Marigolds dry on the windowsill—
I wait.
When you find me,
we will hold each other.
Sway to summer's music.
Mosquito, frogs, peepers, and rainfall.
I'm in no hurry—
I have waited 
slow months.
Emptied my vases,
then filled them.
Scattered the floor with yellow.
Money cannot bring you back,
but these gold-peso petals
will buy us a moment.
I sit on the porch,
and watch for you.
In the company of
sweet marigold murmurings.
When you appear
I hold out my hand.
Then we dance.
                        

I start out thinking it is an expression, isn’t it, whatever 
floats your boat, and that instantly alerts me to the fact,
that as a poet I am not as clever as Billy Collins nor
as deep.  He could turn the steam off a cup into something

to notice. A celebration of life, steam off the mouth of a cup
would become a spirit rising, perhaps my dead mother, if you
see what I mean.  Today, I realize, is my mother’s birthday 
had she lived to be 82.  I am writing this as a bird,

not an owl, calls to me through the glass. I apologize 
to the empty chair, knowing Gary Snyder would say
with certainty if it were a lark or a wren, but I am pretty confident
that I and the absent Mr. Collins do not know.

Nor do I know for certain, where the song “Row Your Boat”
comes from exactly.  I wonder if either of them does,
although it’s a silly message that I feel certain none of us
believes: gently, would hardly be used in rowboat instruction.

Ask anyone who has ever struggled with oars, would this procedure
be done merrily?  Li Po may have been merry as he paddled,
as one of Yeat’s relatives may have called it. Li who supposedly
drowned while drunk and trying to embrace the moon.

In reality, this I did research, during one of my annoying 12-step
moments, Li Po died of cirrhosis of the liver.  Which reminds me
of poets somehow, and me with my own thinking problem.
Mr. Collins would have known how to salvage this doomed

and rapidly sinking poem. Buckets of water, lifting it higher
than it deserves, certainly a reference to Virginia Woolf
and the River Ouse where she did herself in.  She must have paddled
romantically, skimming stones like dragonflies spiraling off lily pads. 

Is that enough, Billy, I ask the chair informally?  As for this poem,
I have these poor strophes going down for the last time.  Sure
I have done a bit of name dropping, thrust out my literary oar
like a sword, but mostly (other than a nod to Mom)

I have wasted a good deal of paper, sheets and sheets and sheets.
A drunken rowboat stuck forever in the currents, and this blotty pen
that keeps sticking, repeating despite itself:  merrily, merrily, merrily
merrily with our lives connected so permanently to dreams.