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.

PENMANSHIP

To say it is a lost art is not
exactly news. It was on it way
out sixty years ago when our
teacher had us do the loops
and curls within triple track
lines. The days of fountain
pen were long past, though
our desks had inkwell
holes that now gaped to no
purpose. "It's all in the wrist,"
she told and retold us. My
scribble scrabbles proved her
wrong. I had a wrist and used it.
Didn't matter. I was never
going to be a penman. I aspired
to use a typewriter.
Years later I did. Sixty-five
words a minute.
   

VOLUNTEER DAY AT GREENCASTLE ELEMENTARY

They file into the room
where two of us have come
to tell them about plants.

I had forgotten how fresh
as roses third graders are,
their faces bright with

eagerness for anything different,
their hands ready to shoot up
to the simplest of questions:

"How many of you like ice cream?"
"What do plants need to grow?"
except one who slouches

in the back row, gaze turned
window ward, brow troubled.
We pass around ferns, pine cones,

lichen-covered limbs, to grasping
hands till they reach him.
He shakes his head, refuses

to take or touch.
The session ends. He shuffles out.
I catch the only thing

he's said, making sure we hear:
"This was boring."
O child, how your heart must hurt.

MYRA AND DAVE

They would have been in her late forties
then or early fifties the summers
I worked on their farm.
It wasn't my idea;
Dad made the arrangements.
You start on Monday
he said and that was that.
Then he said:
they had a son who fell
off the tractor his dad was driving.
Killed. I think
you ought to know that.

They were sitting on the porch
when I got there.
He rose and shook my hand.
Good morning he said
this is my wife.
Her smile was warm.
We're glad you're here
she said. I believed her.

Once when he and I were hoeing corn
he said: my wife
can outwork any man I've ever
known. I saw that he was
proud of her for that.
The two of us worked side by side,
fixing fence, topping tobacco stalks.
We talked some, mostly sports.
He followed the Phillies.

Sometimes I worked just with her,
in her garden mostly --
beans, sweet corn, strawberries.
She told me about their daughters
and the grandchildren.
A time or two she said the name
of their boy . . . Let's see, yes,
we bought the car
two years before Sammy died . . .
I wanted to ask how it happened,
what field, and where in the field,
if he died right away or lingered,
where his grave was,
how old he was,
if he was fun-loving or serious,
if he liked baseball,
what kind of books he read.
She would have told me, gladly,
if I had asked,
all that and more, I'm sure.

I did not ask.
I did not know enough about grief
and therefore feared it.
But I knew she carried their loss
more easily than he did,
that she never blamed him,
and he loved her for that.
I knew it was what saved him.