If all the world were playing holidays

To sport would be as tedious as to work!
(Shakespeare from Henry IV part one if memory serves)

Tomorrow

Your best friend is gone,
your other friend, too.
Now the dream that used to turn in your sleep
sails into the earth's coldest night

What did you say?
Or was it something you did?
It makes no difference---the house of breath collapsing
around your voice, your voice burning, are nothing to worry about.

Tomorrow your friends will come back;
your moist mouth will bloom in the glass of storefronts.
Yes. Yes. Tomorrow they will come back and you
will invent an ending that comes out right.

Mark Strand

Smetena "The Moldau"

You paint on my canvas
swirls in water and air
using violas and cellos.

You hug me warmly
with triangles where
the sun glints.

You jam my senses
like a radio signal
satiating pleasure

WRM

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(Robert Frost)

Skagway Respite

Hurrying freezing streets,
between uninteresting gift shops,
I am sucked into a large,
warm, bookshop.

Canned music fades,
the air fills with something
instantly recognizable.
The smell and feel of live music.

Searching for it among narrow,
rickety bookshelves, a hole
in the wall leads to a coffee bar
overcrowded with silent listeners.

The musical epicenter is the drum -
a table - serving as, instrument, stage
and music rest, tightly bound by
singers and guitar players.

Standing at the entrance
I am drawn in by the music,
excitement and warmth
held back by an invisible wall

Endemic people's gazes
and feelings burn
as they shine on me
snooping on their worship

(WRM in Scagway Alaska)

Slow Children at Play

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-diner's-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home---
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their
mouths, ohs
that glow and go out and glow. and their slow mothers
flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching
them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, these are my children,
thinking
Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone

Cecilia Woloch


Suicide Soldier

I'm a civilized soldier not
a suicide bomber
I don't have killing equipment
round my waist
no gun, no bullets, no grenades.

My family won't get paid
when I die
I don't ask God to bless me
or America


(WRM)

A Winter Morning

A farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,
and against the starry cold, on small blue ring of flame.

Ted Kooser

Kids with Wives

Born only to cry and take.
Parents only too pleased to give,
children adopt skillful giving
to their tool-kit.
How much and when to use
is perfected by trial and error.

With estranged parents
donating and accepting
are mainstays of relationships
as parents seek to smother
with alternate currencies for company

When sexuality matures
and damages or displaces
the neatly organized tools in the box
their existence is devoted to
pleasing someone else before
themselves, or worse, me

The situations allowed to develop in
my sexual relationships
which you would erase
you have to witness, reenacted.
You dare not interfere.
For theirs' is not my world
and I fear rejection as
they feared mine.

The rope slackens
no need to drag them
they gather their own momentum.
After they pass me,
the leash tightens again
as I become the burden.

No more camping, games, rides,
cooking together, no more
rides home or girlfriends
Kids with wives aren't as much fun.

WRM (written before he became a grandparent!)

On a Child Learning to Talk

Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child
Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled;
The tender racquet rudely plays the sound
Which, weakly bandied, cannot back rebound;
And the soft air the softer roof doth kiss
With a sweet dying and a pretty miss,
Which hears no answer yet from the white rang
Of teeth not risen from their coral bank.
The alphabet is searched for letters soft
To try a word before it can be wrought;
And when it slideth forth, it goes as nice
As when a man doth walk upon ice.

Thomas Bastard 1566 - 1618

November

No

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

(Thomas Hood)

Memory

Arrangement of nick knacks on shelves
chosen by you and stored in locations
familiar to you alone

Classified by color, size or time
linked as firmly and randomly
as branches in a tree.

The dist of time paint over everything
when disturbed, shows clearly
what has been touched.

A word, piece of music, face, smell, transports
through time, distance, life and death.
You have no control

(WRM)

Ladder

A man tips his chair, all evening.

Years later, the ladder of small indentations
still marks the floor. Walking across it, then stopping.

Rarely are what is spoken and whit is meant the same.

Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.

Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes.

(Jane Hirchfield)