Carolyn And Answers
Carolyn is womanym today I breathe in gasps.
She days and nights with me as if we’d known
our love eons and still did glance uncertainties.
A seventh time of light and dark hath passed
our pounding heads, and seen our racing blood
swell out its loops of life in lover’s heat.
And answerless to guess about her look and love
in days from now (or if you will, the other way),
I am enthralled and questionless.
Conditioning
This, he thinks, is conditioning,
the excitement he feels
in the sound of a zipper
in a dark room,
on a soft boot,
implying the ideal leg;
or a long, delicately humming zipper,
snaking on a light dress,
the music of good memory.
He thinks,
when the zipper goes into a valley,
maybe in the small of her back,
or between the calf and ankle,
that there it moves him most
as a brook might move a thirsty stag.
And after that, the brook stops,
a lake of silence, only a zephyr
rustling the trees, her dress,
water beckoning.
Transportation
Whenever he felt his heart slip down
and go holus-bolus into his cock,
he knew it as Love and gave it to her,
a throbbing tug in a churning lock.
She, with her complicated machine
for getting seminal goods to the ocean,
took over until her own heart rose
and expelled it on a flood of commotion.
What they achieved in these comings and goings
was said to have enhanced the nation,
though anyone with experience knows
their object was mainly Transportation.
Sketch
The happiest day of his life was as if it hadn't happened, or happened twice. At four A.M. he stopped the alarm, got dressed and went outside in the dark, intending to go to the lab. He scraped the snow and ice off the car, looked at the driveway, reconsidered shoveling, and went back inside to bed. With an arm around his pregnant wife he felt the baby kick and tumble. In that pocket of warmth, he was as content as the fetus. And when next he woke he had already lived, and had yet to live, a day worth living.
He Has Spent Hours
He has spent hours
gazing on the beauty of his wife,
and child, a girl, and child, a boy,
and revelled in the fortunes of his life.
He has spent hours
staring at the charm of his abode,
its fire and garden, barn and bed,
his haven by a gravel road.
He has spent hours
peering into Newfoundland,
its rocks and water, barrens, woods,
this miracle in Time's diminished sand.
He has spent hours
revelling in the fortunes of his life,
and loved himself for living
just this ounce of wisdom.
A Confession
Just when I thought life couldn't worsen
I met another low-energy person,
and predictably, when push came to shove,
we were lying down and fell in love.
I told her get up or we'll die in bed,
but she told me to get up instead.
I said, as much as I like to eat,
today of all days, I'm completely beat.
So she gave me a peck on the cheek and went
and fed herself and came back and lent
her weight to my acute depression,
and we're still together. That's a confession.
Miss Goodbody
Miss Goodbody said to me, crossing the room,
Follow this with your eyes if you can,
and upright cock, and heart and soul,
till you fall down dead at my feet.
Miss Sensible said to me, sensibly too,
There is finally something between your ears,
as there is between mine, and when fevers pass,
it is you and I should be wed.
Then Miss Energy, and Miss Kindness and Knowledge,
and Miss Comedy, and My Sorrow too,
all presented their cases at length,
and every one was you.
9th Wedding Anniversary
As the lobbed beanbag
does not ricochet
off the down pillow,
so we did not separate
upon our soft encounter.
However, like a well-stung golf ball
in a small concrete room,
our souls put many questions
about this hard confinement.
Yet, as the soccer ball and field are wed
with one great game, so did we blend
forever, beneath the boots of marriage.
And Oh! The joy and good we run!
For Your 29th Wedding Anniversary
We galloped a bed across the floor,
Hurrah! the four-poster cried, Some more!
We galloped a short-legged living room couch,
Yahoo! it squeaked, I’m a bronco! Ouch!
We galloped a blanket along the sand,
The edges flapped to beat the band!
We galloped straight up like a sewing machine
Spilling clothes on the floor, our tangled jeans.
We galloped and galloped, then cantered a bit,
And slowed to a walk, and at last are quit
Of the need to continue at such a pace,
Understandably, having won the race.
Appreciating The Wife
I am glad you still like me,
I think to my wife of 35 years,
asleep when I get there
and crawl in for warmth—
the icy bedroom.
I remember many who didn’t,
or did and stopped for various reasons:
personal, professional, political, social,
romantic, pedantic, athletic, aesthetic,
casual— and they were all right!
