I Wouldn't Do That

"I would not do that," Mary Jessie said.
She's said that many times over many years.
She said that as I tried to comfort her
About the friend who never calls -
The kids who rarely help -
About the friend who hurt the feelings
of another friend.
I would not do that, Mary Jessie said.

"Of course I forgave her, told her so," she said,
"but even then I knew I would not be like that,
I would not fail to see a friend who's sick
I would not fail to help my mom
Whenever I was asked. I never would do that.
I would not borrow money, and neglect to pay it back
There are some things that I would never do," she said.

Me, I always try to understand.
I know I do not know just how it feels
to have another life,
Another life experience.
Me, I'm never sure just what I'd do
If I were someone else.

Yet even as I try to understand
To have compassion, and some tolerance,
Not to judge what isn't mine to judge
I hear this voice deep inside me say,
Me, I wouldn't do that. No. Not me.
As another voice asks,
Oh, really? Are you sure?

Thoughts on Rilke

If I call to Heaven and an angel answers me,
Will I be scared? You bet!

If I create a work of art
A painting that was never there before -
A poem -
Is it not of necessity less -
Than that which it was meant to represent?

No one can create all the facets
Possibilities, extensions, emotions,
Of anything -
And then add on – not just mine -
But your imaginings, and that man's over there,
Or see just what that child sees
When gazing at that reality
In dimensions, from angles
I cannot portray.
It must be less – my poem, my painting
Than the reality it draws upon
And at the same time more
Because it frees imagination,
Not just mine,
But yours.

If the angel isn't there, I don't care
Just so long as I think it is
And see my answer, hear my answer, feel it -
That's enough.

confession

 

As I’m getting more “mature”
 I can admit to certain things

I lied about before – Like this –

I never learned to ride a bike.
In my young life I hid that fact,
Would make excuses not to go
On bicycle excursions.

I have the penmanship, not of a doctor, no,

Far worse – My writing’s not too unlike

A boy in the second grade, or third.
It is absurd when my offspring say
It’s my fault that they’re handicapped
By the hand they got from me.
I tell them, “Well, then, type.”

The worst I guess, I must confess

Is sometimes when I read a book
I read the ending first.

Our three kids are grownups now
With children of their own.
That doesn’t mean we’re less concerned
Than when those three of ours were new!

If truth be told, I must admit

It worries me we cannot read

The unlived pages of their lives.

Nor can we wrap the grandkids up
In bubble wrap so they won’t break
Their bones or hearts along the way.

Life's a book that can't be read

From back to front.

Cleaning by Kay

I had two projects I meant to do this month. The first was to put the things I’ve written into a book and sell it as a fund raiser for the church. I had a deadline. October 17 there is an auction. Yesterday I picked up the book – 100 copies – illustrated! – from the printer. Tomorrow is the auction.

The other project I outlined is much more difficult than writing and putting together a book. I wanted to clean my house sufficient to hire a housecleaner. My progress here has not been so fast. My excuse, working on the book. So I’ve been putting together deadlines. I work much better with a deadline. And I’ve been moving that deadline up.

The first deadline I tied together with the auction (see above!) We’re auctioning a St. Pat’s dinner – March 17. Surely I can clean my house in time for that. The problem with that is it gives me much too much time in which to procrastinate.


February we are hosts to a dinner party for ten people, some of whom I don’t know well, again from the church. That set the cleaning deadline up, but still it leaves way too much time for us to mess things up before we clean them up.


Christmas – well that’s progress but my suspicion is that Christmas won’t be here.

So I invited the children and their families for Thanksgiving. Now I’m getting a little nervous because Thanksgiving is just a little over a month away, and when the family comes there’s not a room I can leave out.

I moved the deadline up again, and invited the children for our anniversary, November 8. I feel I’m getting realistic, now.

Today I invited the knitting group to meet here in two weeks. I have the deadline I have craved. Now that the book is done I can really get to work.

I walk around my house with an advertisement that tells me what a cleaning service would do in every room. I use it as a “to do” list. They talk of cleaning things like blinds, moving furniture, doing the whole job up right. This may get exciting. I wonder what I’ll find that I never knew I lost.

The Concrete Waterfall

The drowsy worker
By the concrete waterfall

Dreaming of rainbows

The man lies in the shadow of his truck
A yellow hard hat on the ground beside him,
His shirt hangs listless on a branch above,
He looks inside himself and sees
The waterfall to come.

He nearly feels the spray of splashing water
Sees it leaping down his unbuilt path
Sees it jumping over boulders, laughing
Crystal droplets singing as they fall.

He sees the water split by beams of sun
He imagines arcs of color through the mist.
He glories in the rainbow yet to be
Created by the waterfall he’s building.

In his mind he leans to catch the drops
Bathe his skin in the magic of the spray
He’d seize the rainbow, but as his hand shoots out
The rainbow isn’t there.

He wonders if he is himself a rainbow
Is his life an optical illusion?
Is he a glorious splash of color
That in time will simply disappear?

He stands, puts on his hat, spits out the grass.
He rises to complete his waterfall.

BLUE

I have a black cat name of Blue
And what he likes to do the best
(Aside from rest) is creep along the window sill
And leap on unsuspecting bugs.
He looks at birds beyond his reach.
If he had speech – could say the words,
He'd say those birds are easy prey -
Were he without and not within..

Elegy

 

My youth was a loud, rambunctious play
With a boisterous cast of parents, teachers, pals
Who stood across the footlights of my stage
Or sometimes simply waited in the wings
of my growing up –


Skip Halfpenny, the scamp whom teachers loved
To scold, And Martha Johnson, whose parents
Didn’t seem to like her very much.
My mother said it was because they were afraid -
They’d had four children, only two remained.


Mr, Stewart led the orchestra and band,
and we were good!
He called on us to do more than we could
He taught us the mathematical reality that
The whole, in orchestra, and perhaps in life,
Is often greater than its parts.
We learned it playing Rimsky-Korsakov.


I see my parents’ friends who smoked and drank
Played poker: nickel ante, dealers’ choice –
I see our houses, stages where we’ve acted
I wouldn’t know them now, they’ve been redone


The lights upon stage on which my childhood
         was played
Have flared, then flickered, finally gone out,
All the actors too are gone,
One at a time, they left.

THE CONDOMINIUM

There is a digger pine down by the lake
It leans, the branches sag, its trunk is two feet thick
The tree is old, it has a tired stance –
Yet in the upper limbs the place is jumping
Blue herons, egrets and some cormorants
Have made the pine their home –
Despite its insubstantial look.
We call this tree the condominium.

The herons and the egrets when they come
Must circle, sometimes several times
Before they make their landing on the fragile
Twigs of branches. They clap their wings
To gain precarious balance and
To let the other tenants know they’re home.
Sometimes they misgauge their space.
Great cries erupt when this occurs.
The branches shake as these long legged birds
Assert their ownership
Of each exclusive limb.

We worry when rain heavy storms with screaming winds
Descend upon the neighborhood -
The lake becomes a tiny sea with waves.
At times it overflows its banks.

We think the digger pine just isn’t safe,
Its branches loaded with the nests of birds.
We wonder – is its lean a little more acute?
Has seepage undermined the roots?
Should not the birds find better, stronger trees
In which to raise their young?
Or will their instincts tell them
When the tree begins to
Tip too much
And fall uprooted.