Month: February 2015

OUR DAN

I imagine him out in the pasture blowing snow

To make a space for four shelter goats

And one wool coated sheep to move and browse

Outside their shed and for impatient hens,

Too long cooped in, to strut and hunt and peck.

His Kathy may be knitting that sheep’s wool

Or weaving a shawl on one of her many looms.

And when the spring produces  brightly green

Asparagus shoots on all  his roadside banks

Dan will be canning them for winter soups.

He must have inherited Grandma Lillie’s genes.

They have no use for lawns.  Flowering shrubs,

Rock gardens, raised beds and berry bushes

Fill up their yard.  They gather eggs.  Sometimes

An aging rooster transforms into a stew.

This distinguished Cisco software engineer

Has retired early to learn to play guitar

And sing his songs at friendly open mics.

When he was young Dan had an attic room

In our three-story,  part-Victorian home,

And in the space next to his bedroom he hosted

Cages and cages of guinea pigs, gerbils and hamsters.

He is true to his Tappan family Yorkshire heritage

As shepherds and farmers, good stewards of the planet.

KISMET

As the cribbage game comes to an end

She wonders about Bev’s maiden name.

“What?” she exclaims.  “Is that who you are?

I knew you in high school.  Your friends were mine.

We often sailed on your husband’s boat.

How did I come to find you here?”

Ah, that is the mystery Kurt Vonnegut

Called “Karma”.  Who does Fate arrange

To saunter in and out of our affairs?

As once we ferried down Lake Ullswater

Where Wordsworth saw his daffodils,

We saw, on landing at the ferry dock

A friendly and familiar figure calling out,

A welcome face so far from kith and kin

That last we’d seen afloat on Big Moose Lake,

A fellow paddler in the Adirondacks.

And once on a remote Montana trail

To Cracker Lake in Glacier National Park,

We recognized a couple by a rock

Who greeted us with an astonished hail:

Friends we had made on Elderhostel treks.

And how did you and I manage to meet?

On such encounters do our fortunes rest.

THE OPENING GAME

On the cribbage board your hands,

Your big and bony masculine hands,

Move your pegs, your red pegs,

And my unwomanly sturdy hands

Want my pegs to follow

But the cards do not cooperate.

Instead I tell you how my sled

Slid into the sunken garden.

You tell me your father died young

But yours was a kindly stepfather.

And now my blue pegs come up

To yours and we move in tandem.

ON SWASEY PARKWAY

The seagulls cloud around her

As she tosses the day old bread.

They swoop and dance and flutter,

Ring bills, gray and white breasted,

Clustered around open water

At the shore of the arctic expanse

Of the seldom frozen Squamscott.

She tells me they know her well,

Crowd up when she appears,

Friends with lively welcomes,

After her bakery days.

She once had a dog companion.

Now winged ones keep her company.

I tell her I will bring bread

The next time I come to the waters.