Cal’s class ring, barely snug
despite the red yarn
wrapped around its band,
slips off her finger, clatters inside
the cast-iron basin.

She places it on the sideboard
holds on to its uneasy memory,
one she wraps around herself
in scathing moments
of doubt and lonely regret.

Details of their last conversation,
tinged with subterfuges
she did not know she was capable of,
bit down — hard — on the heels
of all that messy death and fog at Khe Sanh.

The choice had been hers alone to make.

Redemption, now, never once a possibility.

Sinister longings perish
in a hail of loneliness,
solitary specters of humanity
twisted, tainted, tormented and tattered.

Writhing in misty coils
vanquished blue-haired nobles
smoke their pipes
and drink their tea,
moral beneficence lost amid
the dithering squalor
of their own wanton needs.

Frosted-glass pillars
glow amber and vermillion,
intentions forever severed
by hazy razor-grim phantoms.

Cinder blocks elevate in an obsolete breeze
powder puffs of pink videotape the masses.

Lemon-lime apples tart & sweet,
my fever rages on, hot with need.

Tides permeate the lower grasslands,
neon spectacles of fright

and immense longing,
reeled in one antelope at a time.

Who is
What is
Where is
God?

Why and When?

Not to mention How…

hearts quaver
in somber wake
of laggard lapses,
a crystal clarity

 

all faith denied

 

minds slow and sedate
in earnest repose
free of unseemly query

 

bodies recoil,
horror vivid
and unyielding,
incautious and unwise

 

darkness

sparing none

Grit sustains me.
I hold on both soft and tight,
a self-embrace unlike no other.
Conspirators
seek to overlay
to coexist
amid my red-blue veins,
these emanating cords of my within.

My words belong to me.

Mine to invert as I please.
Mine to wrestle, to subjugate
to contemplate, to savor.
Mine to coalesce toward
my own redress.
Others’ steely wits resolve to upend
yet I remain true.

That lovely muscle
that beats for —and of — me,
moving toward
benign forbearing,
loyalty to self: rewarded.
These peaceful pebbles glisten just for me.

I care not if for no other.

Sitting in a cushion-comfy Adirondack
in the shade of two white oak trees and a beloved maple,
I peer into the thick green canopy overhead,
the gentle sway of leaves in the late-day breeze
mesmerizing in its own right.

Bisecting a slender stem of new growth,
a small, textbook-perfect acorn catches my eye.
I love the solitary position of this tiny specimen
tucked among the umbrella of spirally orchestrated leaves.

Are there more, I wonder?

I sit quietly, focusing on each quadrant of the crown.
Looking past the gestalt of this god of thunder,
I drill down to each branch, each twig, each leaf.

I am patient.

Then, I find it. Another acorn,
a branch or two higher,
just to the right of the first one.
Two of them. Might I detect a third?
I do. Then a fourth, and a fifth.
Clusters of acorns, too, become apparent.

My discerning eye begins to see.
The longer I sit here,
persistent and with intent,
the more I start to notice.

Birds also enter the range of this fresh, new vision.
They stop at the feeder, oblivious to my presence,
a nod to how motionless I’ve become in my revelry.
Sparrows striped in buff, black, brown.
Purple finches, red-winged blackbirds, a spectacular male cardinal.
At the base of the maple, a mourning dove returns my inquisitive stare.
I burrow deeper. I enjoy their song.