January 2019
Note: I am a physician by profession (still practicing), a musician (still practicing) and a dedicated Scrabble player (yes, ZAX is a word). I write poetry when The Muse calls unexpectedly and rings insistently until I answer, even if I don’t want to talk to her just then. I currently live in Connecticut with my wife and the two dogs who rescued me.
Hurricane Season
Dogs shelter under the porch.
Birds are shushed into silence,
except for mourning doves asking “Who? Who? Who?”
The choir of wind chimes waits quietly
until the rising wind rolls in like waves
breaking on a leafy shore,
building into a tsunami roar.
Then metallic voices puncture the air,
A dissonant chorale
conducted by the wildly waving arms of nearby trees.
Red traffic lights and red tail lights
flash neon-bright against the darkening sky.
while worried eyes watch towering clouds
gather in the east like Confederate battalions.
Soon, the streets will be surrendered
to an advancing army of blowing newspapers
and early autumn leaves.
Overhead, a solitary seagull
flies on the wings of the storm.
Avery is coming.
Ghosts
The dogs stand riveted at the door,
separated from the night
by the thin veil of a screen.
To my eyes and ears,
the streets are silent and empty —
not even a moth,
fluttering in the washed-out yellow
of the flickering streetlight.
But the dogs see.
Ears pricked, eyes fixed,
still as statues,
they watch.
“A falling leaf”, you say.
“Some night bird in the branches”, you say.
Or is it the parade of the unseen passing?
When I have left this world,
will my companions see me in a shadow
or hear me in the wind?
Perhaps they will.
Moving Day
The eighteen-wheeler,
bright as a Barnum & Bailey trailer,
arrived in the gray morning mist
of a cold, January Monday.
The house looked as empty as we felt.
The Flexible Flyers that children
and grandchildren rode down white winter hills,
(rolling off to make snow angels at the bottom)
stayed in the attic,
but the snow angels came with us.
The piano is gone, but not the music we played.
Chairs and china, tables and lamps, bookshelves and beds,
will find their way to other homes and other lives,
but our memories, light as thought,
packed into a space small as a heart,
are carried place to place on our intertwined hands.
This is moving day,
the first day of the last of our lives.
© 2019 Paul Bluestein
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