January 2024
Frederick Wilbur
frederickwilbur@gmail.com
Bio Note: My book, The Nelson County Garden Club: The First Fifty Years, 1935-1985, has been recently published. I have written several blogs about the experience of working in a different genre. Now it's back to poetry with a different use of language.

Stalking Aurora
Sunset in the rear-view mirror, I wait. My pick-up is loaded with patience, with all the prophecy it could carry. In love’s humoresque the known is like the print-through of cheap pages, the first recognition that evening brings. And what of the jealousies the heart hazards? Reds and golds of clouds dissolve, crickets click on the dark internet. I hear stars slide down the windshield, think of Newton’s attraction of bodies, how they desire the way trees reach toward what gives them roots, how making love is the surrender of promise. Hours pass. I travel beyond question, passwords are untangled from slip-knot-snares of self-doubt. A message to strangers is the craft to master. I nod through midnight like the train coasting through a sleeping town yellow windows blinking in a take-me-with-you code. A meaning of dawn sneaks by the darkest NO on the keyboard—not a lighthouse search only seen by the few in trouble, but a luscious affirmation of the dew-drenched world. Aurora in a fleet greeting is gone like candy from a child’s piñata and without after-image illusion, I insert the mundane YES into the ignition switch expecting an explosion of sabotage during the morning news. I leave no more than tire patterns in the red-clay of her lane to evidence my perfect hope.

Question
I take the fourteen-hundred, ninety-nine piece puzzle of Sacré Coeur, Paris, to the thrift store, finished only yesterday, a note enclosed— Can you find the missing piece? You think this devotion to puzzle making is a decadent timewaster, but let me tell you it requires uncommon patience and focus like Buddhist monks painting a mandala with sand, like coaxing the ephemeral concerto from an oboe. I have stood where the photographer stood, had the same glass of wine in the delight of evening, but I don’t feel guilty donating imperfection, as lives can never be considered complete. I’m reminded of Native American Mimbres pottery that after archaeologists glue shards back together there is still a hole at the center, deliberately broken to allow spirits to escape, to lose the possession of self. You think it is heartbreaking to tear perfectly fitted pieces apart to re-box them for another day, so you adhere the completed picture to foam board, frame it for the living room wall where the cheaply printed picture will fade as will this parable of giving it away.

The Delight of Perhaps
When firewood cords lean close to collapse, ground-rot finally shifting them plumb to scrum, the house wren is not surprised to flight, but casually flits above this waste of men. When mousetrap peanut butter molds like the Achilles heel of a powerful myth, we remark how flexible are Death’s rules, capricious, jocular, ironic even. When bookmarks travel through biographies, they flag chapter pauses or favorite poems or, reading interrupted and resumed by another, they may be keepsakes connecting one life to the next. When the poetry critique group counts their surgeries, and stir the bowl of mixed feelings, they are cultured beyond their means, like lilies blooming in a compost pile. Then the world of perhaps flaunts its beauty; does not apologize for the endless art it provides.
©2024 Frederick Wilbur
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