StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XVII

When my grandfather was my age,
He had four decades left,
A little over two with my grandmother,
A bit more than one at the end by himself.
Then he was gone and my life continued
Without the discussions about the merits of
The San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics
And the memories from his well spent youth
About Cobb and Ruth as we compared them to
Willie and Mickey, Ted Williams and Stan Musial:
But the game that counted most was the one
That was on the radio come that sunny afternoon,
And the moment that was best was this one,
Drinking wine and eating fresh Jack in his home,
One generation to another everlasting..

12th Floor above the flyaway,
Waiting for the ophthalmologist,
Farsighted, Nearsighted,
Cataracts and Glaucoma,
What a lovely world
The eye doctor inhabits..

The jet from National is low overhead,
Directly over my ears as it echoes
Off the five walled courtyard.
We sit in bright sunlight
On what look like new benches:
Women in the first skirts of spring
While the men of the uniformed services
Properly pretend not to notice.

Halfayear, halfayear, halfayear gone,
26 newsletters, several hundred poems,
A notebook full of hand written lines
Struggling to keep up with the word flow.

If I were to rest, my ink would pile up,
Crushed by the torrent clamoring to escape,
And, once ended, who could say I would restart
After turning a deaf ear to my muse.

Here, in these lines
Full of sharp American syllables
And inconsistent rhymes,
The poet testifies to her beliefs
Made incarnate in the words
She puts to use in her craft;
She is not herself the words
But bends them to her meanings.

She doesn't believe in virgin birth,
Not even her own,
But admits she might have tried
The exact same explanation
If she had found herself fourteen
And knocked up after sharing
Her wine with a soldier boy
(Since gone) a few weekends past.

Saturday morning at the plaza,
Hitting the Giant and the TJ's,
Women with their daughers,
   and other young children;
Men seldom to be seen,
Like some rare endangered species
Last reported  in nineteen ninety three.

Mothers and grandmothers,
Pushing carts, examining produce,
Daughters asking questions,
   observing closely,
Little boys running back and forth,
Demanding their mother's attention;
The occasional male driver
Tagging along behind in the aisles,
Looking for all the world
Like a cornered animal
Searching for the nearest escape route.

Aging widowed men,
Their baskets filled with frozen meals
   and pre-packaged calories,
Wander silently down the rows,
A look of quiet desperation
If you meet their eyes:
They are here because she is not.

The gay couple along the dairy section
Dramatically debate which cheese to buy
And the perfect wine to drink with the
Hors d'œuvres they will serve at the party;
Groups of lesbians in the corner argue over
   Cuts of meat and the best recipe
For Thanksgiving turkey tofu.

A polyglut of voices backgrounded through the music,
Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Viet Nam and American,
The occasional Russian or French in the mix;
   We drift in and out of English
As we touch the fruit, examine the vegetables,
And check the prices for sales and bargains:
Just another Saturday morning in Northern Virginia,
Springfield, U. S. A. on planet Earth..

When Billy danced the fandango,
All the girls waited patiently in line,
At night in the darkness of their bedrooms,
No finer gunman could fill their desire.

When Billy danced the fandango,
All the world would tap their feet,
The music would play and the girls would lay
Contented as Billy escaped.

When Billy danced the fandango,
All the men would stand and watch,
Until Garrett cut in and the music stopped,
Leaving Billy quite dead at the altar.

Sitting here without glasses,
Waiting for the bus, writing poetry,
I can almost read the scribbles
Left on the paper by my pen.

I trust my muse will not allow
Her poet to wander blindly,
But will guide my hand, surely true,
So I not dishonor our profession.

I listen to a Radio that gives away tickets
To Sting, the Eagles, and Margaritaville;
I never hear Hendrix or some hot guitarist
When the 'larm wakes me up in the morning.

How can we be this old, twice trustless thirty,
With half the music already dead and buried?
We can barely march from the couch to the mailbox,
No wonder so little of the world has changed.

When I was young amd testing telepathy
By communicating with aliens around Tau Ceti,
The world was much smaller, God, a possibility,
And the Universe, far stranger than I imagined.
Years later I have seen the grand canyons of Mars,
Viewed the rings of Saturn from near world orbit;
Light speed no longer seems insurmoutable
And my children plan excursions to Centauri.
But the child who was is still somewhere inside
This aging sample of earth bound evolution;
When I go, and I will, scatter my ashes, if you would,
On some open expanse of primordial savannah
Where the forest meets the grass and the rivers flow free
And the new kids stand upright, clear eyed to the stars.