September 2018
 Frederick Wilbur
fredlizwilbur@gmail.com
Note: Recently, as with many fellow poets, I have been increasingly aware of contemporary social, cultural, environmental, and political issues and have been provoked to address them in my work. I hope, however, that these poems avoid impassioned rant. As in my collection, As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, I use images derived from nature and rural living to explore human relationships.
 
Beach Fire
          Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5

Not so much driftwood here
as histories of shipwreck might suggest,
we walk pier to pier for what we collect,
kindling is trashcan cardboard.

Our fire cannot compete
with the lighthouses of Currituck
or Bodie Island, but is our greatest defiance
of the horizonless dark though tonight
there are no thunder-clouds,
no lost ships desperate for a signaling light.

Fences chaperone the waltzing sea oats,
pastel houses settle into their yellow windows,
we do not deny our simple fears that promise
more than tomorrow’s smudge on glittered sands.

After orange fades, we stumble home
along the fringe of neap tide, our havoc unseen, unsuspected.
Dolphins, no doubt, saw more in flame
than our careless, endless desire,
saw in our burning their own peril, their own thirst.
 
 
 
 
  
Seasonal Affective Disorder
 
 
Spending winter by the window has its fears,
the photograph in the gilt frame has changed— 
her face grows colorless with the years.
 
In snow, topped trees stand like gears— 
iron black, mechanically arranged.
Spending winter by the window has its fears.
 
Smart-aleck sparrows tap the panes.  She hears
mocking desperation, feels estranged
as her face grows colorless with the years.
 
The rebuke of depression gently nears— 
she is drained, depleted, deranged.
Spending winter by the window has its fears.
 
Dark sadness is purchased by dark tears,
but daylight regrets cannot be exchanged— 
her face grows colorless with passing years.
 
Fading now, a frozen scream no one hears
is all she has, the smothering snowscape unchanged.
Spending winter by the window has its fears,
her face grows colorless with the years.
 
 
 
 
 
Granddad’s Refuge
 
 
“Might come in handy,” he justifies
the embarrassment of a headless handle,
the nonsense of a saw blade missing teeth.
He foresees in some desperate day how each
could be resurrected for an unexpected use.
The shed of concrete block, with barn doors,
is like an ark thoroughly grounded at the garden’s edge.
The bench top is piled with hand tools
sorted after their own kind—wrenches and ratchets,
chisels, pocket knives, hammers, crowbars.
 
“There are things here I don’t know I have,”
he says with self-deprecating wisdom;
peanut butter and baby food jars hold tacks,
cut and coated nails, brass screws, cotter pins.
A sail-shaped mirror swings the afternoon through the dust;
it flickers with cloud shadows like an old-time movie.
Out of date calendar girls, teasingly promote
pipe fitting equipment, and though they smile
there is a chill darkening the air.
 
“Progress makes a mess,” he has said more than once.
He does not abide worn out beliefs; by the door
a broom stands ready. Scrap metal shifts like shoals of a river,
shovel and rake skirmish with the hoe and pitchfork,
a stow-away rat has stuffed an apple crate
with golden twine and shreds of society pages,
tires are liquorish donuts for copper snakes to thread.
 
“Saving for the final auction,” he simply says,
knowing full well that excuses are a lot more cluttered.
Rain begins ticking on the tin roof, he turns on the florescents
above his head. “Things do not make the man.”
​© 2018 Frederick Wilbur
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