There is so much wrong!
And yet, here I am, still warm and lucky,
frequently happy, and safe in bed.
Oh! My Lovely! Unconscious One!
Blessed Are Warm Asses
Blessed are warm asses
already in bed when we get there:
radiators, unimposed upon
by our chilly hides,
furnaces, gone from consciousness
to generate a hot pocket
in a cold house, in dead winter.
Blessed are warm asses
already in bed when we get there.
I Don't Tell My Wife I Love Her
I don't tell my wife I love her
every day, or even month,
and probably miss some years.
But when I do, surprising us both,
it pierces her so, she shudders.
Then it is true, forward and back,
through all time,
and we’re perfect mates.
The Wife Sneezes
My wife hasn’t mastered the lady-like sneeze.
Hers is more like an Indian warrior’s scream
as he plants his axe in your head.
The moment of silence that follows that yell
and shower of spit and damnation,
is not really very relaxing either,
Because that’s when they wrestle it
from where it was lodged (the axe or the sneeze),
and draw back and gather for another blow,
So that when it comes,
you knew it was coming,
and that makes it worse.
Tapping
One foot on a ladder,
the other, a bird feeder,
nine, maybe ten feet up in the air,
I need a tool that is in the house.
Tap, tap, I go
tap on the window.
But the wife is busy Googling.
I thought you were
making that noise with your work!
she tells me later, in all innocence.
If I were inside a coffin, tapping,
I think she would say, offhandedly:
I assume he’s enjoying the afterlife.
Bower Bird
She likes it when
I build her something.
She’s my hen,
comes a-clucking,
Couldn’t stay away
if she tried;
and every day
I take pride
She never has,
but rather laid
those eggs that made
the place I made!
Smartwife
I know you’ve heard of the smartphone,
and doubtless also, the smartbomb,
and possibly numerous other machines
sold with a claim of smartness.
I decry reliance on these.
They make you sick and exhausted;
stunt the mind and pervert thumbs;
reduce good personality.
Instead I’m suggesting the smartwife.
I use my smartwife for everything
except vacuuming and doing dishes, toilets, etc.
And I’m telling you, you should get one.
By The Frog Pond
My wife took me once to a frog pond
and showed me the fun of it, all that was there,
slippery and pretty, slimy and lively,
things I would never have seen alone,
but might have walked by, unknowing.
Standing there in sunshine with her,
peering, pointing, talking, enjoying,
we might have been like a mother and child,
or brother and sister, or two little friends
going home to fuck.
On My Wife’s Snoring
My wife of late, my old wife,
the wife of my life and my wife for life,
has become my Muse, and she snores.
I wouldn’t sleep in another bed
for all the tea and virgins and opiates
and dancing excitement there ever was,
unless pretty sure she wouldn’t find out.
For she draws me to her like leaves of paper
blown about in a breezy room
and come to rest by a thickness planer
at work on a contrary hickory plank.
All is going well with the feed,
till she nears the end of that hard board
and hits a knot that adds chatter—
a Kalashnikov firing a short burst.
After this comes a moment of silence,
still as the grave, the ears open wide.
Then follows a powerful, deep-rooting snort,
such that, had it been made by an actual hog,
it might have unearthed a whole pot of potatoes,
or perhaps uprooted a small tree,
or opened sky onto treasures of truffles
and won any number of prizes pigs win.
Through all of this I am pure patience,
wakeful, diligent, at work on the poem.
This is not the kind of snoring that ends
by simply saying, Tusk, tusk.
Nor is it even worth broaching at breakfast.
The best one can do is to search for words
that, left lying around, may win some sleep.
Oh! Winsome sleep! Oh! Winsome sleep!
Sketch
At what point has so much of life passed that basically you have had it?— when thinking back is the gist of living, memory greater than the present. Just now I was looking at a bedroom wall and thinking how once it let in snow. My parents were visiting and slept in this room, and they laughed and we bought them long underwear. Later the wall was improved and painted, and here, in moonlight, I loved my wife and rejoiced she was mine— the woman and room, the house and land, the children sleeping in other rooms. That was when life was full and happening. Tonight, it seems to have passed.
The Way Love Ends
The way love ends is both with a bang
(or any number of fevered bangs,
where the two are one but so asunder
the coupling’s only a wild struggle
to hold the separate selves together),
And equally, with a whimper
(or any number of lonely cries,
or soundless starts of nose and eyes,
in private, isolated grief,
as trivial to the world at large
as terrible to the wounded soul.)
