Moving Right Along

Breakfast Music, 9:00 a.m.

Him:  It's 9:00 a.m.

Me:  I know.

Him:  I wish someone would toast me a sesame seed bagel.

Me:  Oh, do you now?  Well, if it is physically possible for me to drag myself from this bed, I will do it.  But I only slept five hours, and my body knows it, so I don't know if I can.

(He turns on the radio.  Classical music emanates softly, pastoral stuff with rich horns and a stately, napulous rhythm.)

Me:  So I guess you want me to go back to sleep, then?

Him:   Not at all.

Me:  But this is sleeping music.

(Music changes to a movement more lively.)

Him:  That's not what I hear.  I hear golden bagels flying through the air being toasted by the sun, with lots of squirrels running around slicing them and putting little butter pats on them.

Crepuscule

It was supposed to rain, but it didn't rain, so I went out into the garden and watered all the needy green things anyway, the sky darkening and threatening but never breaking into even a single tear.  I planted what needed to be planted, puttered about with recycling and birdseed and compost and new mail, observed the gorgeous traces left of a tragedy among the small ones, and blew bubbles instead of cigarette smoke into the dusk when I was done.  Then I looked into the sky just in time to see it softly, surely cut by a blue heron gravely beating his course homeward to the river I forget runs by here just two blocks away, a world of its own so unlike my little backyard world teeming quietly behind this crumbling stockade fence.  After he'd flown, two swallows ran curlicues against the clouds like an after-flourish, and then things were still and grey and blushing as the sun made unseen progress downward behind the cloud curtain.

Thursday Floribunda

Fibonacci this:  (Click to enlarge.  Please.)

Happy Thursday!

Love, as always,

Sara

Peg Tale #1

What happened to it?

I'll tell you what happened to it:  pirates.

Yes, it was pirates, right here on the Concord River.  Bet you never read about anything like that in your Thoreau or your Emerson, now, did you?  Naw, for it's a dark, dread secret. Would be terrible for tourism if it got out.

Up they came in their black kayaks, silent almost as the river current itself.  They may just have been men in bear costumes, but the claws they flashed and the teeth they gnashed as they growled and demanded our picnic pack looked real and sharp enough to me.

Now we had already eaten our picnic, up on the banks, some ways back where the water lily pads hold their shiny, smiling faces up to the sun for kissing, all at once in wide expanses like some kind of mass marriage ceremony.  And it had been a good picnic, a fine picnic full of luscious gourmet tidbits, and we had eaten every bite.

Every bite.

We feared the wrath of the bear pirates when they discovered nothing in the pack but empty Pellegrino bottles and soiled Tupperware, so with just a brief glance into each other's eyes, over the side of the canoe we went, swimming, swimming for all we were worth.

It was then that the mighty, giant snapping turtle, sister goddess of the Musketaquid herself, she who wallows in the muddy bottom far from sunlight and harsh-slicing paddles, saw my legs a-kicking, kicking for freedom and my life.  Starved and exhausted as she was after crossing broad, fast highways to lay her eggs and then crossing back to her cool, dark lair, my flailing limbs looked to her like a tasty lunch, pale pink and full of vigor like the biggest, juiciest worms she'd ever hope to clap her beak upon.  So she fulfilled her name, lunged from the sediment with the last of her strength, and snapped into me with all the gusto of a construction worker with a hero sandwich at noon.

I had to hop home once I reached the beach, and peg it ever after, but it was worth it, for I learned my lesson well:

Leftovers are a good thing.

Birch

You died in front of me
and I didn't even have the sense
to grieve.

I thought the woodpeckers
and the fluttering fluff of new birds
clustering with new feathers
and open beaks
meant you were still alive.

I thought the wild ones
who ran along your branches,
leapt and clutched and twirled,
flourishing their way from place to place
like crazily pulsing corpuscles,
like the flow of blood
or sap,
meant you were still here,
just maybe different
or asleep.

Mild spring came and kissed us in the wrong month.
Everything bloomed in one week,
too early.
You started dripping those golden tendrils
Japanese lacquerware style,
tentatively setting out points of green,
and then winter like a jealous lover
rushed back in to reclaim its place
with vengeance and bitter triumph.

And that's when it happened.
That's when you died,
along with my potted peach tree,
its two pink blossoms, new that week,
first blush of trust,
shriveling back onto tiny red branches
even as your own gold
faded back into the grey
and vanished.

The peach tree stays
in its pot on my balcony in the sun,
a perch for little flutterers,
a sad and elaborate stake
for English peas.

And I have argued to keep you, too.
There is still life in you,
I say,
the birds, the wild ones,
and you are still beautiful,
graceful and fine in your decay.
But I am told you are a danger
to property.

What should I have done?
You are older than I am,
and everything has a span of years, or days.
Would realizing the difference in April
between your life and life itself
have changed anything?

The inexorable price of man's things,
hard and still as steel and glass,
seals your fate
and instructs my grief
when to ignite.