Fast Day 222 September 1 2011 {40th Anniversary}

40th Anniversary

I wonder where the vermilion roses bloom?
Why my soul… a trembling ruby hummingbird?
Why our walks into the woods o’er so soon?
How long our fiery words of love be heard?

When will mem’ry be estated wholesale
to the summer vacation’s antique store?
When old photos do fade to enigmas pale?
And poet’s metric cadence is no more?

Swimmers having climbed the last sandy hill,
feel the sun’s warmth again, bright as love’s coin;
I shall love you, young rose gardener still,
holding nectar as trembling souls rejoin!

Whoever with deft hand and eye fresh flowers has arrayed,
May memoirs and their beauty with roses be portrayed!

--
notes

The lines are not of uniform length, and I had started writing with that intention, having recited a number of things of varying lengths, and had decided I liked the cadence of the irregular better than he regular length.

I like the word "estated", past of a new verb "to estate", which I take to mean that process by which a person's life is dissipated by one's heirs in a series of auctions or garage sales over the weekends of the late summer.
Thus, "to estate" = to distribute, dissipate, and otherwise disperse the material goods of someone after the heirs have culled them for any potential value, and assuming there are no items of discernible  value, historical or otherwise. The process begins with attempts to sell all such items, and eventually ends in disposal by whatever means available.
The process begins at any time of the year when there are items of value, and as the total value of the estate decreases, the process moves into the "garage sale" phase, which takes place in the late summer through "Indian" summer and finishes before cold weather.

Many items end up in antique stores near the beach of summer vacation hot spots.

I put this up early, since we'll be working on the 90th birthday party.
You would not believe what we are going through with my parents to try
and get this done! It's not a surprise party, just maybe 20 people. Very difficult.

--

Fast Day 221 August 26 2011 {On My Mother's Birthday}

 Vessel Roger Blough in Fog

On My Mother's Birthday

Sitting on a glider…
Sitting on a glider in Marine City,
we fell asleep;

a cold front
inserted itself into a hot summer day
bringing rain and fog;

freighters surprised at noon
sounded ten inch steam whistles’ alarm
waking glider children.

the pilot houses floated
above the now obscure and fog-grey hulls
as if disembodied

and chased by the surprised
smoke stack, freed from the now invisible stern;
timelessness, summer, youth!
--
pix:  boatnerd.com

notes
the photo is the closest I could come to describing the actual events. The pilot houses back then were taller and stood higher relative to the hull, and the fog totally obscured the hull, which in the picture above is slightly visible as a black line between the stern and the bow.

I am early with the poem, and early for the birthday.
--

Fast Day 220 August 20 2011 {Stuck in Botswana}

Stuck in Botswana

I suck my iPods like a cocainero noses blow,
and I listen to music, and I dance!
There is no worry: a big pumpkin for dinner!
and a bottle beer with misty gold boss!

Outside the house, by the kraal, the trannies giggle
as they go to the music box cafe
There is no worry: I smile at them,
and they throw sequins like stars down on me!

It is time to forget all this crap that has come down!
My girl will eat curcurbit,
and I will eat the pomegranate!
We shall spend the night all Okavonga!

Okavonga delta where Long Dry meets Deep Wet!
All the Namib desert cannot fill!
Rainy season makes the river laugh;
sleep beneath the Milky Way - on and off...

--

Fast Day 219 August 11 2011 {Counting Twigs} second draft

Fish Traps and Gill Nets

Counting Twigs

I count the twigs of fate.
There are many.
I think about the twigs of fate.
The number... is it odd or even?
I count twigs of fate.
I throw them into the wind,
I throw them into the sea.
The number... is it odd or even?

I count the thorns of life
upon the rose.
If I fall upon them, will I bleed?
Who will wear this crown of thorns?
I count the thorns of life.
Will I bleed real blood,
or will I bleed a dream?
Who will wear this crown of thorns?

I go to mend the fish nets.
There are many.
I think about their spider web:
which salmon lives and which will die?
I go to mend the fish nets.
What has set a net for me?
Who will come to set me free?
Which salmon lives and which will die?

--
originally in Russian:
Я рассчитываю ветки судьбы.
Есть много веток.
считаю ветки судьбы.
это число...  четным или нечетным?
Я рассчитываю ветки судьбы.
Я бросаю их в огонь ...
бросаю их в море.
это число...  четным или нечетным?

Pix:  EdBob  on Flickr.com

Fast Day 218 August 5 2011 {In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd}

In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd

In Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Yellow Room,
Shiva woke up after taking a snooze;
so there was a young girl dead, just one,
and Floyd the sheriff drove to the cottage
old man Spencer had bought in thirty-eight
before the war, before his own death.

Mrs. Spencer closed her eyes, exhausted;
her daughter, Carol, who’d lost her lover
in the war, resented digitalis,
mother’s med,
mother peevish, invalidish...
lost her lover in the war,

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Age Atomica
was about a full month away; it was
June of the year Nineteen Forty-Five;
In July Trinity fathered Fat Man and Little Boy
and Shiva was the Destroyer of Worlds!
and Shiva was in the house, the big house!

Mrs. Spencer sipped her scotch and soda
and dreamed of her son, Greg, coming home on
a thirty day to be decorated
by FDR himself,
the President…
and a dead girl in the Yellow Room.

Now in August of Twenty-Eleven
the Dow will drop five hundred points;
now Shiva works for Standard & Poor’s!
Can’t CSI all the dead in all our
yellow rooms: Iwo Jima and Darfur;
in the ball-park of the madding crowd.

Mrs. Spencer sat in a white wicker chair
in the sun porch…
after this great war, things will
never, ever be the same;
the future will be bright:
the future when every TV
talking head will know
who killed whom...
the young lady
named Casey perhaps
in the Yellow Room.

--
Reading a murder mystery, The Yellow Room, by Mary Roberts Rinehart in an edition published in 1945.
Thinking how things are in the past and the present.

Casey  - Casey Anthony

--