November 2024
Bio Note: I've written poetry through a succession of jobs—psychiatric caseworker, nursing home social worker, university engineering editor, the latter spanning more than 30 years—and a family of five children, seven grandchildren, and my wife of more than 50 years with whom I live in Middleton, Wisconsin. Bios always leave me wanting to say with that sailor, Popeye: "I yam what I yam an' tha's all I yam".
The Disappearing
They would call:
she with her mourning-dove voice,
his more the raven’s, harshly insistent
from their farmyard of chores and worries,
bound to curtail childhood reveries
and bring their prodigal home
from cotton-wooded banks of that
lazy, sun-flecked creek where schooling
blue gill and catfish dallied like dreams
earth’s cool lap beneath him, breezy
fingers mussing his hair and counseling
no reply—
So he would sit, just sit and watch
armadas of possibilities pitch
and bob on eddying whims
while time’s slow waters passed by—
the boy finally answering their call
become someone else, dispossessed
of name and permanent address,
owning only the compulsion to sail, fly,
be other than who he was, not knowing
from the void they’d always be calling,
for duty would always await
and night’s darkness draw near.
in·fin·i·tives
to swim through the silence
of dust motes and stars,
T-Rex bones and god
to endure the ghosts
haunting Auschwitz in moonlight,
war’s graveyards and killing fields
to accept the heartbreak
of miscarried births, departed loves,
betrayals by one’s own body
to scale the walls
built of loneliness, despair,
poverty and injustice
to insist on meaning,
the hour’s truth and beauty’s cause—
and the rightness of light’s dying
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