July, Nikos, crows, and Theodore

July is not as hot in Eugene as in Houston
but the rains of winter and spring are long gone.
Our primary chorus continues to be the geese
but the crows are abundant, cheerful, and loud.
I seem to enjoy the geese arguing overhead
and the crows arguing in our yard. They are our bards.
I have not thought of Nikos Kazantzakis in some hours.
We like our red geraniums and miss Theodore Roethke.

I recognize sometimes that I am a lost ant on a large leaf
drifting through turmoils of crappy conditions
and that I float north on the Willamette
going in the opposite direction of much of the world.
I am okay with alternate directions and can smile
without quoting lines of poems from Theodore Roethke
as we do our daily walk through the Delta Ponds.
I do sometimes repeat bits of Nikos Kazantzakis on the trail.

My Poem July 2020

My poem, like some others,
is mostly a gentle searching for words
that give my morning coffee taste
and pull my supper from the blues.
I intentionally always dance with you
I mostly sing at the top of my lungs.
I don't yet scribe in tongues

nor sing my words in thought.
I am but the fish you caught.

My songs are mostly smiles
searching out some rounder, prouder world.
We may wear mostly scarfed bandanas
against the whirls of terrible yesterdays
but sometimes it is also tomorrow.
Our masks are not meant to hide
but merely guard our love and abide.

We do not need to borrow from hope;
a step in time is all it takes to cope.

Fractal Horizon

We may start out smiling, walking some fractal path
maybe admiring the abundant buds of new flowers
and as we encounter more paths and change our aim
we do not fault our discretion nor calculate our math
until we see that there is no intersection of worth.
We scan the horizon and complete our final curve.

Rejoicing Well

Euterpe dances in pellucid dress
against the sea. She is the ocean stone
that toils toward the shore - her tears caress
her riven cheeks. She clicks, bone against bone,
a fictive note, her long toes zither fast
among the breakers as she sways the wind
against the sea. Her singing cannot last
a printed page, recognition is the end.
No painted face reflected in the long
morning's moon, just a clack of spent coin
in an empty glass; a formal song
that stirs no wind - each song is sung but once.
We float to shore singing from her sea
searching inland, repeating from memory.