Baseball

 He wore a felt hat

for his early morning beach walk-- an old man as regular in his habits as any tide. He moved slowly, carefully, in incongruous leather shoes under an anvil sky. Later, the oddest thing-- he sat on the sand as if resting, but his shoes were gone and he was as dead. His felt hat had fallen nearby cockeyed, between a cracked shell and a dead fish with a blackened hole in the crown about the size of a cold drink coaster or a baseball.

Third Marriage, Seaside.

 

Go down to the greenhouse and gather the blooms,

then scatter them all in separate rooms--

the rose on the grate of the fireplace cold

to lie there and die there as we grow old.

The arrangements are odd and enigmatic,

the occupants frail and most asthmatic

afflicted with allergies, fear and despair

made worse by the stale and fetid air.

Though we gasp our devotion like fish in a boat

and confess our passion by rite and rote,

we're as blinkered as babes, as clear as bells

as we rise from the drink on our half-assed shells.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--First Love

Emmeline in Trefoils

 

birdsfoot trefoils

Emmeline by dawn light

borrows roses from your bed

Emmeline by moonlight

brings back petit fours instead.

Italy had its masters

who loved Emmeline with their oils

touched by God in Trinity

and Emmeline in trefoils.

Emmeline in summer

reads your letters until the fall

then she wades into the water

to the boatmen's barcarolle.

______

for Word Garden Word List--Tenderness. 

I have broken my own rule and only used 2 of the List words (Italy and summer.) I had used several others but they all ended up on the cutting room floor. I decided to keep and post the poem anyway because I think it speaks to the source material(s), which was my aim. 

This is the fourth of my Emmeline poems. The previous three:

Emmeline By Evening (2009)

Emmeline By Wolf-Light (2016)

Emmeline In November (2021)

All The Little Flamingos

 

All the little flamingos

who used to hang around eating candies

turning themselves pinker by the hour,

where are they now? 

They used to carry Rod McKuen in boho bags

and spice their spring water with Tanqueray. 

All the infallible flamingos

confusing the Salton Sea with the Isle of Capri,

posing on one leg, demure and goddessy.

I miss the little flamingos

riding in paper gondolas, hating the pea hens,

in love with themselves, beatifically banal. 

I misremember the little flamingos

smiling behind Japanese fans, loving leopards

on screens for their mysterious silence.

So shallow and fresh, faces dipped

to the worst most brackish water, honking unmusically,

naked under their feathers, one more awkward than the next.

All the little flamingos.

Scornful, inscrutable, fragile flamingos.

I was there with them.

I was one of them. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Poetry Out Loud. 

Benediction

There is a bell in the tower by the lake of the swans

and a blind priest with his stick on the path.

What hymn can matter to these bickering birds?

What pew can comfort the bewildered dead?

The swans trick the dead to come into the lake

and fool the bell to fall from the rope. 

The priest is found on the bench in the dawn

his mouth filled with feathers as if they belonged.

__________

Michigan Vacation, 1967

 

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places." --Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

"Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling." --Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River part one.

_______

Michigan Vacation 1967

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a love of lake water.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Goodbye in the eyes of my father.

Solitude in a red paddle boat

watching the sea-weed swaying.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

A time cut short. We won't be staying.

That summer, Detroit and drift wood burned.

My paperback left behind.

Rain on wood rails. Cold green waves. White sails.

Something born or dying. Something fine.

When I turned twelve, Michigan blessed me

with a week that never leaves.

White sails. Cold green waves. Rain on wood rails.

How to love well and then, how to grieve.

________

Process note: My father had a particular fondness for Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. I can't read them without thinking of him.

For Dverse Poetics "One True Sentence." This form is called a ZaniLa Rhyme, invented by Laura Lamarca. 

Apes In The Coffee

There are apes in a woman's coffee.

"We warm ourselves against a hostile environment," say the faces upturned in the steam.

"Asian disciplines,

activism,

on-line broadsides,

these failed.

But this warm pool...is become our haven."

The woman's mind and limbs are heavy as asteroids, 

her heart a falling anvil,

her simian teachers ascended, sanguine.

_______

for Flash 55, hosted by the amazing Hedgewitch O' The Wilds, noted connoisseur of cofveve. 

__________

The Choir

The choir begins to sink.
Their robes cling to them as they submerge,
giving them the appearance of unusually godly torpedoes.

From their practiced throats, come tiny notes encased in air
as light as devotion.

Unfortunately,
this choir, like all instruments of deity,
is subject to that old bugaboo, the same one that always comes along:
The deeper they go,
the less those on the surface understand 
their 
rippling 
song. 
_______

Originally written in 1980 as part of a series of poems I wrote in reaction to having read Russell Edson's "The Wounded Breakfast." I have rewritten it today for the prompt at Toads.

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him,
He said, "All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them." --Leonard Cohen