The Old Curiosity Museum
In this second volume of An Artist’s Life, once again, the sudden layoff of my partner is the story’s trigger as I’m forced to leave my home and garden of thirty years. I tell myself it’s change that brings evolution. A benefit that, at times, I am wary of claiming. What happens when you are forced to leave a place where your identity is so deeply entwined?
I search backward, looking for patterns and connections. The fingerprints of the past are both softened and intensified when viewed through the shifting lens of time. The emotional baggage of experiences, not just the facts, are the guideposts. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the illuminating through line, but it’s seldom linear. Poetry becomes the perfect vehicle to express the complex intermingling of grief, love, beauty, and belonging.
The Company You Keep
You ask me about my childhood?
Willows and river and swamp
Canoes and woods and wildflowers.
Memories you ask?
One day, one week, one season blur.
When winter breaks
I search sun-dappled spot on south-facing wooded slope
for hepatica, wood trout, and spring beauty.
Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel corn
whose flowers can only be pollinated
by long-tongued bumblebees.
I crouch by vernal pond
as pairs of trilling toads lay strings of eggs
and croaking frogs produce gelatinous globs
that go from round to oblong
sprout arms and legs
lose their tails and
hop away.
Oasis dries,
disappears for another year.
Skunk cabbage is beacon in swampy patch.
Rotting flesh odor attracts early flies and beetles.
They gather on yellow spike tucked within the maroon spathe.
First food of the season for emerging pollinators.
Dappled light illuminates forest floor,
ephemeral flowers burst into bloom.
A short window of reproductive urgency
before canopy fills with broad green leaves
and consumes the rays of sunlight.
I build terrariums habitats
for silver-dollar sized turtles
purchased at the dime store
for fifty cents.
Hungry baby reptiles await offerings I gather from fallen logs.
Bark peels off,
revealing colonies of centipedes and pill bugs.
Beetles carve elaborate hieroglyphics.
Carpenter ants race to relocate plump white eggs.
I replace wooden husk,
roll log back into leaf litter depression.
Turtles will eat dried flake food after all.
Fat squirrels compete at harvest time
for beech tree bounty of triangle-shaped nuts,
racing up and down thick trunks,
darting in and out of treetops,
chasing rivals from their territory.
I swing from wild grapevine dangling from highest limbs,
unfazed by the pull of my weight.
In autumn
clusters of seed-filled tart fruit appear.
Cedar waxwings, cardinals, and woodpeckers feast.
Golden Field Guides are no longer necessary
I know the names of my companions.
Vernal pond and I converse.
It doesn’t have a mouth,
and yet we commune.
Seasonal Prompt
Husband died at first of autumn
when seedheads formed
and leaves turned fiery red and burnt orange.
His body,
like flaxen wheat and ripening grapes,
fulfilled its mandate.
Perhaps he would have preferred going to sleep when winter came
like a fat bear in the woods
filled with salmon and blackberries.
I think I would like that.
I could never leave in spring
as sweet sap rose in the sugar maple.
Resist the call of the spring peeper and house wren?
Return of the red-winged blackbird?
And summer?
Fledglings flying
corn stalks growing
Monarch butterflies covering the milkweed bloom.
How could I miss that?
And so, winter has its appeal.
Slumbering in a nap without end.
As if one could choose.
He stayed as long as he could.
Perhaps When I am Older
Wished I’d sat more in that old Adirondack chair by the pond,
taken time to identify the bird songs,
mating calls,
calls of warning,
territorial salute to dawn.
I’d built the bird houses,
but did I stop to witness the nest building?
Twig by twig,
soon-to-be parents assembling their babies’ bed.
I could have seen the circling hawk
and watched his progress in the sky
if errant weeds hadn’t demanded attention,
calling me off the chair to pull just one more,
looking down instead of upwards.
Perhaps when I’m older,
and my bones ache
I’ll rest,
become one with the symphony.
In the midst of moving trucks and cleaners,
the bird chorus is silent.
The wooden chair is tipped to the side.
Awaiting its next destination.