Category: Aging
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Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse, graying outbuildings. In your final winter, you stood with empty, cracking branches to tell us plain that your kind shade would be gone – My father, too, would warn us so in his gruffled, dying voice to give us time to account, to record, to not be frightened. Empty sky. Time unwinds. I…
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Finding things lost
I no longer trust myself having searched all morning for the missing piece in our endless jigsaw and come up empty-handed – then to find it with a quick glance as I poured more coffee. You ask where I left my heart – out on the porch after dinner or somewhere on the lake bluff?…
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My father finds comfort in crows
Inexplicable. That is what I say when you tell me and all I can do is shrug and count: How this is one more thing that separates us How you would kiss me goodnight and I would pull back How you stood wishing the boys would come to you not out of duty, however precisely…
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An Easter thought
It does not seem fair in all the measures of life that our heavy ways hang in expectance on these tiny buds just now swelling as if even trifle error could be swept long past by the miracle wrought when young leaves break their cocoons. We are at the gallows, bewildered, then resurrected, by the…
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The heart needs good work
All that comes to me now is the prairie, how it is empty to the casual eye, how you walk or see for miles, alone, how you wonder ever why on the absence of your fellow creatures. Will you get another dog? it asks me, or a grandmother, or husband, or son? Do they make…
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Worth staying for
Dusts of snow edge the earth, uneven lines mark sun-warmed pavers. With under-parts protected, statuary gather new relief, dying grasses open in broad pompons, perennial stalks crisscross into heavy mounds of gold, pine tufts reach out in a first, mourning grace. All else hushes, runs for cover, but our small, neglected garden unfolds, yawns wide…
Poems from in between 