Right Place, Wrong Time

“Mountain Haze” by Bill Davidson

 

this wilderness
teaches tranquility
joy found in freedom
that comes to the lost
without compass
or maps no agenda
no time but the time
to explore to imagine
directions toward
everything possible
everything needed

this wilderness
too late discovered
impassive impatient
it should have told
eager young bones
plangent tales of antiquity
given its wisdom
to years yet unlived
not stand wasting itself
upon calcified dreams
and abandoned ambition

Drainage

Retention Pond photo by Jim Mueller

 

 

turtles drag breastplates

from a wavering mirror

clouded with skyscape

runoff from roadways that led

me away from yesterday

 

Vantage

“Rocking Chair Porch” by Jennifer Branch

 

blue white-tufted skies
bird-speckled sun-flecked woodlands
rocking chair pleasures

Ponytail

 

button down collars

under three piece suits

and military hair

 

made deals big and small

all over the world

styled in boardroom attire

till I folded my desk

shredded airline club cards

and retired to sweet air

of flannel shirt country

 

haven’t been to a barber

since bagging my suits

over mothballs in cedar

 

despite the bald pate

what fringes my ears

and unshaven nape

now falls like a flag

fully twenty-eight inches

waving its gray

and matching my beard

 

I blend in just fine

here among unshorn aging

sturdy good mountainfolk

 

save for amusing

mistaken identity

that sometimes has

taken me for

some grizzly old liberal

lost-in-time hippie

if they only knew

 

but I just play along

all the better to spy

in the enemy camp

Stonewood

Stonewood
My Home in Rural New Hampshire
Since 2005

 

secluded amid old growth forest
tucked in among histories gallant
with nobly achieved revolution
long since come to peace and
prosperity settled by ruminant
creatures who carry no war in the
velvet reserve of their memories

here has retirement planted its
final phase roots meant to grow
sweet serenity quiet tranquility
giving the gift of escape from a
life long with labor in jungles of
concrete and commerce a time
and a place to regenerate joy

the natural progression of time
is to lay expectations asunder
ten years in exquisite communion
with nature have proved more and
less than foreseen such is life
ever strewn with surprise each new
day cast with traits of adventure

 

 

From my book Onionskin

Hooky

“Freedom”
Painting by Esam Pashwa
From artdiamondblog.com

retirement feels
good as adolesced guilt
permanent hooky

Barrow

“The Old Wheelbarrow”
Painting by Michael Pickett
From fineartamerica.com

countless seasons of labor

add up to auxiliary life

existential employment

at heave and at carry

of natural materials

congruous substances

man and his earthly environs

in congress enhancing

both each and the other

experience bettered by sweat

of keen toil and soil become

the more beautiful fruited

and flowering into the future

beyond the earned rustic

repose of the elegant barrow

retired in long slow organic

delay of decay into elements

all at once poignant and stately

Utterances

“Out of the Woods at Walden Pond”
Painting by Rita Brown
From pixels.com

was a time
when I thrived
among men
and machines
of free enterprise
traveling continents
backing development
building new industries
giving to laboring poor
paths to middle class stature

I did my job well
with great pride of success
until time and debility
turned me for home
and the tools of my trade
knack for numbers
a nose for the telltale of risk
became specimens
artifact memories
sconced in museums of mind

now I write in seclusion
removed from the fight
for the wheel and the deal
I create with new tradecraft
arrangements of words
molding metaphors
fabricate stanzas erect
upon pages of commerce
exchanging new coin of this
notional literate realm

“My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it”
– Henry David Thoreau

GQ

Photo from
dressedlikea.com

I used to carefully tend to the
look of success tailor-made
groomed and stylishly dressed
trompe l’oeil baron of business
urbane with the glib edge and
crease of sophisticate finish
while all the while knowing
my torn tee-shirt scruffy self
someday would step out
to stand in the comfortable
soft wrinkled truth of a
countrified soul far removed
from the trains planes and
boardroom existence that
fooled men and women on
four separate continents
into my custom sewn pockets

Flashback

Princeton, NJ Train Station
Photo from flickr.com

monster of Mondays
reeking of Amtrak airbrakes
rapid eye movement

 

(That’s my old train stop pictured above. But it’s been ten years since I retired. Dreams can reach a long way.)