A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
There is a fashion – and as fashions come, they go – of decolonizing one’s bookshelf. The idea is that the reader should self-interrogate his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) cultural influences and determine if they are not right, not approved, not liked. Or, as Pasternak’s officious, oppressive, busy-body Soviet Deputy says, noticed.
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Summer is better in theory than in practice:
Watermelon days barefootin’ in the shade
Pole-fishing for perch in the neighbor’s pond
Oak-tree afternoons lost in a library book…
They’ve gone and pulled a general down
And all the birds that used to rest
Upon his visage fallen to ground
Will have to seek another nest…
Trinity Sunday – a cosmic leap indeed
From the second week in Lent until now
We bless ourselves with holy chemicals
And the awkward elbow-bump of peace
Some high school graduates are in the top ten per cent of their class, and that’s good enough for them, but I was in the top eighty percent of my class, and eighty is a higher number than ten, so their. Or they’re. Or something….
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A mighty wind has passed, an ashen wind
It was not the Wind we were waiting for
Nor yet again Holy Wisdom’s tongues of fire
But only Babel’s burning ziggurat…
While isolated in my rural estate here along Beer Can Road and County Dump Extension I have been dragging hoses, reading Robert Frost, saying bad things about the ‘possums pillaging my vegetable garden, and considering Star Trek…
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He lightly leaped from the old garbage truck
Waved back at me, and sprinted to the bin
He Fred Astaired it as a pas de deux
And lifted it up with panther-like grace…
A haircut today – my Wolfman look is shorn
The virus-time follicles set to rights
Follies and follicles, the locks of lockdown
A-tumbling down in coarse, unseemly waves…
This is the only thing normal today:
A tornado watch on a Sunday in spring
I have shifted those famous Loose Objects
Into secure areas as best I could…
