INVENTORY OF UNUSED HAIKU AND TANKA LINES

Five-syllable lines:

Gulls on the buoy

Rain, wine-sweet evening

Halcyon day trips

Scent of linseed oil

Named rocks on the shore

Pantomime of joy.

These have seven syllables:

Ocean, lead-gray, almost flat

Concrete marked to look like brick

At two hundred bucks a night,

You’d think the plumbing would work

Canadian strawberries

Irremediable loss

Without further evidence,

He assumes they are in love.

More five-syllable:

White glow on the pond

Nineteen-fifty Ford

Refrigerator

Fading August light

A long way from Maine.

But then three:

Memory

Abandoned

Childhood dream

Their tree house.

AT THE POETRY WORKSHOP

Outside, the bay is that August blue

Of sailboat masts,

White spires beyond the shore.

The workshop leaders want us to

Write with other people’s words,

Describe something that shows

What we believe.

In this long day

We are quickened, finally sated

With new ideas, images,

The insights of strangers and friends.

A canoe, I write, hovers near the dock.

He quickly sees they are not callers

But fishermen run aground,

A casting plug caught in a small maple,

Snarl of line, leaf and hook.

Mild inconvenience yields

This fine New Hampshire morning

To something else...

I do not go on.

People have begun telling

How faith pulled them through surgery.

I cannot use borrowed words

Or say what I believe.

"Overtime"

Philip, now eight, begins to sense
Possibilities,
Tectonic shifts under his feet.
Granddaddy, he says,
In the chill of a November night,
After basketball at the Y,
Will my children know you?

November 2008

"Overtime" appears in Still Crazy, January 2009

"The Aorist Tense"

We grieve in vain
For memory’s wandering off,
That favorite corduroy jacket of the mind,
Worn, thread-bare, elbows patched.
A young man learned three different times
Then lost
The aorist tense in Greek
And how to extract the meat
From soft-shelled crabs,
Wielding with a surgeon’s skill
Tiny tweezers and scalpels,
Sugar, vinegar at the ready.
These days, when there is need,
He slips inconspicuously
Into the computer chair
And lets Google help recall
Who played first base
For the Philadelphia A’s
In the summer of ’48.
It’s been a while since he’s had need
Of the Greek aorist
And many years and miles
From Shibe Park
Or the shores of the Chesapeake Bay:
That friend who had the cottage there—
Gone now, of course;
What was his name?

November 2008

"Gestures"

Next year’s calendar came today
From the museum shop,
Impressionist landscapes,
Colors not just right,
Still, a gesture of hope.
I fill in dates carried forward
From the past.

Each day I drive by the memorial park,
Ordered rows of artificial plants.
We refuse to make plans,
A gesture of defiance.
Still, it crosses your mind.
Those flowers will not return to dust.

November 2008