Jan 19 2020 -- May 10 2010

January 10 2010 Sunday

A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.

Feb. 21 Sunday

As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.


May 9 2010 Sunday

The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.

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A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.

A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.

A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.

May 10, 2010

Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.