My life these days is lived
in the fog of a visit to mom.
We sit at lunch, lost in 90 years of forgetting.
I caress her with sweet nothings to bring a smile
that I can lose myself in.
I want to lose myself in this forgetting.
To remember is to think of death
which seeks us in so many ways.
These weather blues beset me, on this day,
the twenty-second of February
anno twenty seventeen.
Sandhill cranes and grackles were seen.
Redwing blackbirds squawked at me.
And the tundra swans swept in for the night.
Tarmac does not shine, gravel flies,
and nothing human-made breathes.
The birds are speaking to us I believe.
And the frogs croak with snakes that are waking up.
Go back, and sleep, I want to scream,
but think instead – perhaps the cold snap will not come.
And buds will bloom instead.
But will the water then be dry? The lake levels lower yet?
Nothing weathers well these days. All confused
and still-
The oil that lubricates the capitol’s dome
has a voice that isn’t dim. Its’ shiny lucre rubs the pulse-
which moneygrubber will be the king of the hill?
That biological imperative equals biological death-
Of crane, of blackbird, of frog,
perhaps peace on earth will finally exist at last.
All it takes is the death of life.
These oil blues equal water blues,
whiteout that broken treaty yet again.
Water protectors – the incomparable
losing yet again.
Listen to them, listen without ears and
with the justice of your heart.
No-we hear them not.
So we roll on down to Rome
in an American auto machine.
Braking not in time of course,
a collision written in stone of what has passed-
but not been remembered,
repeating our ancestors’ sins.
I sit with my mother in forgetfulness-
her mind lives in a fog.
I know that fugue surrounds me,
letting what’s right shadow what’s wrong.
2/2017
