I listen to the third movement
of sinister footwear
2 of my 3 little dogs aim syncopated
barks at the front door
my coffee bean order peeks up post-fanfare
on the porch-edge bricks
I see Ed,
the old FedEx guy recede, hear his heyyyyyy
in my gray day Ed’s wave imprints
from the fleeting passenger door
I fret about him aging just to
live in the dawn-till-night work pandemic
but Ah, coffee and how about
that leftover burrito?
& dogs are there to feed and one’s
accelerating canine dementia to be dosed
I think ahead: prune lavender,
spray seedlings, walk dogs with my crane-head cane
my week’s poets: Pope, Rekdal, Whitelock, Dunlap,
Limon, Swift, (not-to-mention 2 months-of-Poetry and two anthologies), Blake
& Paterson linger patiently on the end-table shelf – Read Me? Remember Me?
they sing softly
Bags Groove: Miles, Sonny, Milt, Monk, Horace,
Percy, Kenny hoot and tootle to lazy beats – I want to drift offshore
accelerating canine dementia, Ed, my poets, Miles:
I stir the pot, walk, prune, spray
I remove my sinister footwear, empty bags, enter, re-enter and
exit all at once
will things reform to sub-normal
or won’t they– I will sip the new coffee now
WE NOW RETURN TO REGULAR PROGRAMMING
We're in the middle of this coronavirus global lockdown thing. Yesterday we needed the ride in the country experience and live in an area with 5 minute access to rural America, so we drove around to see the landscape all alive with spring. We also found our local ice cream place was open for walk-up bus, so we got some soul food. Yesterday, I also planted another 150-200 flower seeds in a sub-bed I repurposed from ground-cover geraniums to five varieties / heights of flowers.
Our approach to flower gardening is just stick them in there and deal with the excess. One thing the isolation has done is to get us to cut and bring more flowers indoor than ever before.
Tomorrow is the last day of the semester for the Beowulf Seminar I am auditing at Rutgers with Professor Stacy Klein. I'm really going to miss that class. 1/2 of it was in class, 1/2 was online (after the shutdown). We fairly much translated the whole of Beowulf from Old English to 21st Century New Jersey academic English. So much fun. I'm thinking of revisiting the whole thing to produce my own version. It's devilishly tricky translation work and no experts agree on much of anything about it.
Reading Kathleen Jamie's book of essays, Sightlines. She's really a great writer and poet - one of my favorite poets. Her essays are intrepid: she goes on remote arctic digs, observes with forensic pathologists and other hard-to-imagine adventures.
