There is

There is even time
to take a bucket and a trowel
over to the March creek
to spoon a cache of stones
the size of jewels for a ring

and rinse the in the cold rush
within a screen mesh
so I might fill, when they are dry,
the flat black bowl you gave me
for my own Zen garden

losing myself when I rake it
within my own present
as I did a few moments just now
gathering the tiny minutes
that endlessly make their way down to me
to use or keep
for my own reflection.

DDD / March 1, 2023

Mine eyes

 Recorded this poem of mine in the ACSLIB back in the day. Really enjoy the rendition.

 

Mid-February

Back to burning Danny's wood,
the pieces shaped like ampersands -
hollow cheery and maple yokes
on beveled ends that will not stand.

Lying heaped beside the stove,
I love each cob-jobbed wretched piece
that I myself wrought in the Spring
when days stretched out beyond my reach.



February 11, 2023

Two

My bronze turtle
burrowed under
leaves and cold

ticks a quicker beat
like impatient maples

when an urgent sun
melts the February snow
from around their feet.

____________

How deep
are the feet
below the pate
of this stone
always
melting away
February snow
despite being
cloaked behind the barn
every Winter minute
of the day?

Late to the party

 

It happens; you miss writers and books along the way that you would think you would not ... like reading a complete book of poetry by Sharon Olds for the first time when its her latest one, written when she is eighty, and me nearly seventy, and then having to get-up-to-speed on the "deal" of her life, which touches every poem, and then growing as a reader within the span of those pages from first labeling it a crutch that one can only play off of for so long, until recognizing it as the honest-to-goodness swinging door she must hinge her life to if she ever hopes to catch a glimpse of the world and love it.

Her writing is courageous as well as expansive, and beautiful - the way a streaming comet is, even as its orbit strains to escape what brings it round to us. Indeed, she has dealt with the defining ordeal of her young life (abuse at the hands of her mother, but also a profound understanding of her) by dealing with it throughout the long journey out into this reach her life.

But Olds, while not beyond the pull of that torment, has not let it define her as much as using it as a prism to separate out and embrace the great poignancy it reveals in love, loss, and the the gifts of this world. And she gives me a necessary strength to read the later works of poets, which is sometimes very close to the bone.

Changes the season brings

 

From the batch of poems I wrote over the last two year:

IT WAS ABOUT


It was about the gravity of the giving from you
and the acceptance of meaning from her -

his sixty-year-old Sanforized summer shirts;
one striped, straight at the waist, cinch-able,

the other a fine red Cornell check;
both ready for her frame and life-force

as the season and the rarity of her nearness
brought you to readiness too,

and so a seemingly casual porch bestowal,
yet a legacy as authentic and guarded

as your father's cap and your mother's shoes.
Curious, the coming together that precipitates

at last the release from touchstones
smoothed by years of dear remembrance -

perhaps just knowing she will wear them
in the sunshine and on the open road;

carrying something of all he was away,
yet sharing this world with you again.

by DDD / July 11, 2022

Poem

ONE SENTENCE

Four thousand school children serenaded Kaiser Friedrich III with folk songs
under the great linden tree when he visited Nuremberg in 1487, and His Majesty
is said to have rewarded each with a gold florin on this occasion.
                                 - Jane Campbell Hutchinson / Albrecht Durer, a Biography

Perhaps it's just because
most of the text so far
in this scholarly biography of AD
is so clinical and dense, but
I think this morsel would have stopped me
even if it were strewn in some
paperback bodice-ripping romance
because so few pleasant and innocent moments
surface from the fifteenth century. Of course,
a gathering of four thousand students sounds a bit too
Teutonic for innocence,

but that school children,
folk songs, and a linden tree
were recorded at all by some attendant scribe
and then included in notes to the author
by the overworked grad-assistant
mining German black-letter in documents
from the Holy Roman Empire,
and then, despite being way-off-subject,
plunked as a refreshing aside by Hutchinson
in this de-assessioned tome from
the now defunct Pine Manor College library
that I got for four dollars

that, well, it makes my elbow tingle.


DDD / 01/30/23

A confluence of touchstones

So, I ordered this book last week along with a few others, and of course (as is is so often the case these days), I cannot remember the article, review, or aside that led me to it and prompted me to buy it.

It has proved to be a wonderful and poignant book of poems, but also a nearly spooky confluence of my own personal references and dear touchstones.

Now, there are only 28 poems in this book, but Fairchild refers to so many building blocks of me that I’m beginning to think he had me in mind.

Attend:

Bernd Heinrich: I chose his “Winter World” as the first community-read at my library.

Donatello’s “David”: Just last week I brought down from my room my lavishly photographed book of Italian artwork featuring beautiful close-ups of that sculpture.

Orson Welles/Citizen Kane: Ask anyone, I’m an acolyte of 50 years.

Gunga Din: One of only a handful of poems I can recite.

Robert Penn Warren: My original poetry muse. His New & Selected Poems one of my first poetry purchases back in the day.

Saipan & Tinian: The Pacific Islands where my Dad piloted his P-47.

Lucky Strikes: His cigarettes that I would bike to the corner store to buy for him.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: I gave my son a gift copy of Sacks’ book just two weeks ago.

“Old Men Playing Basketball”: Me

That’s a petty dense occurrence of meaningful landmarks in one little book.

 #booktalk