Last Rites

 

Like an old soldier donning old armor,

The trees are again greaved with white,

Frosty, in serried ranks, undaunted,

Soldiering into the gathering night.

 

Like an old fashion come back into fashion,

The smug snow lies on roof and spire;

It’s a good time for a last blast of winter,

And a good night for a grateful fire.

Valentine

 

Romantic love

Seems greatly overhyped,

Unless you consider

The way everything else

Is built on top of it,

Which makes you feel

If anything it’s being

Undersold.

 

The kiss itself

Is not so much,

But a billion-year history 

Lies on each side,

And a boundless future 

May hinge on whether 

The “spark” is there,

Or not.

 

So let’s keep buying chocolates -

Flowers, dinners, rings;

Let’s kiss our way to eternity,

As our ancestors did

To bring us here at all.

Late Snow

 

It falls like a blessing,

Bathing a bare place,

Blanketing a naked world

In cold white forgiveness.

 

Spring has no beauty

Like the endless peace

Of the snows of late February

Whispering their goodbye.

The Trick of Memory

 

Your life is mostly forgotten.

That’s why it feels so short.

Most days are nothing in particular –

Nothing to write the cosmos about –

And even memorable things are unremembered 

More often than you might suppose.

 

Life isn’t short; your memory is weak.

It lets the vacuum of oblivion 

Claim days in their thousands,

Minutes in their millions,

Until you feel you’ve blinked 

And found yourself grown old.

 

Don’t let it fool you. You’ve had a long life –

And what remains is not so very brief.

You still have time for many thousand moments,

Which are there not to be remembered,

But lived.

The Gem

 

“You’re a gem,” she said,

But she didn’t say what kind she meant.

The kind you squirrel away at the back of a treasure-box,

Beholding only occasionally, in private,

Like a secret too shameful or too proud to share?

 

Or the kind you wear boldly,

Out in the open like a silver necklace,

Like the heart-shaped silver necklace

I used to open our first conversation;

Something for every day, for all days,

To catch the sunlight, the eye, the heart?

 

Or maybe the kind you see only once,

At the back of some forgotten cave,

On the ring of some passing lady, long ago?

The kind you cherish only in memory,

Until memory itself goes faint,

And all you have is a fading glitter

Gone dull with the piling-up of years.

Odysseus in the Condominium

 

On that particular morning,

The summit of his heroism

Was rising, a little late, from bed,

Pulling on sweatpants, padding downstairs,

Making too much coffee,

Playing with his phone.

 

That was his epic.

That was his Beowulf.

And he did not feel very proud.

 

“Tomorrow,” he thought,

“I might climb a mountain,

Speak to a beautiful woman,

Put on a button-down shirt.

Today this is all I have in me –

This lounging, hibernating life.”

 

He poured more coffee.

He looked out the window.

Out there, the burden of the trees

Was white as crystal,

Soft as forgiveness;

The hero forgave himself,

And dreamed.

A Dog Called Hindsight

He had a dog called Hindsight,

Acquired, perhaps, in 2020,

When everyone, it seemed, was getting dogs -

Too many dogs, in retrospect.

 

Dogs don’t know what their names mean;

It wouldn’t help them if they did.

They know the sound, and they can catch the tone,

And slink or swagger, as the case demands.

 

There’s knowledge and then there’s knowledge.

Hindsight (the dog) doesn’t know what he knows.

But if the moment came for action, he

Would know instinctively just what to do

 

And already be doing it, without thinking,

Or wasting a single moment looking back.

Religion

 

I worship a nameless god

In whom I half-believe;

His nameless feet have trod

Where men rejoice and grieve;

His nameless altar stands

Among the virgin trees,

In far and foreign lands,

Unstirred by any breeze.

No creed is handed down;

No rites are acted out;

No priest in pompous gown –

No book, no pious doubt;

I only know him thus:

When through the toil and strain

Come words melodious,

He smiles in my brain.

Heartland

 

The cows are black

In the golden stubble

Among the white snow.

 

This is the flag of Nebraska:

White snow, golden fields, black cows,

And above it all a pale-blue sky,

 

Blank and indifferent

As the eye of God.