On the dock,
An oak tree my umbrella,
I do not feel
Raindrops so light,
So widely spread
That their faint impressions,
Circling outward,
Form Venn diagrams
On flat, gray-green waters
Before they disappear.
The drops quicken:
Which of them will push
The brook beyond its banks,
Hurtling downstream
On cable news,
Which will combine with wind
To bring the white pine
By the turtle rock
To rest beside a windfall
From the Hurricane of ’38?
Each a part of alphabetically named disasters; year after year. – mh clay
The governance at Golden Pines
Intends to raze St. Joseph Hall
And so is not replacing
Those who move on
As circumstance conspires,
To Assisted Living,
(As if there were some other kind)
Or Health Care or Memory Care
Or other destinations.
One wonders, then,
What they must feel,
Those who remain,
Bringing their groceries in from the car,
One or two small bags,
To see only seven names left
On the directory
In the dimly lighted hall.
The race to be the last present resident takes a lot of time. – mh clay
At 73, I have long since given up
Soccer and basketball with him,
So we have devised a new game,
My grandson and I,
To play in the back yard on afternoons
Thick with the warmth of late spring.
I am the pitcher,
He the rest of our baseball team.
We toss the ball back and forth,
Field grounders and pop flies,
Each catch an out.
Sometimes the other guys reach base,
An errant throw skittering
Into the monkey grass, hidden by
Fallen azalea blooms.
My teammate, playing deep,
Somewhere between childhood and
Adolescence, applies tags to phantom foes
As they foolishly try to stretch a hit.
Our team scores a run
Each time we retire the side.
We have never lost.
A game to play in your seventh inning stretch. – mh clay
His neighbor’s sister is
Someone’s second wife,
Joy postponed, subdued;
But her mother,
Suspicious, surrounded by cats, had
Darkly demanded explanations,
Disowned the proper word,
Had there been something to pass on.
Helen doesn’t come up anymore.
He remembers taking his mother,
In her last days,
To an antique shop
To buy a wedding gift,
As if to make a point.
Spirited spunk, spent on spite. – mh clay
He called out of the blue,
As they say,
One night in October
About five years ago,
A fraternity brother,
Out of touch—what?—fifty years or so.
We joked about college days,
The self-important fools we’d been,
Swapped synopses
Of our lives’ separate paths,
Offered congratulations
On things heard about or read,
Passing over sorrows.
I urged him to come back
For the reunion some year.
Sounds good, he said.
I wasn’t sure why he’d called.
Then last night, for no particular reason,
I looked for him on the Internet,
As people our age will do,
Found his obituary,
December 2010.
I thought to write his wife
(Untimely condolences
Worse than none)
And saw why he had called.
Oof! Let’s stay in touch so we’ll not be out of touch. – mh clay
When his mother died,
Thirty years ago now,
The principal gave his school
A conference table.
It weathered the abuse
Of ninth-grade boys,
Restored, its polished cherry stain
An elegant gesture of memory.
But he was not surprised to learn
The other day, quite by chance,
That someone he did not know
Had judged it no longer needed
And packed it up for storage.
Where is the little plaque
That bore her name?
You can say these things happen,
That no one had set out
To dishonor her memory.
He has no wish to share
The resentments of the heirs
Of Confederates on horseback,
But he does wonder if
The people in Omaha
Had thought to give
The Rosenblatts a call.
In the need for remembrance, we are Rosenblatts, all. – mh clay
Eight cars in the crescent driveway.
College students, renting rooms:
Not likely.
An opulent Sunday brunch,
Hollandaise seeping through moist eggs:
Too early.
Out-of-town wedding guests,
Gathered for muffins and coffee
And, in subverse whispers,
To critique the reception:
Perhaps.
Early mourners, news just out,
Funeral arrangements
Incomplete.
Benedict is best when eaten with observation. – mh clay
Part One: 1944
Sunlight on broad strand,
Incoming tide: cousins wade
Unaware of war.
Part Two: 1958
College beach weekend:
Hot drive home, awful headache,
Wet bread on the floor.
Part Three: 2008
Ninth-floor oceanfront
Condos for sale:
Motel rooms in perpetuity.
Tuesday morning:
By the sofa,
Philip’s goggles, left behind,
Other people’s grandchildren
On the beach.
The receding tide
Sucks sand from under your feet:
Time slipping away.
Was it the same sand? Was it the same us? Sifting, sifting… – mh clay
How was your day,
Not having a good day:
Someone else’s lexicon.
One day follows another.
He thinks of bad days,
When his father died,
Losing his job:
You land on your feet,
It all works out.
Days and years merging,
A life:
Was it just last Thanksgiving
That she left…
Lives,
Why he does not require
Going back to Quoddy Head,
Chooses to remember that blue day
In August of ’85.
One day follows another,
One year then the next.
He tries not to use
Words like segue.
editors note: Grief is an ever present hole; does not shrink with days, only grows more familiar. – mh clay
1. 2003
He had been known to paint over pine needles,
Gooey globs of soft pitch, even rotten boards:
One coat covers all!
At first it looks great,
Then little flecks of different shades of gray
Peek through: He decides it’s good enough,
A forbearance he would like to think a trait
That comes, for want of a better term, from God;
Or it may be what makes space ships fall from the sky.
2. 2018
I have stopped looking for metaphors
In things like this.
There will be a time
That will be the last time
That I paint the stoops,
But I don’t want to hear about it.
Instead I concentrate
On the smooth flow of the brush
Over pine, over the layered years
Of other shades of gray.
An ant wanders into a pool
Of acrylic latex, becomes mired
Then relieved of his suffering.
What must he have thought,
What did the dinosaurs think,
What will we think?
But then here comes his brother,
Unaware of danger.
Something to be said for being an ant.
If you were a Buddhist,
You wouldn’t paint the stoop at all.
editors note: Or, you could make your mantra, “Om Mane Paint My Stoop.” – mh clay
