On some channel I never watch I catch the Veterans Day doc 
	in its last moments,
and pounce on the name of the transport ship,
snatching at details, 
fleetingly like the taunt of the witch in the old story 
	I can never quite get enough of –
The Leopoldville! –
and lose the thread at once.
It sinks beneath the waters of my short-term whirlpool memory,
as the doomed vessel itself sends a thousand souls
scurrying for their lives, finding instead (many of them)
cold water, last breaths.
The transport, that one of three,
that took the final bullet from the then death-spiraling 
	U-Boat reign of terror 
that had plagued for half a decade the English Channel’s
thin ribbon of liberation.
 
My father’s regiment divided among three ships,
Dad catching one of the luckier transports:
an entire line of ancestry.com, a generation’s destiny, 
	hanging on that chance
… And here before my tired eyes,
while stretching in front of the TV, 
surfing while supine,
the documentary evidence confirming a family’s brush-with-fate 
	survival story,
I recollect Dad recounting, a half century later, 
his fortunate escape from a plunge into all that cold water,
and picture again the breadwinner who clung to the sandy shore 
	in socks and shoes
while his children squirmed in the foam like fish.
 
Dad’s brush with destiny, confirmed on the screen:
Survivors as we are, not heroes,
I stick to my own fortunate course,
grateful for the lucky draw.
                        

Moving my friends
	in the garden
(a few of them)
Digging up the long-established order 
	of things
Finding the spade among the trees
and the spade in myself
And risking the first desperate plunge
Defying the natural order
I have so unnaturally constructed 
Employing the violence of both these tools, 
those killing man-handles
that have so deeply enabled our likely short-lived dominion 
over this green and growing wonderland
 
Disturbing even the long-settled bulbous declaimers 
	of Springtime!
Installed in their subterranean quarters a mere two years before 
And risking my Grub-Street digits
In the cold mush of 
	seasonal disappointment 
 
To discover whether the old magic
Still has a trick up
	its muddy sleeve 
                        

Already I have felt the chill,
the mercury declining,
the stirring of the heavy coals of winter’s bills; routines, 
warm socks, thankfully, in the drawer
planted right where I left them seasons ago,
along with the thermals, the layers,
the familiar whines, the habitual tongue of wintry complaint,
the chill procrastination of rising,
plaintive pleading for hot beverages,
cool rebuffs, closed windows,
thicker footwear still,
warm climate fantasies 
(within the cautionary boundaries of plague),
heavy thoughts, brooding calculations,
fond adieus to milder hours,
the live burial of lighter wishes,
warming shores unvisited, festivals unshared. 
 
To all this, a prorogation,
that stay of execution:
gentle airs of a late autumnal day,
one more cozy afternoon
with the solar love of my aging days:
warming up with Lady Warm.