Day 58

February 27, 2021

Grey Day

It was a bleak day, it was grey, foggy, rainy, snowy and still.  I did not go for a ride.  I took my lunch to the Cavalry Cemetery and saw a few birds.  Then I went home to my abode.  

I

The trees are beginning to do that new thing, they are budding out.  Aren't they afraid it'll be too cold?  We're 3 weeks before Spring and in all of the bleakness of the day you could see those special signs of spring.  The birds were even singing songs again.  

   

 The finch were up in the trees singing their song.   

Here's an old poem, but I like it and I don't think many of you have seen it.

Where did the poems go?

 

I haven’t found one in my body

for at least six months.  I find it unsettling,

as though I have no moments to express,

only large concepts or complicated stories.

Where did the poems go?

They started to slip away when I watched her die,

but they continued to spit and sputter

like the old Simca on a bad gas day.

 

            Driving that car was like winding up a toy. 

            The doors were thin sheets of metal, and the tires were tiny. 

            You could cause it to fly over bumps

                        even if you had five people poured in to it. 

            But if the gas was weak it would sputter and

            almost stall every time you put the clutch in,

                        or if you slowly rounded a corner went to go uphill

                        it would almost completely stop in second gear. 

            Sometimes we’d have to roll back down the hill

            and take the corner a little faster so we could make it

            up on the second try.  Ahh, the Simca. 

            My brother forgot to put oil in the engine,

                        so when he took it to Rochester

                        he seized the little engine once and for all.  

 

Has my mind been kept from oil? 

Have I forgotten to add a couple cans of 30-10?

 

Where have the poems gone? 

Are they sprinkled in the smell of unplanted rose bushes? 

A moment, a glance, a smell that says

everything I want to say has not appeared

long enough to let me place it on lines of paper. 

Those tiny moments are rushed away

by the incoming tide of larger questions. 

No, not whether there is a God, but

whether life is worth living, or whether

            that question is ours to ask.

 

Yes, where have all the poems gone? 

Why do I think they are hidden

in the colors of a painting?  And has

the painting been created yet? 

Is it already laid on a canvas, or is it

up in the same tunnel that words used to spill from?

 

            In 1962 my birthday party was

            held at Putnam Park in Redding Ct. 

            We climbed through the tunnels in April in Ct.

            but snow started to come down

            before the cake was served.  I remember

            I couldn’t sleep that night and Mom

            told me to remember every moment

            of the day precisely. I would be asleep

            before I reached lunch.  (Now there’s an odd memory.)

            I wonder if it was the day that had me anxious,

            frightened of those caves?  I don’t think so. 

            I think my friends were scared, but I was not,

            I followed my brothers in fearlessly

            I’m sure they played a trick on me,

                        scaring my friends.

 

Where did those poems go anyway? 

Did I leave them off the coast of Ptown,

a large humpback whale surfaced,

her back showing through the water’s surface

and like confetti I spilled them all over him,

            the last of my poems. 

Then he blew water out his hole

scattered that confetti into the Atlantic,

a couple of smaller fish thought it was

food and swallowed them up. 

Other pieces, saturated in seawater, fell to

the bottom to become some crustaceans supper.

            Gone.

 

Where did those poems go? 

Like the humpback’s back,

will they slowly lift up under their weight

curve out of the water making an ess curve

with a fluke? Water pumping from a hole in her back,

large body rising up out of the sea,

flapping her tale up and then down,

the only splash seen.