Bones
Mainly the flesh around our bones
is what we are loved for and are loved by,
The bones themselves going unadmired,
a scaffolding, profound support,
Yet one which is held in scant esteem,
the subject of cartoons, Halloween and Science.
Taken for granted, they are yet divine,
deciding the shapes and angles of angels.
What shall we do when Dear Bones rot,
right in the middle of what we most love?
What if a woman has cancer?
The Recorder
Carolyn has taken up the recorder
and tootles in far parts of the house.
A child, a good child, she sounds with this
the depths of my worry and affection.
What is the age of fearing death?
Five years since our diagnosis.
Many good times, relaxed and moving times.
Few problems, comfortable.
And yet it is with us constantly,
as if we really had to be told:
we will not be together forever.
Larkspur
Sunscreen stung my eyes as we walked
King’s Canyon Trail to see wildflowers,
and I had no way of getting it out.
Carolyn passed me a larkspur blossom
I held throughout, till the end.
I recalled once holding another blossom,
at lakeside with the family and friends
of breast-cancer ladies, ourselves on land,
each one with a flower, while they,
the focus, including Carolyn,
floated offshore, a few meters away
in their dragon boats, done racing,
paddles across gunnels.
We on land were told, on a signal,
to toss our flowers into the water,
all together, which we did.
We all threw our blossoms into the water
and that made us cry.
My eyes filled again and the stinging was gone.
Love Poem For Carolyn, Christmas 2012
Dear Carolyn, my darling wife,
the woman I won and got with children,
the one that stayed by me, and I, by her, you,
I love you, I love you, I have long loved you,
love your long hair, long legs, long temper,
love your long-laughing, hazel eyes,
even your long, peculiar feet,
unlovely as anything, yet I love them,
if only because you need them to stand on,
but never mind that, where was I?
I love you, and how else I love you
is you long for me, it seems,
and the other ways I can hardly count
would require an encyclopedia of loves
to sort through and check off, every last one,
so Elizabeth Barrett Browning, herself,
would get tired and eventually summarize,
I love you for all them, and having me when
you could have had anyone, richer by far,
and more famous, you,
the most longed-for, best-loved of women,
could have had anyone, not just me,
and maybe you did, but we’re still together,
so this is your present, 2012. Merry Christmas!
Champagne
She goes around like a bottle of champagne
everybody deserves.
There must be a hundred people
who count her among their best friends.
She has time for them and needs their love,
offers her own in advance.
Her gift is to convince them of this—
that they are the funniest,
the most important, free-thinking
and adorable individuals alive.
Nor is she likely to mention her breast cancer,
but the extent to which she is in disguise,
untrue to friends and deceptive,
is only by one rubber falsie.
Apart from that, she is quite herself,
especially with the focused attention,
the great affection, and above all, the bubbles.
Golden Wedding Anniversary
I had Grandmother sunny side up,
smiling and eager, pigtailed and perfect,
as she was fifty years ago,
approximately,
both of us married to someone else,
glad to snap into this stabler chemistry,
productive at once, a daughter, a son,
like the hydrogen bumps you see on water
in schematic pictures of how it is,
thereafter part of the human river,
en route to an ocean beyond knowing,
our only real knowledge, ourselves,
if that, for never was it certain,
this fact that we are—
married fifty love-lingering years,
as if nothing could ever have been better—
though it couldn’t.
Poem Exploring End Of Life
Were I to write a poem on our lives
with the perfect title, that title would be:
Laughing All The Way.
It wouldn’t be perfectly accurate.
No simple summary could be.
But this is as close as I could come
to describing our lives together, even now,
with breast cancer in stage IV.
So I declare, it was all Jingle Bells,
with an excellent sleigh
and lots of laughing.
Unless this is whistling in the dark.
No doubt a good deal of both.
Blue Ribbon Love
When did you ever love her better
than when she was throwing up?—
in this case standing,
she with two hands on the plastic bowl,
you with one,
your other around her retching ribs,
so thin and tortured,
everything backwards.
You offer as comfort
your greatest insight,
it’s a darn shame,
and put your noggin
against her noggin
and watch the splash.
Oh Dear.
