Declaration
All MEN are created equal
Endowed with rights
To abolish happiness
Despotism their right
Repeated injuries
For opposing invasions
In circumstances of cruelty and perfidy
Answered only by repeated injury
Every act define a tyrant.
All MEN are created equal
Endowed with rights
To abolish happiness
Despotism their right
Repeated injuries
For opposing invasions
In circumstances of cruelty and perfidy
Answered only by repeated injury
Every act define a tyrant.
in the kayak,
I am alone
floating next to the canoe
carrying my friend and his girlfriend.
It’s blessedly quiet,
until the girlfriend begins to chatter
at me from the bow of my friend’s canoe.
Her paddle lays across her lap.
I am not really listening,
and then I just can’t hear her
because as we near some shallow rapids
the water’s volume adds her voice to its roar
that is so loud now I can laugh unheard aloud
when my friend, who’s paddling earnestly
to avoid an approaching tangle of roots,
shouts “Mandy, paddle!”
Past rocks and roots,
the water deepens and flattens.
His words blend with the babble of water behind us,
but the scolding drifts back to me on the air.
I dip my paddle on both sides to slow down,
buoyant in my solitude.
The plant’s long spikes bear
tiny purple blooms, lush
with pollen
for the black and yellow bees
to harvest
with unrestrained zeal.
Their buzzing forms
a low, communal hum
of bliss, as if
to voice
the plant’s well being.
It’s a shifting choreography
of bee onto blossom,
the stems bobbing
in sync.
Miniature petals shaken loose,
are like amethysts coloring
the ground.
The herbal scent of sage
feeds the air.
How about a film depicting a meeting between the leaders of India and the Soviet Union in 1947,
Where Gandhi throat-punched Stalin and made him cry?
Imagine the revelation that Al Capone had a drag queen dominatrix,
And Geraldo Rivera discovered the whips and chains in a second secret vault.
Is it possible that Marco Polo had a twin brother,
Who went in the opposite direction,
And discovered Neverneverland?
Finally, what if Abraham Lincoln slew vampires at night?
Oh, wait.
Sorry, Quentin and Oliver, you dropped the ball on that one.
One summer I sold flowers on a street corner.
It was Arizona and the sun converted
the crust from my northern bones
into orange smoothies and halter tops.
I skateboarded in the park
and forgot the language of snow.
With each bouquet I hawked,
my hair grew blonder and wilder,
the sun a drama queen
turning my skin into a fading
remembrance of winters past
until I owned that street corner.
Bright carnations and daisies,
a whisper of baby’s breath and fern,
the bundles flew into car windows—
a quick gift for grandma,
husbands hoping to bury mistakes,
hospital errand duties—
impulse buying in a fast food world.
I lived in a shady apartment
above a thriving jazz club
with Jeannie who read palms
and took her bible to bed,
two windblown transplants
eager for adventure.
We discovered Nina and Billie
and the syncopation of women.
We hung out with life that summer,
tasted dangers our mothers warned us about,
paving a new path to adulthood
and flourishing in that culture
where even the cactus bloomed,
beautiful and temporary
like dust dancing through sunshine.
I worried you would get carpal tunnel or arthritis
in those hands that deftly sliced, diced, chopped,
minced as you poured a chiffonade of vegetables
into your soups..
Or as you carved the tasty beef tenderloin
seasoned just right.
Your garde mange of birds sculpted from apples
and watermelons scooped into baskets amazed me
along with your tomato roses.
Saws scraping and crushing ice into fish
or flowers or urns to embellish
buffet tables with your art.
Preparing and filling over
1,000’s of turkey cavities for
huge Thanksgiving banquets.
Your hands survived just fine.
It was the legs that carried you
for 12 hour shifts of standing and
prepping and creating meals for
many that became your
Achilles heel.
In the post-truth world where fear threatens
the inner voice, we can’t let go the thread
lest
we all go mad
can’t let go the thread that winds
back before the beginning of time
the fulcrum
of the present
in which our lever pivots
He always collected
Her tears and
Stored them in
Beautiful glass jars.
She didn’t realize
That one day
He would
Drown her
In that ocean.
From the front row of every reading,
he photographed each writer who took the stage.
In our workshop, his measured comments on a poem
often ended with “This seems like it could go much further.”
His own poems plotted disturbing events in metered stanzas,
to make grief bearable in “Sam’s Hand” or to accumulate
irony in a poem about a boy drowning at a church camp.
His favorite poem was “Abide,” from a posthumous collection
about civil rights martyrs by Jake Adam York, who died at 40.
Jon died at 58, four months after we met.
I remember most his poems
about yanking livers and gizzards out of chickens for KFC.
I could not expect him to go further than that.
