MindSpinner

In the center of the crescent window
whence light falls
the moon is a paring
curled in solitude
on a whisperless sea.

The moon hangs poised
half in light
half in shadow
just above the apex
of my neighbor’s roof
as if to balance there
in the coming blue of day.
Moon storms whip unseen
along the knife edge
of its stilled Picasso profile,
where light plunges
into shadow
and shadow disappears
half a face.

Comment: If you were to visit and revisit this site in the hours after I post a poem, you’d think you were losing your mind, for every time you look, something is likely to have been changed. I must have altered this poem twenty times today, and I’m not taking bets on whether the tinkering is done. A poem is done when it stops asking for every note to be sounded and heard again and again, until all are tuned true, until nothing could or should be different than it is. The whole business seems to be up to the poem. (I have stopped querying my poems about whether they are good poems or bad poems or mediocre poems or whether they are like anybody else’s poems at all.) Finally a poem will say, “You can go away now and do as you please, for I am what I am to be.” The poem is not thereby agreeing to leave me alone for good, of course. It has signed no contract. It reserves the right to be fickle and to demand my attention all over again at will.

All those who hanker after finality should know that all poems will be certifiably done when I am dead.

The barn photographed
last month standing
at sunset stands now
smaller by half.
The western half lies
fallen, its rusted roof
covering its ruin
like a sheet drawn
over one dead.

Watch out! I have a new laptop (no ordinary laptop) and a two-week spring break approaching. No more borrowing the kids’ eMac at 5:00 in the morning or when nobody’s sitting in front of it. No more passing over what wanted to be written because there’s no ready opportunity to sit down and hash it out. (Pen and paper don’t work so well for me anymore.) No more checking my mail through Yahoo and jotting only the quickest replies. Now I can sit on my bed and write whenever I make the time (beating back lesser claims upon it). I can download photographs and share them, upload and order those pictures my mother wanted of the kids, and find out what I want to know via the Internet without having to wait in line or deal with haphazard connections at school.

I’d rather cook dinner every night over an open fire than live without a laptop and an Internet connection. I’d rather wash clothes in the bathtub and hang them out on a line. Did I mention how grateful I am to have this extraordinary tool, this doorway to the world, this means to conversations that matter? Or how grateful I am that this dimension of my life is important not only to me but to people who care about me? WOW moment in progress here.

The coffeepot sits forlorn,
absent aroma, in the kitchen.
When you walk again with me,
daffodils will bloom.
I depend on the promise
of their green fingers rising.