Today is a mixed bag
Like so much in life
And I have mixed feelings
A mess of childish resentments and
Spiteful retaliation and love that
I will probably die with.
My mother was like a starlet kidnapped into a homely peasant family
Tall with blood red fingernails.
My father was the homely peasant over-awed
By his captive.
My aunts were dumpy and mingy with praise.
I was the daughter
Having inherited flat feet and myopia
From my father
And delusions of grandeur
From my mother
A mixed bag.
So cold today
With an Arctic blast fast approaching
Driving me inside to
Bide with all the green things I meant to plant
And now I can’t.
What has nature wrought I wonder?
None of us is fit to brave this wind-driven wave
Of frost and ice
Coming so suddenly
Upon us in May.
All I can advise is
Avoid the void
Nothing to it really.
Unavoidably the void will be my
Undoing
And yours too.
Nothing we can do to avoid that.
Let’s zero in on avoidance then since
No more valid response to the void
Exists.
I had no idea how much
A critique of my poems would irritate me
I mean, I expected some negativity
For heavens sake
But now that I’m reading the comments
I am pissed off
By every critic’s obvious inability
To understand what I am saying
Or appreciate the subtleties of my prose.
Instead they sound condescending
And nitpicking
And painfully constructive.
Another day digging in the dirt
Cold out but I didn’t feel it
Because the sun was shining and I was hard at work
I saw my snake again
This time on the other side of the path
In different rocks
It slithered away, wouldn’t look me in the face
Went down a hole I think
Or in a crevice.
Being skinny it’s easy to hide.
I clambered up and down a steep bank on all fours
So as not to tumble
Trying to tell the weeds from the flowers
But they were all green
And I didn’t care much
As it turned out, so
I decided to provide a good home for all
Vegetation
Regardless of gender or nationality.
The lake is choppy
Wind blows the waves into froth
I take the trash out.
********************
I swear by love, death
Is there a third thing maybe?
If so I forget.
********************
Ignore me please folks
I am uneasy with crowds
Fuck me if you must.
********************
Walking with Mama
Shuffling slow arm and arm
Not like the old days.
*********************
Snakes coil among rocks
Scaled in black and yellow stripes
My spirit creatures.
**********************
Cat sleeps bored on bed
No mice to chase in winter
Summertime comes late
So there we were
Karl and me and the baby Katy
Not such a baby, four years old. We
Moved into a shack on Brookfield Pond
With our dog Benjamin, the cat Teeda
And four geese.
All citified except for the geese.
The house was heated by a wood stove but we didn’t
Have wood
Or money.
In the winter when the town plow went by
Snow came through the cracks in the walls.
The toilet froze.
We thought it was an adventure.
As soon as the ice on the pond was solid we took a sled
Chainsawed down a tree on the shoreline, a dead elm donated
To us
And split the wood
Standing out on the ice in the wind
Using a maul and sledgehammer. We
Stacked the logs on the sled and towed it back to the house.
Elm is tricky to split
Doesn’t burn awfully hot
But it kept us warm enough
That winter.
And some years later
We got countrified.
