Quite a number of appointments peppered this month: dental cleaning, front tooth install, Finn’s bi-annual, kitchen guy templating the counters, two Tuesday-Group-Now-Wednesday-Group meetings, a visit from the exterminator and the water meter guy, two extra Amherst Writers’ zoom meetings (not the regular workshops), a PCP visit and hip X-ray. K went to China and I got another Covid booster. Both my boys had birthdays.
3/1 When the sock slips down from ankle to heel, is it the sock or the shoe?
3/2 Rain dots the bluestone as we head out with the dog. Crocus springing up.
3/3 To make cream biscuits just call on your ancestors. Let them knead the dough.
3/4 A spring robin sings her heart out from the rooftop. Even the sky sighs.
3/5 Complicated? Talk and talk some more and then write it down. Stories. Life.
3/6 Dragon litter must mean something auspicious like “Obstacles melting.”
3/7 We laugh. We eat cake. And we wonder how many more years do we have?
3/8 “Reading the sidewalk” is nothing less than scanning for small miracles.
3/9 A man walks east in the woods and at first I thought he was a turkey.
3/10 It’s not a stink bug. It’s not a cricket. It walks on the bathroom scale.
3/11 Jackhammers do the impossible —they make leaf blowers seem benign.
Dueling jackhammers at two sites. You’d think it rare. Here? Not anymore.
3/12 Squat, pair, seam, then press. That’s how you piece a quilt when you work on the floor.
3/13 She ate three servings of my mushroom risotto. Grief notwithstanding.
3/14 I fill one of last year’s hanging pots with dog poop. Raking can begin!
3/15 Idyllic enclave at cul-de-sac’s end — ruined with a fence. Private!
3/16 Rake dusty oak leaves away, reveal ruby shoots. Warriors of spring!
3/17 Vertigo kept her from walking around the lake. We went together.
3/18 Branches bob in a cold March wind. Their shadows brush up against heartache.
3/19 Daniel and Parker, along the fence, fuzzy buds of magnolia.
His hips were the hips of a boy, his eyes the eyes of an old man. An impossible moon graced his father’s shoulder, one of many transmissions.
How it turned green in the passing, that orb. How it highlighted the similar bone structures. How the snake draped across the boy’s shoulders glinted in its light.
Denim is manly. Or not. The moon is not. A snake for a boy signals not rising kundalini, but the rising sap of manhood. How will he hold his lover’s hand through the hail? How will his lips find another’s when the elevator jerks to a stop, no clear exit?
And will he remember how sturdy, how firm a father he had, the day his dad gave him the moon? Or will it, the moon, cause the boy/man’s bangs to stick up, cause a troubling ruffle in his chest where something someone is missing, not his mother exactly, but something someone close?
The snaps will be undone, the head shaved, hallowed music swayed to, meteors hitting the grey still hills on a night he least expects it.
And somewhere someone draws the man/boy a bath.
SoulCollage card as a prompt.
Writing note: once you begin writing, the prompt doesn’t matter anymore. I was tempted to post the poem without the image, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.
The man here is a the founder of Mitchell hair products, entrepreneur, and billionaire. Thanks, as always to magazines for their fertile images, none of which are being sold.
Later: can’t believe I found the guy’s name: it’s John Paul Dejoria.
