Parrots, steam trains, teapots—
terriers, Lincoln’s profile, Corvettes.
I watch them afloat in summer skies,
fleeting fragments of wonder.
One form consumes another—
cinematic streams, planetary
moods, portals where within
and beyond meet a vanishing point.
Islands in azure—
I climb these ragged glaciers
of heaven, finding in condensed vapor
a gauzy reality, dreams.
Everything seems more
than it is in late afternoon
butterscotch light.
Clapboard house, weedy field,
and two-lane blacktop
glow from within.
Halos embrace
a fire hydrant, privet hedge,
birdbath, and lamppost.
Poets and painters capture
the luster, solidifying
reality as art.
I stand stone still on the bank, letting the river
move for us both. My mind meanders
from rock-riffled shallows to a dark, waxy
pool at my feet. How odd
to be mesmerized by mere physics of runoff.
My frenetic world endlessly nags
with ideas and doings, but the river soothes
and calms by its own relentless motion.
I hardly recognize myself, caught
in stasis, letting water do the work.
The river is inside me. I am the river.
Looking down, my mirrored face looks up,
floating among clouds and ragged
overhanging branches like a photoshopped collage.
Breezes stir the water, massage my image
from soft impressionism to surreal distortion.
I’m drowning in a hydrology of random
dreams, part of the current, feeling
an irresistible stream of consciousness
flow over cobbles and gravel.
I take a few dips in the river, but never get wet.
Hunkered deep, every breath a strangled effort in January’s
icy squeeze, I duck into the greenhouse for a quick dip
into summer. Smothered in womb-soft humidity, muscles
slacken and my defrosted mind wanders a jungled riot
of vegetable life thick with soil scents and respiring plants.
I could live forever in this indoor tropical island paradise
of rubber plants, cacao trees, lacy ferns and tendril-grasping
vines from the endless Augusts of Africa, Indonesia,
and South America. Seduced by perpetual green, I’ve
fallen for the alluring lips of glossy, crayon colored orchids.
Thin light penetrating this crystal tent pours from sky
the color of frayed jeans. Flimsy glazing and furnaces
gobbling fossil fuel keep this artificial world refulgent
and sotted with photosynthesis when periodic arctics press
on the panes of a fragile fallacy.
I know about people living in glass houses, an evaporating
ozone layer, countless cars idling at stoplights and my
doctor’s melanoma warnings. A lingering adolescence
looks for a rock: “break glass in emergency,” school alarms
once instructed. Then I remember the cobwebby blue orb
captured in Apollo 8’s earthrise and imagine
the greenhouse floating in space.
Winged faces look up, stare me down,
take flight in imagination
with melancholy, wistful eyes.
Peering from carved slabs
leaning every-which-way after centuries
of frost and rain, mica-freckled
stone sparkles in sunlight, and perpetual
care is as fragile as memory.
Dour, quaint, they gaze from a dark
and distant place where right and wrong
could be smelled and touched, roads
were dust or mud and icicles grew
in winter outhouses. Still, it’s hard to see
a world before the dawn of electric light
and television, hot showers, and air
conditioning as more than a clever fiction.
Far from the scent of freshly shoveled
soil, names and bookended dates
remember lives cut short or ripened
with years and storied deeds.
How strange to feel distance thin when reading
that children fall through ice and drown,
lightning stops the heart, and young mothers
die in childbirth with stillborn babes.
Lots of life survives in the old
burying ground, echoing fates
of my friends and family,
enlivening the moment with chance,
fear and hope as past bleeds into future,
dissolves to a present where grief and joy
are solvents of centuries as I confront
my own effigy, wings yet unfurled.
Home is my oasis in a snow desert
where swirling flakes reveal fickle winds,
the weave of uneven ground smooths white,
ponds cure overnight to concrete.
I see the cold in lace-frosted windows,
clouds of breath,
bodies hidden by layered clothing,
all exposing a season of found and lost.
Age brings me closer to Oz,
so oil me up with ibuprofen
against the stiffness and rust of years
where muscle aches measure days
as fatigue corrodes desire.
Love given by friends lubricates time,
grows the heart, spawns
an afterlife in living hearts
lest the soul predecease the body
since tin does not rust.
Joyfully I move toward the emerald
glow, horizon of dreams
where I might trip over a rainbow.
Eagerly I’ll pull back the curtain
and find whatever is to be found.
A long period of hospitalization and convalescence
following a spinal operation in October, 1954,
gave me my first opportunity to do the reading
and research necessary for this project.
John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
Worn down, scolded by a nagging back,
I ask what the Carolina Rocker can do for me.
Embraced in steam-bent oak and woven rattan,
I find the angle of incline and the seesaw
swing and sway eases my ache.
It’s a brisk sit, like walking while seated.
At my mom’s skirt hem to the thump and hiss
of her ironing, Kennedy sparred with Nixon
in jittery black-and-white. A few years later,
a shot in Dallas sent me home from school.
I saw Oswald murdered live on television
and John-John salute a flag covered casket.
I could rock endlessly in a chair that sweetened
the president’s suffering. Rhythmic
motion stirs both memory and legs, pain
fires time’s essence, saturates the moment
with necessity, just as distance provokes
our reach beyond profiles to full-frontal courage.
