For Cee’s FOTD
Upon Running into a Former Best Friend
Don’t give me cause to regret our reunion.
Don’t bring back to mind our former disunion.
Don’t lament my career or cuss at my kids—
those actions that once put us into the skids—
dissolving our friendship and our former ties
when I’d had enough of your conniving lies.
Don’t inveigle or bemoan your lack of a pension.
Past times I’ve come through I won’t bother to mention.
And if you’ve a reaction and want to explode,
do me a favor. Take it on the road!!!
The prompt for NaPoWriMo today is the post a poem that begins with a command.
Brutal Truth
Fresh as they come, you’re the pick of the litter.
Though too young for pathos and too soft for bitter,
how can I describe what fate has in store
later in life as the innocent lore
of your earlier life is exposed as just part
of what might affect your innocent heart?
Prompt words are soft, describe, pathos, later and young. Image by Alex Gomes on Unsplash.
Friendly Game
You come to bat. I toss my pitch.
Convention dictates. It’s a bitch.
You note my sudden augmentation.
A loud crack signals your elation.
Over the fence with deadly aim.
You round the bases to loud acclaim.
Exploit the crowd’s ecstatic cheers.
This afternoon, you’ll buy the beers.
Prompts today are deadly, pitch, augmentation, exploit and convention.
Split Seconds
On Valentine’s Day,
standing dizzy on a dry summer country road,
between weekend dances in different towns,
sweet 16 and finally kissed.
My eccentric English professor,
slapping down his briefcase once, twice, three times
on his table at the front of the room,
opened the clasp, drew out our first papers,
and chose mine as the one to read aloud.
I felt the gun barrel pressed against my head,
heard the gun fire,
fell into the street and rose above
to see them lift his wounded body into a taxi,
my body lying in the street.
The woman in the dream
walked toward me across the barroom,
threw her drink in my face,
then hit me over the head with the glass
and I woke up soaking wet, with a knot on my head,
screaming, “Just wake up!”
I saw him for the first time
on the stage at the little coffee shop in Santa Monica
reading love poems he’d written to another woman,
and it was as though I’d been with him
for my whole life. Then afterwards,
I was with him for the rest of his.
He met me
at the plane
with a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup and a rose.
Hours later, in his kitchen,
after the long ride southward,
luggage spilled sideways on the floor—
another long-delayed
first kiss.
The NaPoWriMo prompt is to “write your own poem that provides five answers to the same question – without ever specifically identifying the question that is being answered.”
Each one of my older and bigger animals has seemed to adopt a role in raising Zoe. It seems as though Diego is the one who has decided to be her martial arts instructor. They can go on like this for a half hour or more. Sounds fierce but no one ever seems to get hurt. See video below:
]
Shirker
Clearly, she holds no ardor for most housewifely tasks,
and so declines to provide help if anybody asks.
Requests for her assistance will be to no avail.
She cannot wash the dishes, for she might chip a nail.
She will not soil her pretty hands with ordinary work.
She cannot pot a potted plant or set coffee to perk.
The observance of perfection is clearly her main aim—
her ardor for maintaining it the purpose of the game.
Words for the day are observance, clearly, ardor, soil.
Morrie’s Ball
I throw the ball and throw the ball,
over my head in an arc to the garden downhill from the pool
where every midnight I do aerobic exercises and yoga,
trying to stem the freezing-up of joints,
the spreading of spare tires around the waist.
I am allergic to the sun,
and so these sometime-between-midnight-
and-3 a.m.-sessions in the pool
have come to be habit,
with both me and the small black shaggy dog
who leaves his bed in the doggie domain,
no matter how late I make the trip to the pool,
carrying his green tennis ball.
It is the latest in a long progression of balls
chewed to tatters until they are incapable of buoyancy
that sink to the pool bottom to be picked up by toes,
toed to hand, and thrown down again.
When they are replaced in the morning with a fresh ball,
he still searches for the old one,
like a child’s nigh nigh, grown valuable through use.
Again and again he drops the ball in the pool
and I interrupt every fifth repetition to throw the ball.
Like an automaton, he returns with precision,
then is off like a flash so fast
that sometimes he catches the ball I throw before it hits the ground.
This little dog, faithful in his returns,
sometimes jumps up on the grassy mound
I’ve made for him in a big flower pot by the pool,
chews the ball,
drops and catches it before it falls to the water,
drops and catches,
as though teasing me
the way houseguests might have teased him in the past with a false throw.
Or, sometimes he drops it on the grass,
noses it to the edge and then catches it before it falls.
Over and over, constructing his own games.
Then, bored or rested up from his countless runs,
he lofts the ball into the water precisely in front of me
and I pause in my front leg kicks
to resume my obligation.
But this night, he returns listless after the third throw.
“Go get the ball, Morrie,” I command, and he runs with less speed and vigor down the hill to the garden. I hear him checking out his favorite places, but he does not return, and when I call him, finally, he returns, ball-less, jumps up on his mound and falls asleep.
He’s getting old, I think.
Hard to imagine this little ball of energy
as being anything but a pup.
He’ll bring it to me tomorrow, I think.
But tomorrow
and tomorrow
and tomorrow
brings no Morrie with a ball.
When I go down to the hammock the next day,
his enthusiastic leap up onto my stomach
is the same, his same insistence
that I rub his ears, his belly, his back.
But no ball proffered for a throw.
No Morrie returning again and again for more.
I am feeling the older for it,
like a mother who sees her last child
off to University or down the aisle, fully grown,
but I am reassured three days later,
when I arise from the hammock
to climb the incline up to the house
and see lodged firmly in the crotch of the plumeria tree
five feet off the ground: Morrie’s ball.
He sees me retrieve it
and runs enthusiastically up to the pool with me,
where I peel off my clothes
and descend like Venus into the pool,
arc my arm over,
and throw the ball.
He is back with it
before I get to the other end of the pool.
If they could see
through the dense foliage
that surrounds the pool,
what would the neighbors think
of this 72-year-old skinny dipping,
lofting a ball over her head
for her little dog
in broad daylight?
Morrie and I don’t care.
For Day 17 of NaPoWriMo, we are to write a poem about a dog we have known. This assignment is a pinch!!!
