Metaxyturn Diaries

On my lunch hour I
watch the clouds and the bay be-
come one in the rain.

It feels so good! No
umbrella to separate
me from the surprise

crossing this threshold.
I don’t know what I hoped for,
sitting here waiting.

A poem at a crowded party.

I used to count the minutes before the flash of the bufflehead broke the surface.

Summer calm. An egret lifts off, a duck keeps paddling.

At his book party,
Cor was charming on haiku.
I paid for the scotch.

His haiku memoir
evoked the old New Hampshire
of his boyhood. Verse

this good doesn’t sell.
The gaunt crane looks at his feet
in the still shallows.

Independence Day. Everybody’s doing it.

A strange looking thing,
the float in the cove with no
cormorants. It drifts

a little, lists, rocks
gently with the ducks as tides
rise and fall. It puts

me in mind of time
and its ecstatic presence
in the life of things.

I watch the geese feed
under the oaks and ask for-
giveness for tonight.

Fireworks will spoil the
peace of a cool evening.
All to stoke the pride

of a sick nation.
I will hide my face from my
cat’s pitiless gaze.

Who is it appeals
to me in the wild grasses —-
blue arrow, soft rush —-

now that I live on
the East Coast? A child wanders
in the Sierra,

a grizzled man sits
by the Bay. Lowly grasses
the same vocation.

Cooling off today
this mono ku eel grass waves
up from under.

Endless talk about
these white clouds from our small cove
to the Atlantic.

So high and so bright.
Platinum. Bridge to open
water. Summer wastes

and wastes, though poets
whose thing is eternity
keep waiting, waiting.