Sad Songs End Long Summers

These Metameric Lyrics

Fragments may be evidence

Of hidden ruins. Fragments

May be ruins, or may be

Shored against someone’s ruin,

Or may point past all ruin

To find what lives in the cracks

That didn’t exist until

We piled fragments up in stacks.

~

On the Moral Cost of Cats

A tiny, crooked man

With a huge, woolly head,

Wrote cats out of the bag.

Never call natural

Good, fixed in place, he said.

Cruel can be sweet and sad.

All summer long, he winced

As nestlings turned up dead.

Would you have tied that sack?

~

For Some Reason, the Memory of Sitting in That Chair One Sunny Afternoon . . .

There was a woman, named Nicki,

Gave me a haircut once in her kitchen,

Where she’d installed an ornate barber’s chair

Bought from some antique store, as I recall,

Enough to set herself up in business.

This was by the lake, in the Kootenays,

A number of years ago. A couple of years

Later, her child was one of a foursome

Of teenagers who fell into the lake

Out of their overloaded canoe

One breezy, sunny day in early May,

Suffered hypothermia, and drowned.

Not long after, Nicki left town. I don’t know

Where she went or whether she ever visits

The memorial set in the woods by the shore.

I know a young couple with two small boys,

New to the village, moved in to her cottage

And then split up. The mother stayed

In that little house, while the father moved

Just a tiny bit up the road. Another story.

I don’t know. Where could a barber’s chair go?

~

Take a Quiet Life

All the goodness of an unspecial day,

Lacking in any miracles, any

Unexpected graces, unless one counts

The torn corpse of a gorgeous male goldfinch

Left on the lawn beneath the pink sunrise

As a miracle of grace. The doves coo,

The traffic rumbles out of sight, sprinklers

Hiss reminders of Joni Mitchell songs

From entirely other millenniums.

A small dog barks somewhere beyond a wall

In the calm. “Stop it, Charlie.” I can see

The young moon with the old moon in her arms.

~

This Violence That Is Ours

Explanation and defense

Occupy the waking thoughts—

Why aren’t my poems about this,

And why haven’t I done that?

In the center of serene

Stellar swirls lurk the likely

Huge, harrowing black hole beasts,

Spinning plasma, eating stars,

But why can’t I seem to write

Well about strong emotions

And human relationships,

The violence that is ours?

~

Respondebat Illa

Decrepitude’s the price we pay

To gain a long perspective.

Once it’s more than flesh can pay,

We lose all perspective.