Mantra
I keep
telling myself
it’s not the end
of the world
& sure enough
it isn’t
so far
I miss the cabin in Michigan
the family rented those two weeks
every summer going back
twenty or more years.
When the owner died
his children sold the place —
a kit house bought
from Sears-Roebuck
and delivered by railcar —
to a trader from Chicago
who plans on razing
the musty, spider-filled cabin
and erecting something more modern,
with phone chargers, one imagines,
in every room.
*
My mother can no longer speak,
dementia having robbed her
of even crude, guttural syllables.
She lies in her adjustable bed
lowered to six inches off the ground
should she roll out again
and kneads the hem
of the blanket
when my daughter and I come to visit.
I am always too uncomfortable
to spend more than a few minutes with her.
She reminds me of crisp, amber-colored cicada shells.
This woman once dove into a pool to save me.
*
Weeds have overtaken
the raised beds where I would grow tomatoes:
Big Boys, roma, the occasional heirloom.
I got tired of fighting the dogs
who scatter the dirt and overturn the wire cages.
The weeds aren’t all together ugly.
Some might even have been
medicinal in a previous life.
*
My uncle was a puppeteer,
free-drink famous at the corner bar
for his role as the gopher in the movie Caddyshack.
So many of his friends
died of AIDS, he suffered from
survivor’s guilt, relieved,
even grateful, toward the end,
when he learned the cancer
was terminal.
*
No one will remember all the gopher holes
I filled on the small farm we owned
those three years, or the compost bin I built,
storage for all the manure our two horses produced.
I sunk 6 by 6’s into the earth, took extra care
to make sure they were plumb,
then boarded three sides
with plank from the lumber mill
off the road to Taylorsville.
I lost my new prescription sunglasses
in the shit and the muck.
Sometimes when I’ve been drinking beer
I wonder if they’re still there.
*
An ancestor on my wife’s side was
forced to walk the plank
off the coast of New Orleans,
her ship boarded by pirates at night.
The family believes this story to be true,
but I argue it’s just as likely she ran off
with a cabin boy, or two,
maybe to Tahiti, some island paradise.
This tale would come up once a year
while playing putt-putt at Blackbeard’s Cove,
summers, in lake town Michigan,
where we used to rent a cabin.
You’re the cat I truly didn’t want,
but my wife did, so take a guess.
You’re the cat that left hairballs
right where I could find them at night.
You’re the cat who head-butted me
while yowling to be fed before sun-up.
You’re the cat curled up on my lap
while I sat by our mistress’ sick bed.
You’re the cat sitting in the window,
watching me make food for her wake.
You’ll always be the cat I truly needed,
the cat I’m glad came, the one I miss.
(after the unattributed early 20th century
photograph of the headstone
of a cat named Dewey)
in the magic
of this early cool
you ask me to sit with you
and listen to the Bee Buzz
under the super-bloom
of Sweet Mimosa,
your internal decible
meter rates the vibration
higher than our refrigerator
Familiar flitter
My nephew saw a blue angel rise
from a polished copper vase
that cradled gravely bits
of my mother. He was chanting
a poem in Hebrew as the electric
blue feathers fanned out
& flew in pieces to the upper corners
of the sanctuary. The roof opened up
& the feathery blue essence tumbled out–-
woosh–-like a speed train into the sky.
You may notice I use the word blue
but it was a blue vision, surrounded
by blue, illuminated blue & received
by blue. You could say it was a hallucination
but several attendees saw it, scraps
of blue traveling up, disappearing.
