I find myself placing
a plastic wrapped package
of Bounty quilted napkins
on the radiator by the back window.
Like a tiny version of the hay bales
I used to enjoy watching being made
out in the field by a contraption
then chucked out
flying through the air onto a wagon,
A release of something
that happened in golden light,
the accomplishment of a season
attended to by a team of excited
sometimes shouting men
and a certain kind of dust
in late afternoon
at the end of summer
and the smell of fall.
I think of my cat, Miss Kitty,
who would climb up
hopefully and full
of calculated wonder,
and real joy,
upon the radiator
to the window sill
by the Norfolk Monkey Puzzle
and the Buddha statue.
She would, from there,
make tiny cooing birdlike sounds
if she saw birds out there,
calling to them
on wintry mornings.
She would stand proudly
and inspect the world
carefully sometimes
lightly swaying,
her two eyes bright and even planed.
She would sit
and read,
as if before a newspaper
or the news hour.
At other times she would place herself
on her side of the screen
and hiss and taunt and growl
at the neighbor's cat,
also female, with just a touch
of calico in her grey fur,
far larger than my cat,
both with raised fur.
The napkins, inert,
pulpy vestige of a wooded hillside.
I do the dishes.
The image of her
looking out,
reminds me of my wise old
Polish lady neighbor
in her immaculate clothes
and a scarf about her shoulders,
about to say something
or suddenly laugh.



Poetry just is.
Something people do
while off on a slight lark
in their day,
while suffering a moment lacking
sternly regarded and
carefully upheld seriousness
of the stuffy kind,
or a moment as if from a dream.
It should be demystified,
harvested like solar energy,
something that happened in the mind,
freely, a gift, like a cherry tomato
plucked from a backyard garden.


My dad had great creative gifts.
He was always nonchalant about them.
They included his treatment of plants and flowers,
his gentle way of letting them grow as they would
both out in nature and with his own provided nourishment.
It's in his spirit that I contemplate the terroir of a wine,
as if I were a child discovering a new hillside of wild strawberries,
or the stones of a stream in the shaded hardwood forest
below a farmer's fields with cows up on them,
a patch of Sprengeri tulips sown from seed.

Never lose your belief in poetry.