Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about chunks of time. “How long do I have to live?” and “Where was I that many years ago?” and “At this stage of my life, a half century after graduating from high school, what did I think?” …and crap like that. The chunk that keeps coming up, though, is this one: 17 years ago we prepared to leave the snowy realms of upstate New York and head to North Carolina. A truly shit job and what should have been a wonderful company (and was for many others) had ended unceremoniously with a layoff. Less than three months later we were headed to what became the best dozen years or so of my working life, and ended with a pandemic and my retirement. Above, we’re about five minutes from leaving our home and never seeing it again. (I had to use the snow blower on the driveway that morning.)
I am not a friend.
I am an appliance
turned off and on
at whim; replaced
when my performance
fails.
Valued for comfort,
valued for feeding
egos/stomachs/hearts
(choose one or more)
until satiated.
Stress-walking, tense-talking,
wondering when this misstep
will negate our shared history.
This just in:
I too will turn you off
at a moment's notice.
Gardening emotionally,
I prune unfruitful relationships,
attempt to shape the unruly,
fight invasive species, but,
lately, I think I've pruned too
aggressively, fought too
vociferously, spent too little
time nurturing those pretties
who choose to live in my garden.
"Window up, window down",
Grandma's mantra. Why bother
with gradations, nuance, shades
of meaning, human failings?
Today's binary, electronic culture
can't see it's founded in
yesterday's hard realities:
"If'n it doan kill ya, it'sa prolly good,
but if'n it make ya sick, t'ro it! Ain't
no use hangin' onta sump'n gonna
maybe kill ya, sooner or latuh."
Yes,
I live not in my past but
in someone else's. It served
our ancestors for lifetimes, it
put backbone into indecipherable
existence, into amorphous life:
Symbolic living, roles for everyone--
must I think about myself,
about you, about everyone? Surely
I will die inside. I will face
insurmountable walls of
misunderstanding.
Today's non-roles just demand
different roles, other rules,
other games to play.
Just tweak roles from
millennia past. No need to
reinvent new modes of
emotional transportation.
But still...
It's on/off, "thanks for being
there, why can't you behave,
why can't you act the way
we act, push the buttons
we push, hate what we
hate, love what we love?"
I've got some on/off for ya:
Be who you are; I'll be the same.
Maybe similar will attract
Similar.
Or bug off.
Who’s using whom? Purple coneflower and bee. June 2017.
Sometimes, poetry is not good,
rejuvenating long-dead memories
when one graded The Poetry Assignment
as written by thirteen-year-olds.
Sometimes, the poet shoots
invisible needles of meaning,
millions of them, ripping, zipping
through me, nailing me
to where I sit.
[once again grabbed by the poetry of James G. Piatt as featured on Ephemeral Elegies]
Assess today, try harder tomorrow. Make your resolutions every day… every minute. Resolutions annually have little impact six months from now. Every moment is now, every day is today, every future is “the new year”. It’s great to usher out an arbitrary measurement of time, but really folks: let’s focus on where we really are!
Ibis or egret on a nest. Gatorland, Orlando, Florida. March 2010.
I have been ‘gestating’ a piece more than two months in the making. A friend of mine quoted an author to a small group of us in email, which prompted my reaction, “why do we like what we like?” a question which has tormented me for nearly 20 years. This writing has begun, and I am reasonably certain Part One will appear prior to the end of the year. Like the mother above in the photo, when the egg hatches is not a certain, well-timed thing.
Not a great photo. Taken with a primitive digital camera from the mid-90’s. This creek (Quackenkill Creek) defined the back property line of our New York property in the early 2000’s.. November 2001.
all the voices in my head 