Don’t bother

They’re here

Move over, Stephen Sondheim.

Have I got a song for you.

Write an elegy for the end of summer, the last picture show of orange sun and cappuccino flesh and verdant leaves of grass.

Autumn elbows in, impatient for its stage cue.

Here it comes. Enter, laughing.

Send in the clowns.

I thrive on the page and stage, your presence and pleasure from things I share give me air and life. Applause is an upper.

“I can see it from my house.”

And so begin the Days of Awe.

What a collision of worlds today. The end of summer, perfectly fused with the onset of a new year for people I break challah days with when the time is right.

Sweetness, ushered in. Flood damages, dumped to dump.

Aw.

The transformation is complete.

I am officially my mother and father. Working on a tan as if I never had skin cancer.

I’m outside by a pool, eating fruit, blasting Elvis Presley, and forgetting I have a woe in the world.

I walk into a pool, hands on hips, not interested in getting my hair wet. I lean against the edge and work on crossword puzzles.

What’s next on the playlist? Jerry Vale? Vic Damone? Frank Sinatra? Jackie Mason on Broadway? (That enduring image of my dad at the outdoor pool at the Catskills hotels, putting cassettes into a portable radio player and not sure if the volume was on is a mental painting I wish I could paint.)

It’s Labor Day in reverse. Giving birth to the soul and spirits of those that brought me to this moment.

It is mid-afternoon on Long Island. Not exactly Green Acres territory. We have traffic. Diners. People. Lots of people.

Why do we have roosters?

What is the point? A neighbor nearby hasn’t figured out roosters are noisy and needless.

There she crows again!

When you ask for a “stack of napkins,” what do you expect?
Bring me two (as they often do) and I roll my eyes.
Bring me five and I wonder if we can actually be friends.
Bring me a stack that will last more than a minute.
How do people make it through a meal with five and under napkins?
You know I am going to ask for more within seconds.
Why drag out the dance?

Because I could not stop for sleep, come on, world, it’s almost 6 AM
Everyone else is doing it
Give me a fair shake and let me go down the back alley into a dreamscape

But there’s a long line between night and day and day and night
It is written in the stars, in the palms, in the cards
Don’t move. No one will get hurt. Put the gun of anxiety down.

Online, still. 6:30 AM. It’s safe to go through drawers left open,
letting me live in your shoes and dinners and photos
until I am done meandering, fearless, an easy steal

Borrowing cookies you have on display on the table, on the wall, on the shelf,
wondering if your smiles are more show and tell than you intended,
draining the pool and seeing the crumbling, cracked floor for the first time

and I am still awake but smirking, like the burglar.
There is blue light beyond the windows
And hours to go before I sleep.

I’d say I’ve gone fishing but I don’t fish. I don’t even like to eat fish.
My To Do list is as long as a week at the graveyard. Quiet, I suppose. Good thing no one there wants to talk or ask what I am doing with my life. I’m not in the mood to think about anything.

Happiness is two new hairbrushes arriving in the mail to replace a favorite old-timer that finally cracked in five uneasy pieces. Have you ever tried to glue a hairbrush together out of desperation? Don’t.

I ordered two new brushes online.
That felt smart.
An heir and a spare for my hair.

There isn’t a pillow that survives a month under my head.
Punching. Fluffing. Turning over and over. There are hard needles sticking out.
I am a ball of of Covid.

My feet shift all night long. I don’t know where to put them.
Left side? Right? Criss-crossed? Open, wide, straight, dangling over the edge?
I have more awkward positions than a ballet student at the barre.

Sometimes there is music. Sometimes I choose talk. Other sounds comfort me.
I am not deaf.
A room filled with silence is not an option.

I want to know the secrets of sleep.

——————————————————

This was your last sunset

before your last ride.

We were the ones howling,

beside you, bedside, begging for you to come back

While your skin stiffened, like hard, white sand,

and spun into the ocean, returning you to where you began.

I hope those out there celebrating Easter are bathed in light and love. However you honor your days, my greatest joy will be when we can someday be together again.

We must all surely sense there is hope around the corner. This is a time of reflection and renewal. Let the healing begin. One more shot left for me. I look forward to complaining for a few days after that. Whine for Table Two!

On a lighter note, I need a lot of personal repair work done in the merry old land of Oz before I am fit for public re-entry. I need a protective mask that covers head to toe before I feel ready to join the world again. “If I only had the noive…” Buzz buzz here. Buzz buzz there. And a couple of lah-de-dahs.

A big basket of courage cheerfully accepted. Is there a wizard in the house? Bell out of order. Please knock! Aaah-wooooof!

If you were on the internet in April 2019, you may recognize computer scientist Katie Bouman, who went viral after her team captured the world’s first image…
— Read on www.lx.com/social-justice/women-are-writing-themselves-back-into-history-on-wikipedia/34029/

It’s about time.

I’m not complaining. I’m halfway there to Fully Vaccinated for Covid-19. My body is in full-blown, mentally and physically exhausted mode. Not sure why these side effects are hitting me this hard but sharing here just in case this is something you’re feeling or will feel. You are not alone.

Another curious benefit of the shot? I’m on a poetry-buying spree. Time of impulse purchases? Middle of the night. If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right. (Fuzzy Wrath!) Latest buys: Robert Browning, Jean Valentine, Elizabeth Bishop. One love. One Art.

When I asked Bruce Springsteen what to do with his guitar, he said: “Play it!” Ask Elizabeth Bishop what to do with your poetry? “Write it!”

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

We are not women writers.
We don’t call men “male writers.”
We are all writers.
Come out of the closet. History needs us.
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-silent-toilers-are-no-longer-silent