WRITING POETRY

No, you will not win a Pulitzer.
Yes, by comparison with Yeats
(or fill in the _________ with your
favorite), what you create
is small potato stuff.

Do it anyway. Make it as good
as you can. No weekend
golfer thinks he is Tiger Woods.

So drive it down the fairway.
It may land in the rough.
Don't bother keeping score.
It's your potato stuff.

TUBING ON THE CONOCOGEAGUE

Just beyond the bridge
slip into the current
and be carried, bobbing
gently, into the quiet.

Stripped of time's obligations,
you enter a new world,
a place where you have no
authority. You can observe only,
and you will be observed.

A frog's plop announces
you are in frog land now.
A floating congregation
of mallards up ahead
is speaking in tongues.

You round a bend,
the water widens,
and you slow
drift into a dream
of sun and silence.

You pass the remnants
of a farm long gone
and wonder how and why.

High overhead a heron
alights on an oak, waits
till you approach, then,
with what seems to you
contempt, takes its
lazy leave and puts
you far behind.

And so the day passes.
You have accomplished nothing.

Congratulations.
   

VISITING THE ALZHEIMER'S UNIT

Will they come,
the refrigerator days?
Are they on the way,
when wild wind will whistle
through the eaves of my memory,
stripping the last vestiges
of what was once real?

O, my mother said, I don't
want to get like Papa
who, towards the end,
got out the telephone
book and said I know
that verse is here
in this chapter in Matthew.

But she did.

What was hardest to watch
was the weeping. At least
there were no rages.

A mind is a terrible
thing to waste.

A mind is a terrible
thing to lose.

PET RABBIT

He showed up three months ago
and still hasn't left. Brown
with a white band that circles
his shoulders. He -- or she --
(how would we know?) spends
his days in our front yard,
usually under a shrub, sometimes
hopping into the woods, other
times lying flat on the grass.

He has helped himself to my
beans, but apparently is not
a carrot connoisseur. He is
the anti-Bug Bunny, with
no wise-guy tendencies and
not a mean bone in his cotton-tailed
body. How and why he got here
remains -- as they say -- a mystery.
Theories abound: best guess is
he saw his cage door open and,
like Huck, lit out for the territory.

Anyway, there he is. He'll let
you get about three feet close
before he hops a way.

I call him Harvey.