Entering the Kindergarten

 From now on,
September will always be
the month of new beginnings.
Forget New Year's Day,
your world will tip to the Sun
as the bright days of Summer fade.

All time will be counted to
and from this date.
The endless circle of morning and night
will explode into a year,
then a decade.

Your dreams and your awful fears
will revolve around this season
forever.
Your fresh innocence will be postponed
until the leaves begin to turn.

When tomorrow finally comes,
you will lift your slender wrists
to receive the bracelets of time.

Swing Set

 

Opa gives me uppies
into my pink swing 
ClickClickClick
to the moon
    silly old moon
Grass sky grass sky
grass sky grass sky
My shadow shrinks
and grows  shrinks
and grows shrinks
and grows
    Watch this, Opa
Grass sky grass sky
Grass sky grass sky
my hair in my face
shush shush shush shush
shush shush
    remember dat?
I feel squishy and warm
cozy cozy      like a cloud
like a    marshmallow
Me        love      marshmallows
Eyes heavy   sun warm
Me love to swing
me love    to    swing
me love       me love 
me     love
love. 

The Children's Room

 

The Children's Room at the Kennebunk
Public Library is full of toddlers-
a noisy chaos of glue sticks, scraps of colored
paper, moms, books, stools and low tables,
more upscale than our country library.
The kids seemed more privileged too,
as no doubt they are, bossy
unwilling to give up the wooden train set.
"Well, piss on them", I think and maybe
Bindi heard because she grew very quiet
and her Bluey pants turned dark
and wet.

Scoop up her blushing form and hustle
to the men's room, to the privacy
of the handicapped stall
(too flustered to correct myself and think disabled).
Peel off the wet pants and the Paw Patrol
undies. A futile seat on the toilet but
that stream had moved on. Now what?
Off comes my vest, fleece and
undershirt – transformed into body-warm dress.

Coat and clothes back on but at my age,
I can't leave a toilet unpissed.
Bindi is behind me, angling for a look.
She knows what her vulva is
and the word "penis".
But there will be no anatomy lesson on my watch.
Circling the toilet bowl
to keep my back to her,
"I need some private time. I am being shy."
From behind me, in a gentle voice
without judgement -
"It's just me, Opa.
It's just me."

Timko and Oogala

 

“The future looks bright for Timko and Oogala.”
  
So said the warm, white male voice
on Sunday night -
the Wonderful World in Living Color.
The hearty Eskimo(say Inuit) youngsters 
were now fully prepared to meet 
the rigors of the North
and thrive.
Next week we would thrill to see
Charlie the Cougar. Brute hunter,
cunning but never successful. (No sight of 
doe's blood\gashed throat
on Sunday night).

Timko's grasp is light on the ancient rifle 
in his lap; His gaze far across 
the open land, 10,000 feet or more.
The shell is in the chamber.

Oogala sees open water from her house 
all winter long.
She turns from the frosted window to CNN
and pours.

The last dogs howl for the children  
taken away to school.

Three hundred forty breeds of dog, 
but the snow bears will soon be gone
(like the ermine, the fox and honking geese).

The scientist laughs out loud,

“The earth will survive the 6th extinction, 
but we won't.”

Snow Bear (television) Two-part television show; aired on November 1 and 8, 1970. Directed by Gunther Von Fritsch. A polar bear cub is befriended by Timko, a teenage Eskimo boy, while he is on a year’s self-imposed exile from his community, learning the art of the hunt. The soon grown bear has to be returned to the wilds after it destroys the village’s meager supply of food. Stars Steve Kalcak, Rossman Peetook, Laura Itta. Filmed on location in Point Barrow and other Alaskan sites. Released for schools on 16mm film as The Track of the Giant Snow Bear. https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q72928840

 

My Winter Days

Coarse, blunt hairs sprout from the top
of my nose like the salt wind stunted
trees along Somes Sound.

Why they have started growing
out that way is a mystery to me,
another curse of my Winter days.

I make my wife promise that when I
am lost and mindless in a nursing home,
she will come and pluck them

One by one.

December 27, 2021

 

Penguins: An Anniversary Card

It was, of course, the picture that first attracted me; how

one moves away and one stands still. 

Which of us is which, I wonder?

That each day we struggle between the forces of life, green

and bearing up through the snow towards the sun,

and death, a quietude when all energy is expended

and space is the only sound;

That we all stagger between one of those gates

and the other, that is well known.

Some are moving forward and some are standing still. 

Some are waiting silently and some

are anxious to rush to the same conclusion.

To wait with patience upon the other, unmoving or declining,

 is love. 

So is being drawn forward by the hand (or wing)

across the landscape spangled with falling stars.

August 5, 2021

What We See, What We Know, What We Read.

 

If I see the gazelle step lightly thru the high grass,
pause and turn to leap away, I tell the story first
by firelight while the haunches broil.
The sun, the water, the birds in the air,
Mountains to the side and clouds above;
I see only the black eyes of the gazelle in the high grass.

We go down into earth together and the drums echo in the cave.
Here by flame light I sketch my prey alongside the 
bears and great cats in profile, one after the other.
Over there, the aurochs roar and the mammoths thunder – gone now.

Later, much later, I will face the lions and put arrow 
to their breast.  Then others will carve my bearded likeness 
and the cats, sleeping in the garden or chased by chariot. 
Across my muscled knees, the scratches record my glory, 
my name and those of my defeated enemies cast down before me.

The hunter lays aside his atl-atl 
and comes in from the sunlight, 
comes in thru the French doors to sit 
for his portrait on a hobby horse,
ruffles fall away from the sleeve where 
he points his baton West.

We think we can smell blood on his hands.



April 11, 2021
reading “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger