NIGHT DRAWS NEAR, BROTHER ASS

Night draws near, brother ass
pale sister moon ascends the dark

brother wind makes a chill pass
from long ago and far away
where Francis dogs still bark—

they echo sorry old beliefs
that make you lesser than
a thing that’s called a soul.

As if some merciless sneak thief
has stripped you of your rigmarole

stolen all your oomph for dreams
of grasping the elusive carrot
and your fear of prodding stick

you slow a bit now, and seem weary
though you stubbornly as ever climb
the slope of each day, brick by brick.

You’ve been a good and faithful
servant— more than I can say

for parts that think and speak.
Yours is an understanding deeper
than all hope and pray. Are we perhaps

at last in sempiternal unison about
the moment that must come?  Then
let’s together bray..and bray…and bray!
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night-draws-near-brother-ass

A CERTAIN AGE

“Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.”
—Goethe

It has been said the weather is bright blue
this time of year.  A tinge of cobalt cools
the contours, copper trembles, sounding true.
Red and golden maple leaves, the motley fools,
die dancing on a breeze of nevermore.
Those who must learn go back to schools.

The year was started long before
this current, nearer to the final, page
of curling calendar behind the closet door;
yet blood, air, the purple-kissed greengage
belie that paper rubric and bestir unnerving
promise in what’s more than come of age.

Cliché favors youth, the tight uncurving
blade of spring, bronze beauty at the beach,
the summer’s salad days all undeserving.
And youth favors cliché, believing each
grey hint of winter is a closing down,
smug in its grasp of things beyond its reach.

We’ve been there.  Now we’re here, my frown,
searching a spattered mirror for small clues
to an unsettling ripening.  We grope for nouns
to name it—for the way so many hues
exquisitely become a potent reticence of brown.
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A CERTAIN AGE

WOMAN IN SPRING WITH CANE

Here on the border, New Hampshire and Maine,
I watch the brown world through my windowpane
begin to go green, to spring once again.
The mossy, rockbound, hilly terrain
of my yard, I can now ascertain,
is a moldy, crotchety, ugly domain:
dead leaves, fallen branches, have lain
under snow the whole winter. Now a toy train,
a split frisbee, odd stones, compose the moraine.
I sigh.  I wish by some legerdemain
I could clean it all up, simply ordain
a neatness.  Sure, and order the sun, the rain.

The dried bamboo sticks, it’s plain,
are mocking me now.  I will not profane
the air with my curses, but those are the bane
of my landscape:  cane after cane, after cane,
their invincibility drives me insane.
What’s more, they remind me how arthritic pain
has me hobbled, three-legged, constrained
to walk with a stick.  Perhaps I’ll never regain
my gardening self.  Someone else will maintain
my grounds.  That’s that.  No use to complain.

What else can I do?  Order out for chow mein,
wash it down with champagne,
try to treasure whatever obtains,
accept the inevitable, ultimate reign
of the gods, however arcane.
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I

SAILING ON A GIFT OF TEARS

How readily, how easily
he weeps these days
sometimes for nothing more
than idly watching
a small spider creep along
a sunlit crack of wooden floor
or for a long familiar meaning
that he keeps inside of him
but cannot find the wording for.

Those around him, how they try
to make him happier— they
keep saying please don’t cry.

If not the master of his fate
he always thought himself
to be the captain of his soul,
knew how to quietly
gulp back a sob and keep
a trembling chin under control.

How well he learned to deal
in what society had taught him
someone is supposed to feel.

Society means less and less
to him with age. He doesn’t care
to reminisce or wistfully to dwell
on disappearances, or assuage
the thought of death with chat
of grandkids who are doing well.

He only wants to hold the book
and read the page he once marked
with a pressed white asphodel

and sail his bonny brine-tossed ship
star-eyed upon the mother ocean
deep in love with every rise and dip.
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SAILING ON A GIFT OF TEARS

LAST EVENING, AT SUPPER

who wondered who
sat in my place that moment
there among the passing
soup bowls
plates of prawns—

whose head was bowed for grace?

above the oaken board
the wine, the bread,
a waft of tarragon
married the onion’s pungency
in a half-lit phenomenon of
dread that I could not retrace

the hand lifting my spoon
looked like my grandma’s hand—
how did that happen?
when?
she is long gone

am I living her again?

companions became colored fog
and I heard nothing that was said
around the room
until—
napkins wiping mouths—

the noisy
pushing back of chairs
the rattling plates on plates
the crumbs
the broom
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LAST EVENING, AT SUPPER

AN OCCASIONAL POEM

—for a friend on the occasion of his seventy-something birthday

Now as you approach that swinging door
And think this day you’ve just arrived, before
You realize you’re also leaving seventy and more,
Do not be sad, and do not fear;
You get to keep this number for another year.

What’s in a number anyway?  No more
Than abstract stuff enough to bore
To songlessness a moody troubadour
Or make a turnip shed a tear
Or take the rooster out of Chanticleer.

No, it’s not the numeral that we deplore
But tendencies of an outworn folklore
To make one seem a dinosaur
When it is perfectly, quite clear
To one’s own mind:  “I’m not as I appear.”

In one’s own mind, one is eleven evermore:
One day a cowboy, next a sagamore,
Then a young blade barefoot on the shore
Lit up by love, crushed by a cruel sneer.
The feelings do not age, they persevere.

So let us spit the bitter in the cuspidor,
Immortalize the sweetness in a metaphor
And raise our voices in a great “Encore!”
This  birthday thing’s a time for cheer,
A time for more than one more beer.

And if you come a little bit footsore,
Wearing a birthday suit unlike the one you wore
Into this life—this life that you adore—
So what?  You are still you, still dear,
But best of all, you are still here.
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.Originally posted november 2013, without audio

OLD MISSUS GIMBLE

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Her teeth are still good for a chomp
And one of her feet can still stomp
She may even be nimble
Enough for a bimble
But certainly not for a yomp.
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OLD MISSUS GIMBLE

TO A TULIP

You,
yellow flower
standing in a cobalt vase,
unfurling blades,
stemmed sacramental cup–
winter was hard
but now your simple grace
is green announcement:
things are looking up.
There by the window you
to sunlight are the antiphon,
beauty new as beauties past,
spring’s insistence
life should carry on.
Yet you become
most beautiful at last,
when age and death are
what you must fulfill:
come that night
you can no longer
close against the dark,
you open wide until
you are all heart,
and every petal knows
translucence as it falls.
You could be hinting
how to do it, for us all.

“LAST HURRAH”        ©Sheila Creighton, 2014

Photo courtesy of Sheila Creighton  Imageryoflight@wordpress.com

KNEES

So many memories live in the knees
sounding the bones where ghosts of youth
swim trudgens, swoop downhill on skis.

Not only memory but present truth
waits there, in ambush, stiffly creaking
allies of the faded hair, the longer tooth.

(These suckers couldn’t play a freaking
game of tiddlywinks if it required squatting
I daresay, vernacularly speaking.)

Going now demands pre-plotting.
No more galloping, me beauties,
no more cantering, no trotting.

Look down, slouch low like the agouti;
watch each bend, and fear to lurch.
Simply walking has become a duty.

So when it’s time to take it all to church,
the genuflection is most tentative.
A certain privilege of age?  A valid search

for ease… or just a bit retributive?
Only the deity of knees knows whether to forgive.

BY THE TIME YOU WAKE UP, YOUR HAIR WILL BE WHITE

…you will own the biblical hoary head.  Your
tree will know how oddly a branch may grow to
sapless, brittle treachery.  Fear alone will
threaten to break it.

Most of those who loved you are dead.  Their absence
shadows, haunts remembering.  No one living
slows to listen really or hear your story.
If you should tell it.

Breath of the morning, beautiful new forgiveness,
not a thought to limit or change or end it–
noon afire with promises, now a rush to
flushingly spend it–

all will come to evening.  You are not of
your time; you are your time.  A shutter
opens, closes, light on a nervous mothwing
fluttering briefly.

BY THE TIME YOU…