Days Now
Days now, I have noticed my beard
keeps growing as they say a cadaver’s does,
Days, as I wait for my wife to die,
I feel the stubble, and with wet eye,
Not so much for myself alone
as for her and her friends who love her, sorrow.
Connsider her champion student, Qi,
whose name in Chinese means, Life Force.
My poor wife, after weeks of vomiting,
said: I feel like I have no Qi.
And she didn’t because they were far apart,
soon to be farther, in another way.
Well, it seemed to me profoundly sad,
her Life Force and Great Friend being absent.
And I felt very sorry for both,
my beard still growing.
Pathetic Fallacy, Numerically
The day after my wife’s death
I did several things to keep busy.
One of them was to wash clothes
and sort them on the new-made bed.
At the end I found there were 5 odd socks,
five odd socks and not one mated pair!
Nor were there any more clothes to look through—
Supernatural, Natural or Unnatural Symbolism.
I tell you without a word of a lie:
there were five odd socks. And I cried.
Grief
I try to think of how she annoyed me:
her contrary thought to my every thought,
the length of her speeches upon it.
We couldn’t walk down a street together:
she, with her strong directions, researched;
I, with my ignorant, wandering ways,
knowing nothing but unwilling to follow;
nor was she willing to walk at random.
We both made grudging concessions,
And got all the good there was from each other:
I, better informed, free to write and play, build
when I would, money and ease.
She, for her part, was pretty well cared for,
loved and made comfortable.
We thrived in vexation and laughed at it,
laughed til vexation itself was funny,
the sight of each other, smiles.
Now there is nothing to laugh at.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/tucson/name/carolyn-harley-obituary?id=38690487
Embarrassing Dream
The day before the obituary ran,
I felt in terrible shape,
weeping about one thing and another,
feeling, I suppose, that this made it final,
and I was the one who said it.
I couldn’t drop off to sleep for hours,
and when at last I did, woke up from this dream:
Carolyn was on top of the bed in her nightie,
cheerfully talking to all in the room.
My old friend, Pete, was one of those present,
and he said: She sure looks alive to me, Peter.
Then, her oncologist stuck his head in the door
and said laughing: I read in the paper you died!
Being painfully well-accustomed to blunder,
I thought, This is your all-time worst!
How could you!
You must have hit Send while practicing!
But why were you practicing? Why?
And I woke up writhing in embarrassment,
twisting and turning in the bedclothes.
When I finally began to go back to sleep,
I felt myself falling into the same dream,
but stayed awake till I didn’t.
Thus, commenced days of grieving.
Weepy Days After The Obituary
I met a little boy in the park who said,
Excuse me, Sir, do you reuse those balls?
I said, Yes but you can have one if you like,
and chipped it over the chainlink fence.
A few minutes later he came inside,
offering to help me pick them up.
I gave him two more and let him hit
with one of my racquets.
He said, You are so nice!
I said, I practice.
He said, No, I mean, nice to people.
I said, I practice that too.
He said, A girl at my school is so mean she said,
That’s why your mother left you.
And I was so mad I started yelling.
When I got home I shed tears about that.
Another Bad Day At The Morgue
Well, fuck, everybody’s dead,
Every Body.
Nobody’s loving. Everybody’s rotting,
insofar as they’re able to rot,*
Poor little microbes wiping away tears:
For the love of Pete, let us at it!
I remember in Peter Mathieson’s book, The Birds of Heaven,
people in the Himalayas took their dead up the mountain
and chopped them to pieces, and set them out for the birds.
A variation was to take them downhill
and feed them to fishes in a fast stream.
So before very long they were back in the cycle
of life and death, and all was well.
So it is here if I take the long view.
It’s just getting past these very low days.
Perhaps they have them in the Himalayas too.
I bet they do.
--------------------------------------
*Carolyn was in the body donor plan at the U of A.
Knuckles And Eyes
In her hospice bed
she liked my knuckles
pressed into her eyes.
One’s eyes are hot from metabolism,
my knuckles, cold, for whatever reason:
polar opposites finding each other
to meld in relief, as yin and yang.
Now, nobody’s eyes need nobody’s knuckles.
I put them back on my own
where I found them.
As by the dead we love to sit
As by the dead we love to sit,
Become so wondrous dear—
As for the lost we grapple
Tho' all the rest are here—
In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize
Vast—in its fading ratio
To our penurious eyes!
- F 78 (1859) 88
said Emily