Stone and Scratcher
after a photo by Frank Cimatu
My human knows how to scratch
ecstasy and submission out of me,
rendering my retractable claws
cold as a wet nose.
My side turns into a Zen garden.
I lie, a stone smoothed by hands
of love, slender fingers
tracing landscapes on my fur.
Words Travel
for Karin Schimke
Like in a suitcase, but always more
than the limits of a book’s pages.
Sometimes by a breath exhaled
after a long silence. Sometimes with feathers
tattered, visited by dust more than fingers.
You know this because you have traced
that solace that isn’t loneliness,
but a search. For what, only makes sense
afterwards, never before.
Palms wide open, fingers sensitive
to the half-light, half-darkness
inherent in those thin, fragile surfaces,
you trust the journey into unknown paths.
A way that’s too clear as a printed map
has never appealed to someone like you.
And so you carry more than certainty
even when you close your eyes.
There is always doubt, a kind of falling,
and at the same time a gift, in bearing
hope and wonder like a pair of wings.
Frail Together
“They spend their days together enjoying meals, sitting in the sun and zipping down the halls of the Kingston Residence of Sylvania in their mobility scooters, but they also give each other space.”
“He’s 100, she’s about to turn 103, and they just got married”
by David Williams, CNN
Most of us turn brittle too soon,
like transparent leaves given to wilting,
the texture of tree bark on our skins.
Words go astray, the train of thought
never quite reaching the desired destination.
Some are reduced to surrendering
sighs between the static
of a dusty television, or staring
at sunsets through windows
in the company of familiar strangers.
Still, there are the fortunate few
like this pair of geriatric lovers
who met in a home they didn’t build.
She’s 102, he’s 100. They got married
on a whim, like youngsters.
Happy to be living together,
though on different floors,
their mobility scooters zipping
past forgetting their creaking bones
into a future fuzzy as each morning.
Even as the flesh grows
fragile as butterfly wings,
there are other ways
of taking flight
amid the trembling.
On Photographs
The tragic beauty of photographs: they cage
the beast of a moment, freezing, as water does at zero,
what in the real world might be something like a fanged
fish thrashing about with its prey on a muddy shore.
A family portrait can hide as much as it shows:
the dull blade of a painted grassy background,
the crooked smile forced almost straight,
the fingers keeping desperation to themselves.
For a panoramic scene, stillness is movement lensed
from a distance in smaller and smaller increments
until one wishes for a breath of air, or for something
more violent to rouse the trees,
uproot what cannot be forever in the ground,
silent and unseen, but always pulsing.