I have a new prose poem/essay about birding at Farm posted at the Advanced Leisure site.
It's called "Hunt and Peck" and you can read it by following this link:
https://www.advancedleisure.com/lifestyleanddesignarticles/hunt-peck
The star that exploded was way too dim. I became nothing but gravity but then I knew my soul.
Archery season for deer opens today, halfway through September, freight rail facing a union strike. You gotta get them data together, gotta get them in the same room, negotiate with them, get them on the same page. This data, that data, get them to shake hands.
I left my flip flops somewhere out there, walking around barefoot, grounding. Shards of acorn shells hurt when stuck to my soles but when clean my feet could grip better against the rock face compared to when their were sheathed in flippers.
In a shower with unheated well water. The body adjusts but the portion against which the water feels most cold is the middle of my back, along the spine, so many switches in there, skin the most naked. Need: white paint, pink paint, Naples yellow. Such a solid state of matter, ailing hospital, corrupt politician needs no rehab. You're fine, said the doctor. Get back down to the waterfront and cast that vote.
It's nice to have a little extra light. Cattle swindle, waterfront development. Notes gone the wrong way, jobs buried in the Meadowlands. A cigarette walks into a farmhouse. The metal is loose on the barn. Your teeth are decent tweezers, and other facts you might as well know while you're still human.
Farm Cat reappears. Where time is irrelevant. She's a jumper, bounces around between worlds...
White-faced cow's got red in it somewhere. Breed two white-faced cows, that's how you get a red one. Some people think Angus meat marbles better, I don't know. Older people said Jerseys or Guernseys were better. To me, you take the skin off the cow, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
There's salt in the feed. They cut it with that or else they'd eat it all at once. It's a protein feed, 20% protein, from the MFA. There's one in Meta, one in Vienna.
Cows can live as long as twenty years. This one here's twelve years old, you can see her belly's getting pretty big. The older cows they call short and solid. Because their teeth get short and square. If a cow has a broken tooth, they call them broken-mouthed cows, and if they have a broken tooth, they're probably old cows. They break a tooth on a rock, eating dirt. When the grass is eaten down to the ground. We keep our grass pretty tall so that won't happen...
We go to lunch. Bob's at the lunch table.
"I look around at these two guys," he says, "And I wonder, 'Are they ever gonna be included in something as big as this?'"
The food arrives and Bob looks my way.
"I don't really want this," he says, and starts laughing.
I take this opportunity to ask him about his tattoo. Was it from his military days? He doesn't answer the question. It's the only time he's ever seemed to evade a question, or appearing to do so. He starts talking about his son fixing up houses. "They were small hands but many," he says. Then, "That's one thing I like about this place. It's clean."
I listen to lunch room sounds. One of the CNAs is encouraging one of three Helens (in this case, the mayor's daughter) to eat her food. Helen replies in her soft-spoken manner, "I'd better not. I don't want to throw up here. Everyone will look at me." The only thing she eats is the ice cream.
Then, a commotion from out in the hall, a racket.
"What the...?!" Bob exclaims. "It sounded like about two or three horses or something." Then he sneezes. "Oooh, that one came out fast," he says.
Bob ate the garlic bread, a little bit of pasta, and the ice cream. "Ice cream's ice cream," he says. "But this is pretty good."
I went over to the main dining room and got a plate of my own. Pizza spaghetti they call it. I ate everything on the plate save one pepperoni. My dad ate everything except one slice of zucchini. It's the Patsy Cline CD playing today. Bob knows these lyrics, some of them. He sings along. When the last song on the CD stops playing he says, "So there."
Genevieve, the 98-year-old woman hunched over in her usual windbreaker outfit makes her way out by taking tiny steps with her dangling wheelchair feet, quiet as a cloud except when she catches one of the CNAs on her way out and asks for a Honey Nut Cheerios to go.
"We enjoyed lunch with you, Bob," my dad tells his lunch mate.
"When was that?" asks Bob.
"Today," says dad.
"Oh, ha. Ha ha. Thank you, thank you very much," says Bob.
But we don't get going just yet. It's quiet now in the lunch room. The sound of wind chimes comes from outside, past the glass. My dad is starting to doze off. Bob is picking at his teeth, wiping clean the glasses he lost for a few days last week.
"I think I'm gonna go downstairs," Bob says. "I don't know if I've been down there. I thought I had. I'll probably make a new, or I don't know. As far as I knew, we hadn't used that, or we wished it away. I'm goin' downstairs. Anybody left? Hello, hello. I'm goin' down..."
