Minus 50, Plus 1

Sharing this project I started: For 50 days before my 50th birthday (and on that day), I wrote a short…something…and now for the 50 days after, I am adding decoration to each piece. The goal is a hand-stitched booklet.

pompom hat

the closet cleaning clothes boxing of your discards
meant to make me feel
lighter; the sadness not in the clothes
themselves nor even in this evidence of time
passing, sizes changing, personalities tried on and rejected
perhaps
a sense of failure in restraining consumption
in training care and appreciation
though the hat is not even the best emblem but merely one
of the last in the pile, the pompom salvaged for when
you decide to wear hats again
rather than this handful of ravaged spangled spandex
that was for one brilliant night a prom dress

night wash

-es all color dim; in a wonderless sky smeared with groundlight we strain for space, craft

-ing dread into dream: mazed, lost, shot, alone. fifty years, so unfinished in peace

-ing phase by phase, layer by layer; your maker heart left to this scream

-ing of wind through the seasons

Thaw

we’re down to icy slush, footstep-shaped
margins of grass or sodden islands
sudden lakes, squished plastic bags
sidewalk-washed downstream

the dripping we heard overnight a dream-
breath of spring, sheets too warm
the same winter birds but heard
with the door cracked

how things get ugly before getting better
like a healing bruise, the heart
churns, chugs, pumps again and
in winter’s dreg-end we sweep away
the debris

Thyme

not the smell of summer but a memory
earth, sun, sweat
or skin or breath, all of it
fading. where a heart stirs yet
beneath these layers of snow

tired of the season’s responsibility
our nerves, words, glances dry-
cracked as winter knuckles
those leaves that still cling, nearly
unrecognizable to our warmer selves

 

 

This winter

is snow on ice on ice on snow
and we know this is metaphor
also, this floundering through drifts
and bleak shivering, a slip and a fall

juncos flit and chickadees
never give up their song, the warning note
for all these branches bent under
their own frozen weight, summer’s broken stems
brittle and glazed

how far down do we hold our love’s roots, the seeds
and is this the winter
that kills them

I envy the squirrels, who need no good government

snow clouds re-gather,
cardinals chirp, crabapples
bright against full gray
and seed feeder full—how else?
some give; others only take

on having to give up cheese

and butter, of course, though
our great society has long figured out
how to do fake butter

so now I’m left with these questions—
what about goat? how do I mourn
the loss of ice cream and every breakfast casserole

should I go to the garden walk with wine and ____ ?
I suppose there might be crackers

and how could a Texas girl with even great imagination
(I’ve hardly that) fathom these long remaining years
without a single enchilada?

and certainly, why now?
when so much of the joy has already slipped

my hermit days march forward
with stiff arms and fists

the world tells you again

in this fountaining the flutter
wing-dust and scattered
seed, greening

why should you not return
to heartening beneath
your one-note lament

and need for salt don’t say
it’s always the same
for when have you ever noticed

roses blown open to rain
robins food-screeching
in your window-tree?

response in reverse to Auden’s “A Walk After Dark”

we find our minds turned
to minor categorizing, as of birds
or stars, planets, plants—
though we still would count ourselves young
we discover how set in our ways
and full enough of age

overfull of death and decay
(the broken always with us)
as another crisis enwraps the world—
we want to feel and do more
with no guilt about it
or being called hypocrite by the young

or worse, a Victorian, having passed
beyond the ability to impress them
with our decent, ordered lives—
so I find at dinner nothing
but exhausted, plummeting defeat
more clouds in the forecast

Playing with today’s prompt from NaPoWriMo.net. I used only the first three stanzas of Auden’s poem.