August 2024
Author's Note: I was separated from a piece of my heart a month ago, the separation going off to live quietly in a local hospital. My latest publication, the novel “Karpa Talesman,” was named the winner of the Prophecy Creek award for speculative fiction. I’m standing in line, waiting for the next opportunity to leave the galaxy.
Queen Mother
Oh, we remember all right.
Not every day one of our old friends drops to the ground,
mere feet from the gateway out of Harvard Yard,
a cloud of youthful helpers descending,
like swallows bringing food to desert pilgrims.
Still, and yet, and all… she doesn’t make it.
Slumping, in quick descents,
like an animal stunned in a stockyard
while you try to get your hands low enough to cushion her head
from a collision with the wintry earth…
Today, months later, we wait, rain-free at last,
at a table in a comfy diner,
fixed up, a little,
to suit the times, which, the man told us,
so long ago
are always changing.
We had good days in April,
and many fine hours.
Will they bring May showers?
Today some answer descends, wetly
beats the drum slowly.
Three months, Karl says: today is the anniversary.
He tells us, instead, about the great gray seal,
sea-mother extraordinaire, giving birth
on the shelf of the gray beach of the great shoreline estate.
The perfect anthem, I think,
returning: lost lover, lost friend,
self-spun to a seal, flippering up the sandy decline
of Crane’s Beach,
Queen mother of Earth’s restless tides,
restoring the balance of things.
Urban Beauty
The first thing a city needs
is old trees
It’s hard to plant them old,
so better get started right away, asap,
Then all you have to do is fight like hell
to keep them.
On Pine Street, the most beautiful street
in town
(in the opinion of one observer),
as of a late May afternoon,
the sky the blue of forever blissful
(the point: you’d want that sky)
And on the street named for Pine,
although many trees, all of them beautiful,
bloom in their spring finery
(none of them, of course, “pine”)
the tall oaks, those the city’s current caretakers
and certain tasteless residents
have so far failed to destroy,
light up the fields of forever, their surprising
tan and yellow canapes,
dropping confetti-shaped reproductive organs
that go by the name of “catkins”
As do the cherry and other fruit trees,
hear also the dogwood, the apple, willow,
and white-flowering beauties,
blossom their offerings lasting only a week or maybe,
with teasing, and the right weather,
a little more.
And the gentle sun,
keeping its schedule, to a perfection
unknown here below,
slipping with matchless grace down a cloudless horizon
to the last bans of sunset, twilight…
But still when night descends
they sleep with us.
And still they house and keep the birds safe
in the quiet hours,
And still the morning prays again
that time persists in being beautiful,
perhaps because it is so much older than we are.
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