This Life
It’s just a rolled up candy wrapper or two or three. Gold foil ball. Since we eat little candy, when we do we play a game passing the rolled up foil back and forth to one another. Often as a playful hindrance. Down the front of her blouse. Down the back of my shirt. Under her bedroom pillow. In my boot. On her jar of yogurt in the refrigerator. In my cereal bowl. It won’t give up for days and days, and sometimes some weeks, until one or both of us forgets where we left the ball, and either the other didn’t find it or suddenly had to get back busy with real life. That damn real life. So what should we call this life?
In The Land Of Slush
They have been together and in love so long now
That when they think of an earlier life apart, it
Isn’t possible. Or it seems another life entirely.
After all it was childhood only before they met.
Somewhere within the love a child was born,
Came into his own, left. They returned to what
They had before the child was born as if wooded
Branches closed in together like wings of a large bird.
When he told her she was beautiful during a quiet
Meal, it was as if she had never heard the word before
Even though he brought it to her in every imaginable
Way each day. Walking together in a land of slush at
The end of winter in a bleak town meant very little
When there is beauty. It could vanish in an instance
So don’t be bothered with those who hate you for it.
In that same instance others would grab it, gladly, and
You would be looking in. She carried a heavy package,
The rain was new spring but cold as snow, you held
The umbrella for her as you both walked, & talked.
Pal Goose
On that sunny day
I opened your pen door
And let you out —
You loved the sun
Sun on snow
Making tracks to the pond —
Because it got too busy
But I have no excuse how
I forgot to close your
Pen door and left home
Sometime in the evening
Faraway, thoughts to you and
The open door but I would get back
The moon was out, and you
Loved the moon —
The raccoon was out, and he
Hunts by the moon —
The next morning you were
Found dead with eyes open
Suddenly flat and huge on the snow
Too big for raccoon to even bother with
Whose blood-tracks tricky designed away
And then as if he noticed how obvious
Seemed to wash his murderous paws
Off in the snow and vanished
You were our third gander
In twenty years, flocks of
Geese once upon a time mixed
With ducks and chickens and when
Our rooster died you were the new
Rooster for the chickens —
It looked funny, it looked
Practical, you fit
I miss you now when I split
Wood and wait to hear your call
Loud and sudden and part of me
———————————
BOB ARNOLD
I'm In Love With You
Who Is In Love With Me
Longhouse 2012
