Settled
The simmer pot rattles
and fills the house with
cinnamon, cardamom, clove,
warming the cold, settling
like dust, the smell of
something old, worn, rich, gold,
the same as library stacks,
and vintage playing cards,
and seasoned firewood,
The simmer pot rattles
like bones and wind
against the windows,
And I settle like dust,
slow like wood and soil,
and this threadbare notion
that nothing good can come
from anything new or
straightforward or inorganic.
The Strange Nature of the Remembering Self
The leaves fall away like memories-
a year of moments that, together, form a whole-
form Tree, form Self in TIme, until
in small, cold, breaths,
our moments unmoor
and drift
and drift
and drift,
separate,
distinct,
colors caught in the light, until,
again, the memory settles in
to a new, chaotic and colorful whole-
ground cover, not tree
Self in Abstract, not Self in Time-
rotting in beautiful, pungent layers,
and there we are, red and gold, and orange
smudges in the sweet mash,
a swirling impression of the life we’ve lived this year.
Beater
You move your arm a particular way
and feel the slice of age in your shoulder
that you hyperextended in a fit of ambition
Saturday at the gym,
And that isn’t even your biggest problem these days,
no need to count the ways in which your body
is failing you because everyday is a new betrayal.
The tooth that needed to be pulled, so that,
now, eating popcorn hovers somewhere between
unpleasant surprise and disappointment,
Or the bulging disc that ensures that reaching
down to pick up the cat bowl or crossing your
leg to tie your shoe is a cruel test of tentative
flexibility in a minefield of aches,
Or the inexplicable thinning of the skin
on the surface of your nose, which often results
in serious bleeding from just an errant scratch,
real bleeding in the middle of the day,
in the middle of your class, and now you have to
spend the next 15 minutes dabbing at your
honker with a Kleenex,
And let’s not forget the pills, organized as they are
into their daily compartments. This one to tame the
prostate, this one to clear the veins, another
to keep the food from burning as it travels
through the body, and another to tamp down
the breathless pounding of anxiety. Actually,
8 pills and 5 supplements in all,
And what can you do?
The machine has been running continuously
for 58 years. Of course the gears are slipping.
Of course the hardware is stuck or chipped
or missing or hidden in its greasy patina.
What can you do?
The pit stops on the way can only replace the fuel
And fill the tires that will push you smoking and sputtering to the horizon.
Forecast
Just suggest the possibility
of snow on the horizon,
and I become truly useless.
The storm’s three days away
and on a weekend, but I am
already (mentally and
emotionally) in my PJs,
drinking cocoa, wrapped
in cats and reading books
with no intention of moving
forward or checking anything
off of my to do list.
I like the hush of snow.
I like the stuck of snow.
I like the no of snow.
Whateverpalooza
Nineties music is all crunch and grind–
granola and iron and the fine dotted line
of the edge of a razor blade.
It is a shrug in the cold. It is an old soul
that remembers and opens the battered doors
of young energy and mourning.
It is earthtones, true, with maybe one or two
bold colors– gold and concrete, violet
and tweed and a pocket watch.
It is time passing and threadbare flannel
and sincere aching for a world out of reach
and the irony of artful uncaring.
All emotion and boot leather and street
names remembered and hard weather and
what is better than what is here?
Patched as it is, and mismatched and cobbled
together, even if it’s the question no one
can or cares to attempt to answer.
It is the tapestry of hope and broken hearts,
the woven home of pirates and sprites, poets
and dusty romantics, madmen and saints.
Picture Frame
Not that I’m looking to go anywhere,
but as I was watching our lives pass by
in random order, flicking along every six
seconds on the digital picture frame–
you and I riding bicycles in Key West;
Riley, Sophie, and Annie leaning into
one another on the couch on Christmas Eve;
the cats as kittens; cousins and beach vacations;
and, again, you, illuminated and sweater-
bundled in the fire’s dancing shadow-glow–
I had this moment in which I noticed
the tap and ticking whisper of the clock.
And I remembered this moment a few years
back: Dinner on the back deck with
the whole family, and my mother’s hand
on the back of my father’s arm, and then
spoken softly, It’s been a good life.
The Consequences
Covid broke this generation.
You can see it in what is absent–
the lack of social stamina,
the physical folding in of the body
when burdened with too many
people for too long of a time.
And also the intolerance for
time on task or ideas outside
of their own ideas (which
themselves seem empty of passion
or direction or wonder).
You give them a space in which
to write their responses to
important questions, and they don’t
put much there, if anything at all.
And the worst offense to them,
it seems, is to be someone
who asks too many questions or
asserts too many claims based
on the institutional memory
of the system that broke down
and betrayed them in 2020.
