Looking for Harmony

 https://youtu.be/KiV7Vo9k8RM

Rant

I don’t want to be old

I don’t want to make excuses 

About my unsteady step

I don’t want to turn and face 

Scary things inside my body. 

I don’t want to watch the watchers

No longer watching me

I don’t want them to say

Tsk, tsk, 

And shoot sly winking smiles

(Bet she was a looker when she was young)

At one another, as they ogle those 

Ungreying others in their quick strides 

Toward the myriad of their tasks,

Stumbles and surprises 

And I don’t want to be invisible

Like the old ladies drooling 

In their wheelchairs 

In the warehouses set up for them

In our cruel national repugnance

And nor do I

Want a special driver’s license,

Discounts to keep my teeth ship-shape,

My hearing keen, 

My any, many premiums at an all time low!

Call now! 

I don’t want the faux deference 

From a passel of hustlers looking

At me and thinking there must be a 

Way to make a buck or two. 

They have no idea how rage 

Turns to fire

And how I can and will

Obliterate their dreams, along with 

Anything else getting in my way

Don’t suggest it’s time to put in

An elevator to carry 

My looming infirmity upstairs

Do not reconfigure my 

House to match what some greedy 

Snake-oil salesmen would like to peddle—

Short of consignment to one

Of those places eating up any 

Legacy and fortune that will be left 

To the children—for I care not  

About someone else’s dreams, 

Of course, and by the way,

Fuck them, fuck them and 

Their coarse green dreams of dollars. 

Leave me alone. 

Do not patronize

Do not share a friendly elder joke

Do not turn in your delimitus 

Because you wish to avoid my belittling

You cannot see it coming, 

You cannot touch my power. 

And anyway, 

You won’t find me

And you won’t know me

And if you try 

You will spoil just like the 

Rotting apples on the ground

Of my autumn birthday 

And if somehow you see

The tracks of my shoes

In my muddy garden 

As I kick all that’s in my way

You will know, 

Because you read these lines, 

That every golden woman 

Fighting the platitudes and 

Cheap dismissive assignations 

That accumulate like leaves from

My Japanese maple just before they fall  

Is I. Is me. She. We. 

No graceful aging here, 

No airbrushed portrait, no giving in, 

No forgiving of assumptions and

No starting over in

The  constraints of time. 

None of this. None of that. 

No nothing but the raw edge of 

A life lived gasping for the breath

Of meaning and of relevance, 

Though knowing in the end 

It’s mostly dust, and the silvered,

Lonesome, wayward jangle of

A few stars along the way. 

Fantasia

Sitting in stillness

No breath of wind

High heat, dew point, and

Stupor,

I slow, slow down, breathe deeply, I 

Sit in the most immense quiet

That I can summon

And then I see imperceptible motion

A tangerine butterfly 

Hummingbirds that don’t notice heat 

Looking afield, apples on our old trees

Are blushing up, 

Some drop and dot the ground,

I hear bird calls 

As they swoop and glean

Enveloping gratitude, 

For this moment of homeostasis,

Unexpected, tears springing,

For that is surely what this is, a

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

That I’m listening to in these moments 

I think to myself

Dad would have the 

Glory of this piece wired to this patio

To each peeling porch,

Volume turned up to fill my skies

My wondrous old Dad

Would be sitting with eyes closed

Arms directing each sublime elide, 

And its resolution 

The way life 

My life, our lives

Are lived 

One elide into another.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0U6sWqfrnTs

Untitled Night

A close heaven, fireflies,

A quickening storm,

Rivers and waters roil

Scattering across lakes

Up toward the Maritimes

Down along the Missouri 

To the Mississippi and the Gulf

It’s not as green out there

Past Ogallala and Arapahoe,  

Brown down toward Durango

He says, idling in the conversation

I do recall, I say, and

Peblo. I like to say it that way.

I am of the land and dirt

Seeking water in arid landscape 

As I seek footing in stars

I see in this gift of life

That change waters the landscape.

In the west the thunder grumbles

I feel the shift of wind

I don’t need a weather alert

To move inside,

The rain serious now.

In a bit less rain, we watch 

Heat lightning as it lights 

The west again,

A western sky

In beckon: 

Come, now, it calls.

Time for you to go. 

On the Way to Dark

The many years, lifetimes

I’ve been lost in sunset

Missing moon rise 

A thank-you God moment or two

I sit in the orchestra as the bullfrogs tune 

And I notice how quiet my dog is,

Gunnar accompanies me

I hush, hush 

He speeds to check whatever rustles 

The brush in the pasture behind us

Behind the pond, 

Dodging under the 

Sweet ancient apple tree 

He’ll return to sit,

Near-motionless, watchful, 

Though I’m not altogether sure 

He knows this moon

This moment, 

This quiet,

This slice of changing light is his,

Although I know

It is mine. 

Tu me manques 

Dearth

Busy, the humming insights,

The reordering in my head of

Those important reverberations 

Upon opening into 

Light, unexamined pathways

I begin to wonder 

I might say 

Wander toward, into a

Strange question:

Are your ponderings

The way a woman like you

Sensibly reflects,

Or are they a little daft?

Perhaps so. 

But what do we know of 

Beyond peril, of some kind of 

Wholeness if 

The spacings that

Shake off conventions

Don’t mean anything?

Landscape

On a night of insights 

Stepping into frigid

I turn my back to wind

I’ve had a notion

Most of my life 

About horizon, space, 

The vast as far as I could see

In the growing up, 

Wind across the plains

Constant in

The calling spaces

Now mighty wind

Rags my shoulders but

I don’t care, nor do I 

Turn to look out into  

Snow carried in this  

Night’s wildness 

And I can’t explain it,

Anything about it, but it

Falls upon me, 

Perspective

February 15