Oddments

In search of story


by 24 Comments

April 14.26: Coping, but barely

My wrinkles and sags

like bright neon sign

declare all my years

like blazing sunshine.

Obvious, blatant,

from varicose vein

to grey at my crown,

it’s electrically plain.

Can I help you, young lady?

I hobble a bit

when my left knee goes out;

my sensible shoes

are clearly about

my senior predictable

fashion transitioned

from business to comfort,

high heels decommissioned.

There ya go, young lady!

It’s mystery to me

why people don’t hear

how cute those words aren’t,

how they do not endear,

what a pat on the head,

smug, patronizing,

these rickety bones

italicizing.

Have a nice day, young lady!

Maybe I’m cranky,

but shouldn’t I be

when “young lady” is smirked

so often at me?

I wonder if those

same people address

old men as “young man,”

but I think I can guess.

 

Every young lady’s corner: rocking chair and cane.

(Did I just hear someone say the young lady is off her rocker?)


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April 3.26: Coping, but barely

Me                                                   Muse

 

The muse does not amuse,

a stubborn plotter she,

devious conniver,

delighting to torment me.

We have our daily stand-offs,

poisonous glares abounding,

clashing wills like fireworks

mutually confounding.

Give me the words!

my soulful cry,

Make me!  her cheerily

taunting reply.

And so it goes,

this writer’s thing,

this tug-of-war,

this dueling.

Now that it’s April,

she’s especially coy,

living up to her motto:

I live to annoy.

 

It’s Poetry Month, dear reader, and what a beginning: sunless skies, whiplash weather, moaning winds, tattered country…I need words! I think my muse stowed away on Artemis, thinking “any place but here.” Am I doomed to wordlessness in Poetry Month? If my muse is not on Artemis, and you should see her, please tell her to get back here! I’d say appeal to her conscience but I think she doesn’t have one.

 

More thanks to S.W. Berg, our sharp-eyed photographer.

He says this is about the game “Go.”

I say it’s writer and muse.

 

 


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March 29.26: Coping, but barely

In the time of Very Long Ago

the year and I were new,

beginning in our being,

tentative, we two.

Then began my early schooling,

to learn anticipation,

to watch through winter’s dark

for sly regeneration.

It starts as merest fuzz,

barely to be seen,

a wispy light concoction

of air and newborn green.

Two blinks, and then it’s gone,

so brief that infancy,

overnight full-grown,

sad inconstancy.

That’s how my childhood self

learned to watch each twig

in roadside bush and thicket

before the leaves grew big.

That blush of leafy witchery,

microscopically perceptible,

delivering me from doldrums

to which I was susceptible,

has been a lifetime lodestar

I’ve watched for all these years

and every year dumbfounded

when such wizardry appears.


by 18 Comments

March 19.26: Coping, but barely

When the world is ablaze with blahs

and you walk eyes-down because

you’re looking for any molecule

of color to give your spirit fuel,

and all you see are blahs,

wrapped in dead-leaf gauze,

you yearn down to your toes

for zinnia, daisy, rose,

maybe this constellation

of pencil conflagration

can give you a case of the ah’s

instead of grey dishwater blahs.

 

 

With many thanks to the excellent eye of Emily Berg Baine,

one of two daughters extraordinaire of our intrepid photographer,

S.W. Berg.

 


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March 17.26: Coping, but barely

Should I believe

what I have heard,

that the heron is

our family bird?

Our heraldic crest —

oh, noble line! —

emblazoned thrice

with feathers fine.

Of his aspect,

what tells of me?

His happy face?

His jollity?

Does beak suggest

an Irish grin?

The shoulder slump

a hope therein?

How to view

the family crest

is puzzlement

at very best.

This cupola

it seems to me

says this about

our family tree:

we might look dumpy,

a bedraggled sight,

but you should see us

when we take flight:

our wings spread out

in noiseless glide,

we meld with air

like farewell sighed.

Magic moment,

transformation

from feathered frump

to inspiration.

Eternal stoic,

still and lone,

wondering where

he left his phone.

 

 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, dear reader,

from the O’Hern birds and me!

 

With thanks to my new-found cousin, Cristal McQueen, for the photo!

(Cristal is a professional photographer, and I had to put in this word for her because she has some great photos of Ireland. She’s our family sleuth, the Sherlock Holmes of genealogy.)

 


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March 12.26: Coping, but barely

Do you know the old rock song “Mony, Mony,” dear reader? If yes, you know how soothing it isn’t.

I went to kindergarten with my old friend Ann, through grade school and high school and college. In later years, we emailed every day, inevitably touching on our mortality. She think-planned her funeral, and I would always respond “have you written that down?”

She wanted “Mony, Mony” as the recessional, envisioning people dancing down the aisle behind her ashes. In my show of support, I told her that, if I were at her funeral and “Mony, Mony” blasted, I’d duck out the side door.

Ann died a few weeks ago. Turns out that “writing it down” meant what she wrote in her emails to me. Unknowingly, I had the only record of her wishes, including her directive to readers to “observe all commas” and to keep Psalm 23 in the King James’ version. To her credit (I guess), she told everyone she wanted “Mony, Mony.”

She got it.

Her funeral was in New York and I attended through the hocus-pocus of something called Zoom. Zoom cut out before I could hear the Mony Recessional, but I believe the organist performed his own arrangement of it. The original was part of the reception afterwards. And now it’s stuck in my head.

Her death hit hard. Since we were both 83, you’d think neither of us could have been stunned by the death of the other. But it doesn’t work that way.

I’m trying to remember her with dancing and laughing. I’m not there yet, but this infernal internal noise of “Mony, Mony” is her reprimand to me: get over it and get on with the dance.

 

 


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February 18. 26: Coping, but barely

The hymn begins “Be still,”

it sings itself within

as pink of newborn day

warms horizon’s rim,

and the barest smear of light

paints the silent dawn,

golden breakfast windows,

suburban slippered yawn.

Later, when the day

dims slowly into night,

“Be still” again the words

in points of crimson light:

sunset on the crabapple,

snubbed and sour fruit,

blazing each to ember

in fading day salute.

I had to stop and listen

with ears no one can see,

the ears that hear the transience,

Time’s soliloquy.


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February 6.26: Coping, but barely

Morning moon,

palest gold,

solitary

hours tolled,

star beglittered

watcher’s arc

hovers yet

in greying dark.

The icy night

in moonlight lingers

as trees dream mittens

for their fingers.

 

Dear reader, it is happening again, and I must ask you again: WP declares “your stats are booming!”  So I look. It’s nuts. Thousands of people are now reading my blog? Yes, thousands. The last time I asked you about this, it was hundreds, which was also nuts. My blog has a small (but select!) following. These stats are loony. Once again I suspect AI harvest. WP shows me these “readers” are international. This does not make sense. Are you seeing this too?

 

 


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January 31.26: Coping, but barely

Better than words

is a picture, they say.

Writers might quibble —

they are fussy that way.

But as winter’s white breath

veils thick in the air

and our spirits, frostbitten,

begin to despair,

even a picture

can offer salvation

from tedium, sameness,

incarceration.

If you look long enough

at this smush of new pup,

your temperature and mood

might edge a bit up.

Many thanks to my daughter-in-law, Kelley Wilson Mesterharm,

for this image of the communal heartbeat.

It gets the Snuggle Award.