My syllabics poem, “The Green Love of the Progress to This Now and” has been published in Thriving An Anthology from Exolutas Press. The publisher, Rhonda Rosenheck, chose the topic and has collected poems that explore thriving in all its glory and forms, often in the aftermath of grave challenges. She writes: “From global events to microscopic movements, change happens around us, to us and within us. We are challenged to adapt, plan, grow, rethink, relax, endeavor, risk, feel and act. How do we live robustly when plans are disrupted and well-being is threatened? How do we find purpose? Feel joy? Be creative? Achieve? Connect? How do we thrive?”
Stanza 7 of my poem—which began as somewhat of an homage to the work of Marianne Moore—is a “found poem” crafted from the examples given in the third definition of the adjective “green” in the online version of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The version that appears in this anthology has a different line indentation pattern from what I am able to reproduce below.
The Green Love of the Progress to This Now and
so many vistas, horizons near flat.
Shiftless winds, wide plains, a beach where evil
ties a dog to a spade as the sunset
tide is coming in. It’s hard to escape
this world of hurt. Yet I, for one, managed
to slip, stream on a riverboat of numb,
my mind a maze, investigative girl-
detective certain of the when—seldom
an if—each time urgent for yes over
no. No! To picture now—why, I never
could count down to this ocean of future-
time where the mother sails toward seventy,
the son who couldn’t tie his lace-up shoes
now rides the surf of forty-six. Precious
little in truth at this late date, under-
stood. About the way love barrels ever
through, insists on finding its wayward most
inadequate, so many words acting
in jest, tailwinds circumnavigating
all that’s secret until the planting, one
more flat of natives green—oxalis, birth-
root, bleeding heart. And what was it I loved?
The restlessness? The lackaday? The pain?
The imperfections in an ancient glass?
Such light was what I thought this now would be.
Or did I think? Caught in the dizzy speed
of circadian day, night, days after
I sipped one cup at a time, the struggling
daze, a recurring heartbeat soundtrack far
from nonstop pixels swiped, tapped-into screens.
What did my green even mean? Young or un-
ripe (of a fruit, a plant); naïve (of a
person); (of wood) unseasoned; not dried, smoked
or tanned (of leather, food); not fading (of
memory); (of a wound) fresh, not healed—
only to be talking snow in the midst
of a greening spring where cherry flurries
swirl a street in greeting, home after miles
of blacktop highways, first-world same-old-same.
For, seen by chance, this petal shower spins,
a whirling gust into my eyes, my hair.
Flies high to drift along the chimney’s bricks,
to swan-dive for an edge, a blue-roofed eave
above the bushtits nesting in a hedge.
No hedging bets, no betting bedded down,
oh green love for such quintessence—my now
of free fall, bloodlines, roost instead of range.
Each day, love buzzes new, its bumbling pleas,
remarkable and undeserving—ease.
Our galaxies contained: sun, smithereens.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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