves to obliterate and demolish
Only to build once more.
Time and sea and sun are a recipe
For reading and reflecting and dozing
And escaping the relentless hand of time
A place for breathing deeply and tasting the salt air
By days end the rising tide and windswept sand
Will have no memory of the path taken to the sea
Nor recollections of the numerous and timeless
Journeys and voyages across the sands
Previous paths become only pleasant memories.
Each visit is a repetition of past journeys
And yet each time is a first and a never again
But there is a lust to return to the sea
One more time
And one more time.
There are times that no one is on the beach
Because of the circumstance of time or day
Or weather or good fortune
No need to share the pleasant loneliness and silence
Of a vacant beach
Only inhabited by gulls and wind
A pleasant domain of sea and sand and sky
Seeming to inhabit and empower the soul.
There are recollections of past journeys to the beach
When tiny dependent hands grasped mine
Tracking through the sands
These once grasping hands grew older and stronger
And now offer to carry what I once carried
Now carrying more than their fair share load
As I once did
Their footprints are more certain and straighter
And confidently directed than mine are now
One must wonder
Where did time and tides and the sand go
To change that circumstance.
Inscrutable and endless tides sweep
The beaches clean
Leaving seaweed and shells and seaside paraphernalia
To be picked and dropped and collected
There are memories of thundershowers
Chasing beleaguered clouds across the horizon
And requiring us to hastily hopscotch
Across the sands for shelter.
Sometimes despite the resistance to leave
Because winds are too cool or the sun too hot
Or the demands of the clock
We turn our backs to the sea
Defining new tracks and leaving old memories
For the sea to contemplate
Believing those memories
Lay waiting on the beach for our return.
The footprints on the sand soften and disappear
And tomorrow they shall be no more
But the memories shall last forever
Anointed by another pleasant day
We are at peace and content with this day
The sea and sand and wind and the canopy of sky
Each genuflects to their symbiotic relationship
Of nature and man
Together they encompass a seaside chapel
To celebrate the blessings
Of life and existence and time.
The beach reboots and triggers the memory
Of what needs to be remembered
And what needs to be forgotten
Beach time is not real time
Time is warped as in some Einstein paradox
Of time and space
With a new and imperfect definition of seconds and hours
Beach time ignores real time.
This next tomorrow and all the tomorrows
We shall engage our fantasies
Of finding yesterday’s footprints on the sand
We shall depend on
The sea and sand endlessly re-inventing themselves
Through the cascade of seasons
The beach shall be replenished
As we are all replenished by our journeys there
For all the dreams and reflections
The sands and sky and sea and winds
And sounds and seagulls
Shall never be the same
Nor shall we be the same for each visit.
The Purpose of Art
The purpose of art
Is to glorify Humanity and Nature and thereby
Imitate
Replicate
Create
Originate
Conceive
Innovate
On a broad spectrum from Representational to Abstraction
Not bounded by evolving representations and symbiotic relations
Not bounded by Traditional or Innovation
Inspiring evolution of understanding
And thereby
Involve
Enrich
Entertain
Educate
Inform
Motivate
Inspire
Both the artists and the participants
To respond to one or any combinations of the various arts
In ways that were both intended and were not intended
And create new and evolving realities
So that Art
Changes
Evolves
Redefines
Transforms
Progresses
Metamorphoses
To provide an evolving definition of the Purpose of Art.