The Poetry Marathon

To dream, but dreams are lost,
for it’s been years since I’ve
remembered mine. I didn’t get
to write my own version of
“The Road Less Taken,” although
I meant to try. Perhaps I’ve lived it,
or will, before I’m done. I know this,
that there is no sleep today, or in
many days to come. I have promises
to keep, and miles to go, many miles
ahead. Where they will take me,
I do not know. But I know I’ll be there,
to meet the rest of myself, when I arrive.
And life, and the memory of it, will be
there, too, I hope and pray. Let me
remember my life better than I
have remembered my dreams, until
I am too old to do anything but sleep.

How many times do we say that
to ourselves, when we smell the baby’s
diaper, and know the parents are out on a
date we sent them on, and won’t be back
for hours? When we see the old dog falter
in its steps, and know we can’t stop cruel,
inexorable time? When you, my love, look
puzzled when I try to play that game with you,
or read that poem you’ve always loved, and I
know you don’t remember, you’ll never remember
again, because so many details of our too-short
time together are already lost in the hippocampus,
where young memories go to die. I know I must
be up for this, for loving you, as your steps falter,
and you grow dim. I promise I will take care of
you, and make you laugh, even when you think
I’m just someone the agency sent,
to change your bedclothes.

I know you don’t know I exist,
and if you did, you wouldn’t want
me around, there being nothing new
I could teach you about Florida.
Hell, you camped for days in the
Ten Thousand Islands, and took
too many pills on Fort Myers Beach,
meaning to die there, if Sha hadn’t
found you. So forgive me, Elizabeth
Bishop, for stealing your lines when I
need a great finish, like rainbow, rainbow,
rainbow, or somebody loves us all.
You help me, daily, even when I’m not
writing poetry, obsessively. You help me
practice, losing farther, losing faster, as
we are all losing the time we crave, to finish
what we started. I love you, EB. Rest in peace.

I always count on you to say the dangerous
thing, the true thing, about Dick Cheney or
global warming, and damn if you didn’t do it
again, calling out Bruce Jenner for making
himself into a facsimile woman, practically
a Kardashian. I know you, Annie, and I
know you didn’t mean to be unloving to
Caitlyn or anyone else, but that you were
doing that thing we all do from time to
time, making Jesus drink himself to
sleep, or want to. We all embarrass
God when we open our mouths and
“the monkeys fly out,” as Zora Neale
Hurston would say. The monkeys fly when
we get it wrong, when we aren’t truthful,
when we aren’t worthy of ourselves,
let alone Jesus. I’m glad you’ve apologized,
not just to Caitlyn, but to all transgender
people, and their parents, and neighbors,
and teachers, and lovers, and friends. I’m glad
Sam’s got your back on this, telling us his mom’s
pretty clueless about trans stuff, but she’s still
his mom. And you’re still my fave, so get back
to work. Somebody loves us all.

Telling me to write a poem to a
YouTube song is about as useful
as telling me to stop loving you.
First of all, the damn ad comes on,
distorting from the get-go whatever
the song might have been. And
then the damn drums, like the
little boy who is supposed to play
for Jesus, but loud drums make
the baby cry, so what will we do
for a savior after that?
And what will we do, you and I?
Who will save us from what’s ahead,
the stove left on, the Silver Alert,
which we joke about, like its Florida’s
folly, but we both know we will need it
someday, if you get lost and I can’t find you,
on the way to Fort DeSoto or Sanibel. Who
will save us from this damn repetitive tune,
over and over again? I hope I’ll forget it
completely, today, this morning, before
breakfast, and not have it stuck in my head,
like “Three Times A Lady,” or God forbid,
“Come, they told me, pa rump a pum pum.”

Whatever we had missed, we possessed,
together, the precious, the incommunicable past.

If you google this last line of Willa Cather’s
classic novel, you will find out that the book
it finishes – perfectly, flawlessly – is part of a
project called The Big Read. You will also find
the epigram for the book, from Virgil:
“The best days are the first to flee.”

So what if someone changed it to
“The best geese are the first to fly”?
It would still be a proper sentence,
but it wouldn’t say anything Cather
meant to say, not that she didn’t like geese.
Kind of like when NEA printed up thousands
of readers guides, just as they still have it on
their website, with “precious” changed
to “previous,” making Cather into mush.
Making The Big Read into a silly read, a
meaningless exercise in great literature,
asking what it’s worth if we muck it up
with auto-correct and don’t bother to
fix it? Pardon this rant, but it should be
on record, somewhere, that the last sentence
of My Antonia was beautiful, and perfect,
and not to be tampered with. Amen.

Balderdash. A penny saved
is not even a penny anymore. The
Canadians have stopped keeping them
in the cash register. North of the border,
they don’t even make them now.
So why do we cling so hard to our
Lincolns? Our town cars, our capitol
of Nebraska? We’ll be driving there,
later this morning, to see the original
of Breton’s painting, “The Song of
the Lark,” because it’s there, and we
wonder if it will look different, away
from Chicago. Nebraska’s bright copper Lincoln,
by any other name, would be Omaha, and
we can’t have that. They wouldn’t
know what to do on game day.
The rose garden would die, and the
sower on top of the capitol would
fall and break on the plaza, rather than
move to Omaha or Kansas City.
So yes, a penny saved means we keep
Lincoln free of suicide bombers and
global warming. Next year, and the next,
when the white pelicans and the sandhill
cranes fly over, on their way to the Platte,
let them find Lincoln as it’s always been,
worthy of our thoughts, our care, our kin.

Please save Virginia. You know-
Virginia Woolf. She’s been with me
since 1984, rising out of doom,
given new life by some sculptor’s
knowing hands. The shape of her hair,
the contours of her face, just right
in some kind of mottled metal.
I don’t know if she would burn,
but I wouldn’t want to take the chance,
after all she’s been through, drowning
herself, being used as fodder by Edward
Albee and countless others. No, I am not
the least bit afraid of her or whether she
might do it again, might fling herself
into the fire if she got half the chance.
Not on my watch, dear. I love your writing
too much to lose you now. So come on,
get in the car. We are still in the race.
Wherever I roam, you will always be there,
giving my rooms some style, some grace.

The waitress is sleepy and so am I.
She’s seen better days, and so have I.
I tell her what I’m doing, up writing
poetry until the cows come home.
She pops her gum, her only comment,
and ambles off with the coffee pot.
I want to say, “Please leave it here,”
but this isn’t that kind of place.
For one thing, the carafe isn’t thermal,
so it would get cold quickly, and then
where would I be? I have to be content
to wait until she remembers me, between
the truck driver with the bad cough and
the teenagers texting each other across
the booth behind me, the F word back
and forth. I want to ask if their parents
know where they are, but they have their
poetry, too, as well as their doom. I want

them to stay here forever,

whispering and giggling.

I would still stand helpless,
wanting to talk about Hillary,
just as we talked about her
in 2008, deciding it wasn’t her
time yet. We were right about that,
but wrong about everything else.
We parted company and both
worked hard for Obama, our
hearts far apart, but our souls
still connected, deep purple,
women of faith, capable of depths
only imagined in dreams.
Mine, not yours. Do you still think
I’m too young for you, too impulsive,
too intense? Go ahead, then. Head on
into old age without me. Wade in, deep
end of the pool. Tread water as long as
you can. After you finish forgetting me,
I would love to take care of you, brush your
hair, bring you Irish Soda Bread, and soup.