with lines and phrases borrowed from Joni Mitchell lyrics in italics
	
	The Queen of Folk is holding court and making every jester cry.
		YouTube commenter “Acoustic Shadow”

My god, Joni. You messed me up when I was 
a teen, my rock and roll brain
buried deep in Led Zep and The Dead.

I felt like a child listening to you, all those moods 
that consumed me - I had no words
and you hymned them into me, conjured

that lonely road I was traveling. I knew I ached 
to be some girls’s old man, to lie with her
under a starry dome, to be the guy who rambled and gambled,

unfettered and alive, like it was me, not you
facing the sea on that album cover, your body
so imperfectly beautiful which made skinny me

feel free to be nakedly imperfect. 
It was too dangerous to want you, but 
maybe I could hold hands with Judy or Lindy 

which would be all I really really wanted to do.
So when my 20 something son sends me a link, 
texts “Joni’s singing and I can’t stop crying,” I click 

and wonder why he cried. Then I saw 
what he saw - you singing “Both Sides Now” 
in a way no one had heard before, you

tenoring today from that stage overlooking 
Newport Sound, so blue you could sail away – but here
you are – not the young soprano 

smashing glasses down at the Mermaid Café,
hanging with red, red rogues– 
but a new one, 

whose seasons have gone 
round and round, who looked behind
from where she came, whose illusions

had played their games on a thousand thousand stages, 
you, who for a moment couldn’t bring yourself to sing
about tears and fears and feeling proud.

Because yes, you’ve changed. And yes, 
we’ve both lost and gained living every day
which is why, I think my 20 something son

cried like I did. And how could he not? How can we not 
hear in the spaces between your words, 
the cadence that none of the sweet jesters on stage 

could follow lest they fall into the well 
you’d left uncovered – your life of dreams
and schemes, and false alarms? And no,

teen me and all our wondering sons
really don’t know life at all so you
sing it into us, you hearing your own song

for the first time – which is why, when all was sung,
the warm chord of your delight played on. You sigh, 
and your smile overflows with such sweet laughter–

you as surprised as we were. 
You say what we would say to you:
“Oh, That Was Beautiful.” 
	Oh, that was beautiful.
                        

This year, I swear.  No more killing
raccoons to save my tomatoes.

I will erect the electric netting
before they get their first taste

before the tomatine
ripening that draws

us greedy beasts to rip
skin with teeth, sup the sweet

beneath. Everyday I watch
the reddening, anticipate 

that first bite, that 
warm drizzling down my chin

and wonder how a man
can deny a fellow

lover of such things
the fruits of such patience.
                        

Did you know that bleeding
horseshoe crabs is a thing,
that half-a-million a year 
are captured on racks,
strapped in by black bungees
as their milky-blue blood is
drained from them, that this
is no abstraction like love or  
antiquity, that these creatures 
lived before plants began on land,
before Gondwana met Pangaea,
before the five great extinctions,
(which were not abstractions) 
and now we scrape them from 
the sea for a liquid more dear
than mercury or Chanel No. 5
(which I read was the only thing
Marilyn Monroe wore to bed,
which led JFK to abandon
Camelot) and that Jesus had 
5 scars and Moses 5 books
and Coco Chanel thought 
women shouldn't smell like 
flowers, that they should smell like 
women, which is an abstraction,
or like laundry - which is not - 
and that without horseshoe crab blood, 
you might be dead of E. coli, 
or of some contaminated drug? 
But you’re not. And the crabs are, 
or at least they will be, dead, that is–
this arthropod having survived
the Ordovician, but likely not
homo medicandus which is just
fine so long as they live long enough 
to be of help for me, which is not 
an abstraction, don’t you agree?