Seems I've been writing poetry for so long that Methuselah should be taking
notice, but in reality, time is simply doing its thing streaking ahead
blithely pulling all of us along for the wild ride whether we like it or
not; reminds me, I've published 15 chapbooks over the years, the last one
just came out about my Dad, "methinks I see my father," and before that was
"when Patti would fall asleep," about my wife, guess you could say I'm a
family man. I've been published in quite a few places over the years, starting in 1989,
including Blue Collar Review, Big Hammer, Bogg, Cafe Review, California Quarterly, The
Devil's Millhopper, Embers, Hampden-Sydney Review, Impetus, Indefinite
Space, Karamu, Main Street Rag, Minotaur, Mudfish, Negative Capability, New
York Quarterly, Onionhead, Orphic Lute, Owen Wister Review, Oyster Boy
Review, Pearl, Poet Magazine, Poetry East, The Pointed Circle, Portraits
Poetry Magazine, Rattle, Rhino, Riverrun, River Styx, Roanoke Review, Ship
of Fools, Slipstream, Verve, Whole Notes, The Windless Orchard, Wind, Word
and Image, Wormwood Review
MIKE'S INFLUENCES:
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Click image to visit the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website; for the Mr Shakespeare and the Internet resource site, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.
WALT WHITMAN
For a profile of Whitman on the Academy of American Poets website, click image; to read the article 'Walt Whitman and the Development of 'Leaves of Grass', click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Click image for a guide to resources on Thoreau on the Transcendentalists website; for the Writings of Henry David Thoreau website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Click image for a profile of Dante on the Kirjasto website; for the Dante Alighieri on the Web site, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Click image to visit the Mozart Project website; to visit the Studio Mozart website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
MY GRANDMA SADIE
TOP FIVE THINGS MIKE LOVES ABOUT HIS WIFE:
she's a terrific mother
***
she's the cook, without her I'd starve
***
she's still beautiful even after all these years have passed
Staying with Linda at her place
by the Palm Coast shore,
sleeping in her and her husband’s bedroom.
Ralph passed away eight months ago.
I never knew him, but he’s still here:
photos of him and her on her dresser
on their wedding day,
on their Majesty of the Seas cruise of Nassau,
on an empty street in Barcelona;
a colorful paint-by-number scene
of a sailboat and the sunny shoreline
he did while recovering from back surgery;
his two fishing poles leaning silent
as sunshine in the corner of their lanai.
Yes, Ralph passed on eight months ago
from lung cancer, Ralph passed on,
but he’s still here, he’s still here,
Ralph is still here.
My poor Aunt dies
suddenly
leaving her nieces and nephews
her money,
very much appreciated, very much needed,
with one child still in college,
another soon to be married,
and the third with
a brand new baby girl.
But I’m as far from gladdened
as one can be,
as far as Neptune is
from the sun.
The fresh earth atop
her grave
makes my heart thick
and queasy with sorrow.
But I don’t cry until later that day,
while visiting the Staten Island Zoo,
drastically changed
over the last 30 years,
almost unrecognisable to me now,
making me feel,
for some unknown reason,
as useless as my Aunt’s wedding dress
from 1953
that we threw out
because it is faded, yellow and wrinkled,
and falling apart,
after all these years,
like me.
Grainy-textured turquoise hue like a dying flame
scrapes at my white and dusty collar bones,
and at the base of my thick skull, scrapes
until my flesh is pink again,
dream-like streaks tug at my soul
or perhaps it’s my psyche, I frequently confuse
the two, then my wife speaks, cracks open,
like cracking open a pink lobster, my revere –
“One of the birdwatchers on the mountain today
lent us his binoculars so we could see
the hawks kettling, rising up over the trees
where the tree-line ropes off the horizon,
and it was an amazing sight to witness.
Have you ever heard of kettling before?”
“Well no,” I say, and while I’m uncertain
if it is a correct term it sounds good,
sounds poetic – a kettling of hawks, as it turns out,
is a gathering of hawks flying together
in a flock, rising and swooping,
sometimes lazy, other times intense,
and as the hawks flew, pumping their wings
then gliding, through my psyche, or maybe
my soul, they caused
the scraping to cease for a time
in the dusk before nightfall,
and that made me feel good
for the first time that day.
I wonder about Cleopatra’s shoes
and Helen of Troy’s shoes,
and also, did Mary Magdalene
wear nice, comfortable sandals?
What about Eleanor of Aquitaine,
the wife of Henry II
and mother of Richard the Lionheart,
were her shoes stylish
as Anne Boleyn’s must have been
or austere and sturdy as Joan of Arc’s?
We know that Jackie Kennedy Onasis
had fashionable shoes and Immelda Marcos
had thousands of them. Yes,
you can tell a lot about
a woman from her shoes,
but I’m not sure what, exactly.
Outside the window in the back yard
is an oak tree, straight
and tall and thick as a bull.
I attached a bat house to it,
but bats never came. And there’s a road
beyond the tree and the other trees,
and a house on the other
side of the road.
Cars move back and forth
over the road, as birds flit up
and down the branches of the tree.
Sometimes you can see the moon
through the tree branches
and sometimes not.
Attached onto the window is a birdfeeder
that Laura gave her mother for Christmas.
Mostly titmice, chickadees,
and even rather large doves
frequent the feeder, but sometimes
a cardinal will come,
blazing red like fire
and proud and sure,
and chase all the other birds away.
My father-in-law is back in the ER, that’s three times in three weeks, not a good sign, this time for acute congestive heart failure. I suspect he is close to the end this time. And even though he has never much liked me, never was happy about his beautiful daughter marrying me (can’t say I blame him for feeling that way, really, I wouldn’t be happy if one of my daughters married me either) I am not going to be happy about his passing. He’s my wife’s dad after all and I have known him for four decades for crying out loud, four decades, You develop a relationship over four decades whether you like it or not. we had some good times, we did, we had some laughs. And also, I’m in love with his daughter, been in love with his daughter for four decades, so that’s something important in and of itself. Usually when I think about him I remember him as a much younger man, four decades ago, proud, confident, self-assured, arrogant at times even. I picture him striding from his car into the house in his business suit at the end of the day. I picture him stacking the small TV on top of the big TV so he could watch two football games at the same time. I picture him pulling a handful of bills out of his pocket (he never carried a wallet), always picking up the dinner tab way back when the world was a simpler place. And today . . . well never mind about today, much better sometimes to keep focusing on four decades ago.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
DANTE ALIGHIERI
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
