springtime afebrile

 

 

 

I plant my garden by the Farmer's Almanac no later than the 25th of May,

the full flower moon,

each year when the midwestern springtime is still in need of a sweater.

I am old,

 

and old folk plant things in the ground just to spite the shovel

that tares into the dirt with aeration and that dampens the pin-curl seeds

and those strands of green hair with water and lotion, coiling it

 

securing it into balls of reflection and abortive compost. Then wait for the

harvest as if something like suns, or days, or moons are running out. And they are.

Not totally out, but out like something unattainable.

I am old,

 

which ricochets with a ping off birds and wagon wheels alike

and summons those large colubrid rumorred snakes, that are legend now,

that never came out to be murdered in this ecosystem. Not once.

 

But I did hear some rustling in the 70's and not the scarlet pimpernel of

primrose either but something long as isallobar, dropping those white flowers

as pinedrops to secure our way back home. Being old I can forget how to get there.

 

Hold my hand.

Sound a horn. Call the other old people. Call them by the names conceived

in midevel atstronomy, that primordial mixture of organic molicules and organ

players and organized bad singers like the ones who sang at Dads funeral.

 

Awful singers of that ridiculous part in the commencement where the ring is given

with a vow. And there are tears, always tears that you can print out in hand-letter

imitation of unjoined printed characters so the spell of a warming dusk

 

can cut through the CATARACT OR ANY TRANSPARENCY THAT OBSTRUCTS THE PASSAGE

OF LIGHT. Catch on quickly! Take advanage of the love when it is there. When the

dress of the young bride is so beautiful and her red hair belongs to inheritance

or magnificence.

Did I dare mention that I was old?

 

Old as a cake baked in 1956. It's icing that pink cathedral of sweet spike and

claiming historical continuity from it like a passageway under a river or

a fist of confetti hoisted and secured.

 

There was a place in Florida during the sixties where my Grandmother took me that

had those "White Only" signs that were erected, I imagine, for purification and

that made my heart race throughout the years. But being old

 

I smile now, not because they have been taken down, but that there is not

nail enough, or wood enough, or post enough, or tree enough

to lift such words past a man's shoulders.

 

And for being old I am a far better person.

Gay people attend my church. The pastor fain deliverance,

pretends he doesn't notice.

Reviews

[Circe]

i'm just grateful there is a poet like you that can write about experience in this way. this nostalgia.. it's also knowledge that you can wear, a peace that can protect... it's what you grew up with and what will be with you forever.... from the child with grandmother to the man with heavy shoulders carrying those blocked signs... perhaps it is the transcendence in time, perhaps it is just you... i will think of your words from now on when clenching teeth trying to find some missing ability.

[saratogaparty]

This is AMAZING.

I love your wording. I felt the flow and the thoughts as they came.

"I am old,



and old folk plant things in the ground just to spite the shovel"

I can't express how much this line resonates to me. I love the way it sounds and I have an idea of what you mean by it. Almost as if the ground represents the past or depleted earth, the plant represents new life and the shovel is the force used to bury or a representation of hard work?

I'd really like to hear your perspective of it, but that's what I took from it.

Seriously, amazing.

[I, Rene]

Just when I believe every subject has been covered you go and throw the blanket off our shivering minds, Dana this was incredible.

[Tree]

Last night I saw a documentary about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights era. Selma, Montgomery, those brave 9, and those 4 little girls who were murdered, firebombed in that Church. Those who where there are beginning to fade away, but some of that hate still lingers there... I like that in this piece young as you were back then you managed to give this reader a link. A sliver of imagery. Isn't that one of the many jobs of the poet? to connect the reader to the moment? a time, a place?

Thank you for sharing this, dana

DPaz

[writing mojo]

Wow! what a journey through the years spiked with the most familiar imagery yet surreal as the intention behind shadows in the sun, hot heated discussion of the ambition, auras left to the dawning of your journeying thought, being old is your gift to express what was left to the imagination of a slave ghost of vacation...amazing as all ways dana