Love songs to family members
LEAVE TAKING
The week before you left,
The ghost pear bloomed
Beyond our window. Perhaps
It beckoned to you, since
You could no longer pack
Your wetbag for the Allegash,
Guide us down the Chase Rips,
Or gaze at the Long Lake rainbow.
It pleasures me to think
That you are chasing rainbows.
(RiverWoods poems: May 11, 2014)
Was it in the Sixties that I first heard
The doorbell ring on the first of May
And found your wildflowers at the door
Of that hillside house your father girded
With cedar logs and sturdy fieldstones
To keep our family sound and safe?
Fifty years later your “Free Spirit”
Roses arrive (I love the concept)
At my apartment, accompanied
By purple and orange tulips and green
Cymbidium orchids, as always on the First
Day of May, their Andean-colored cheer
Brightening up a rainy day
And warming my heart with a memory.
A BACKWARD GLANCE
From my car radio come the slow sweet strains
Of Mozart’s First Horn Concerto, and I am
Suddenly transported into that Victorian room
Where we made music, seated on the piano stool,
Hands on the black and white keys, my girl
Standing beside me easing the smooth tones
Out of her French horn, and I am aswirl
In waves of nostalgia, longing for that ample home,
Those five ripening minds, their patient Dad.
We did not know what signal bliss we shared.
We hurried forward through a sacred time
That my heart now cries out to live again.
(April 2014)
REFLECTIONS
In my mother’s mirror with its faux
Ivory, celluloid handle and backing,
I am looking for her, and I see some
Of her and some of my father’s face.
I ask myself why it is that I,
Their only child, should have striven
Always to differ from their prescriptives,
Always to escape their vigilant directives.
Was it the sound of my mother crying
Every Saturday night and emerging late
And red-eyed on Sunday mornings?
Or was it the summer she took the car
And we drove to her friend’s cottage in Hampton
For a week on the shore before we came back
To the boy scout camp my father directed
And they stared at each other while I watched?
Or perhaps I knew at my father’s funeral
To which his handsome, never-married waterfront
Director came, why his grief was greater
Than mine and why the siblings I longed for
Had never arrived. And so I determined
That my sons would have brothers
And my daughters would have sisters,
And their parents would be truly a pair.
So much does my mother’s mirror
Show me as I look for her face
And some of the face of my father
And find at last only my own face.
(March, 2014)
HARD TO KEEP UP WITH
They are so frighteningly bright,
These cousins, gathered for a night
Of school vacation at the house in Maine
Around a Mexican Train dominos game
To which they have been briefly introduced
And all its rules have instantly deduced.
Their ages range from eight to early teens.
I, as a grandmother, am not so keen.
They fidget at the time I take for thought,
Remind me of some rule I have forgot.
I must take time to calculate my moves,
I am outrun by their unbridled youth.
(February, 2014)
LAMENT
Where and when did it begin,
This call to me of the wild?
Was it the chatter of tanagers
Flitting in Amesbury pines
Waking a six-year-old child,
Or was it the dip and dip
Of my parents’ canoe paddles
In the Powow River north
Of camp on Tuxbury Pond,
Or when I looked up at trees
And hooked my hand on the smooth
Bark of birch and aspen
As I struggled up Mt. Chocorua?
Later I came to mourn
The hurricane’s blast, the pines
Strewn like tangled match sticks,
The scarlet tanagers gone.
Today as an octogenarian
It drives me wild to see
Our maples migrating to Canada,
Our Great Bay rank with algy.
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
I have to learn to sleep alone.
With fleece sheets to keep me warm,
Burrowing into my memory foam ,
I do my best to sleep alone.
Curled around his broader form
I felt his heart beat like my own.
Now I must learn to sleep alone.
For all the lonely nights to come
We must be two: I must be one.
I have to learn to sleep alone.
(January 1, 2014)
THE LAST OF THE PEARS
The basket of pears you sent
From Harry and David arrived
On time on Christmas Eve.
They’d tissued each perfect pear
In festive and seasonal green,
Beribboned and bedecked,
But not yet ripe. Each day
I nuked a pair in raw sugar
And rum, and they were tasty.
However, on New Year’s Eve
The last of the pears called out to me,
Blushing and chilling in the fridge.
It yielded softly to the knife.
Sweeter than sugar and more
Intoxicating than rum, the juice
Ran down my chin, and I thought,
“What better way for an old year
To end or for a new year to begin.”
12/31/2013
THANKS FOR BEING YOU
You were my Dear One,
You rang my chimes.
We had adventures.
We had good times.
No harvest moon
Outshines your smile.
We journeyed widely.
We danced the miles.
Rivers we paddled,
Mountains we climbed
Shine in my memories,
Pleasure my mind.
No better companion
Has brightened my way.
You lit my candle.
You made my day.
(RiverWoods, October 2013)
After thirty years of living
Together we have come back
To where time passes less swiftly
And attention is paid to the senses.
Under a Spanish arch
Old friends embrace us.
Street greetings are familial.
Here a hug is not distrusted.
With Mexican chillies we warm
Our mouths, and mango juice
Drips down our fingers.
We sip Salubrious tea of manzanilla.
Minstrels seranade under balconies
Draped with flags of bougainvilla.
Across the street in the cantina
A jukebox plays us to sleep.
Crossing the old courtyard
Of an abandoned chapel fragrant
With luminous cups of gold,
We are not ashamed to hold hands.
THE CATCH
Two hooks in her cheek, one in her lip,
The bass lay passive on the gravel bank
As though my fingers twisting barbs out of cartilage
Were veterinarian healing probes.
Back in the water, leashed on a stringer,
She rested in rusty bottom reeds,
Sometimes backpaddling the length of her tether
With small delicate strokes of her fins.
She’d made her protest demonstration when the pain
First snagged her face, that treacherous
Red lure. She arched my rod, launching
Herself like a rocket out of control.
I sharpened the blade for a fast scalpel cut
At the base of the head. She lay still
As a patient on an operating table. Scales scattered.
I saw her sacks of roe were full.
My father taught me how to fish, threading
The worms as casually as bacon rind
Onto the hooks, smoothing down the fins,
Enclosing the perch in his freckled hand.
(Reutemann Road Poems, 1960-1972)
COMPLIANCE
(for Grandma Lillie)
White and wispy as spun sugar, her hair
Is still damp from the rollers, our arrival
Taking her by surprise. She sits on her porch
In the only aluminum chair left, her doll
Legs dangling. Gravity has collapsed her
One inch for each calcium-starved disc.
Now she says she has no neck and cannot
Wear the gemstone pendants we have given her.
She hadn’t thought it would come to this, her porch
Bare of furniture and philodendron,
Her plants twisting heart-shaped leaves for the neighbors.
Her sister says the nursing home is pleasant.
She doesn’t know what to expect. She’ll take an African
Violet with her and a rocking chair.
She’ll try to bloom where she is planted. Her voice
Is thin as the top note on a harpsichord.