Admirals Club. Dad going through a USA Today. Cup of coffee going lukewarm in front of me. I just sped through a sudoku and it didn't blow up. The chair I'm in is leather, comfortable. Thoughts of the dog are stressing me; have been since before I left the house. I'll feel much better when my wife returns to the house tonight, back from a trip of her own; lets me know everything is alright. Also, rain today. Gray day, Gray Davis. Remember him? Total recall. The e-mail that never was. Unknown sender, no subject, blank body, unsigned. A friend is to let the dog out mid-day but problems with the front-door-knob plague me like a vice. Is the roof keeping out the rain? I rain onto paper, letting everything out. Grip on my temples easing. Hoping there aren't any leaks; nothing I can do about them now. American Airlines, AMR. Flying in the rain. My father went to use the computer. When he's back he'll tell me if the market's up or down.
I have a poem called "One Road" published in the most recent edition of a northern Michigan literary journal called Dunes Review.
If you are interested, you can buy a copy of the Dunes Review in which this poem appears by following this link which is for the website of an independent bookstore in Traverse City, MI:
https://www.horizonbooks.com/book/9781950744220
The specific volume is Dunes Review 28.2: Fall/Winter 2024. It has a wintery lake scene depicted on the front with some driftwood or branches in the foreground. I wish to thank the editors of Dunes Review, Teresa and Jennifer, for including my work in the journal.
I had another encounter with the mouse lady. Yesterday. I didn't realize it was her; that's how tired I was.
My dad and I were sitting outside, near the St. Francis Center entrance. A woman came out very straight-backed, serious air. She sat down and said, "I just wanted to see who was out here."
And we said, "OK, yeah."
She said, "It's not because I'm nosy. It's because I'm blind."
Blind? Hmmm. She didn't strike me as having a problem with her sight. She had no cane, no walking stick, no walker, nothing. She didn't reach about to feel for the chair when sitting down. I thought she looked familiar but I've been coming here long enough to where most of the people look familiar, because they are.
She remarked on how nice a day we were having, the weather. She asked where we were from. Not from St. Francis, she observed. And now I know where she was coming from, what she was getting at. She's a wasp. I'm a wasp. Her tendency is also mine. To be curious to a fault. To gate-keep.
"My dad's in Dammert," I told her. "We like to come out here for the view."
Then she started talking about wanting to see some of the area cleared. The vines, their tangle, the brush. This is the area you see when you look out, west, southwest, from the St. Francis Center entrance. My dad would start calling it Porcupine Hill. Why, I don't know. And he wasn't calling it Porcupine Hill yet. This was only April of 2024...
I've had a poem posted online at the website of a poetry journal called Sheila-Na-Gig. The poem is titled "3 AM Eternal." You can see the winter edition of Sheila-Na-Gig Online posted here. This link will take you to a series of headshots and you can either find my photo or my name. Click on the photo and it will take you to the poem. Thanks for reading and thanks to the Editors at Sheila-Na-Gig for giving my poetry a place to be seen and to be heard.
We are sitting in the lunch room. Me, my dad, Bob, Father V. We are all drinking coffee. Bob is singing along with the music that’s playing. Patsy Cline. He is not quite singing the words but he is howling, slow crooning, lamenting.
The song is “Baby, Baby.” Once it ends he says, “Yeah! Write something else!”
Lunch is grilled cheese, tomato soup, fries, and applesauce. Nothing wrong with that. My dad is eating well. Bob gets an extra sandwich but he hasn't gotten through the first one yet. It's a warm nursing home lunch room now gone quiet except for Patsy Cline singing “Always” one afternoon before the approach of some very bad weather.
The song ends and Bob exclaims, “Yes, indeed!”
Then he makes to get up from the table. “Well, the wife is wonderin’ where I’m at,” he says, and my dad laughs.
“I know she does,” Bob says, trailing off. He doesn’t get up after all, stays seated. He sits with his back to the wall, looking toward the wall of windows on the west-facing side of the lunchroom. Bob's problem is his sight. He can still get around just fine, using his walker, but his vision is failing.
“Look at the clouds all the way out,” he says, “I think they’re going to be there a while. I think we played football together...”
Bob was talking today. We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.
“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.
I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth. Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced. New brakes. I guess it really doesn’t take that long.
Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.” I asked him what kind of car he had. Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck. He laughed at that idea.
“No,” he said, he never had a truck. “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”
“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked. “Getting up on those poles?”
“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”
Bob was a lineman. He worked for what then was called Union Electric. He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...
JBR.com 