I Have Begun Reading the Obituaries

Yesterday I read of Ellen Ferguson,
survived by only grandchildren. Lucky Ellen,
plenty of life, not many left to grieve.

Just enough busy husbands and wives
to box up her letters,
the few pieces of porcelain she saved.

Chips and beer on her scarred dining table as they sorted
Some laughter remembering birthday parties
when she danced a jig from the highlands of her childhood,

A sorrowed pause
over a crayon scribbled Valentine to ‘Granny’
from a five year old who drowned the following summer in the lake.

A good Sunday afternoon, glad to be together.
They promise to see each other more often.

This is what I wish for my ending. Just a few whom I’ve loved
to clean out my desk, remember Easters in the garden,
find the pictures of me in my soccer uniform.

Someone to look through the binders
for my poems about persimmons.

The Red Farmhouse in Winter

What was it that was the chill
of something warm and cold,
a thrill of neurons
newly netted,
a foggy red house
on grey-blue tinged
foggy white snow,
an air of winter somewhere
as though through a window.
Where did he stand
sketch book in hand
the old man
in wool knitted cap and shawl
to capture the scene?
Surely there is more
than the process with paint on canvas.
Surely there is more
than objects on a landscape.
Surely there is metaphor,
So that Monet’s experience of the light
becomes our own.

Marian Slattery is a San Francisco Bay Area poet.

Because I Doubt

Because I doubt eternity
I prefer the gold of poppies
the fragility of the unique

The scarred and healed
with their calcified toughness
and no way around the pain

Though it’s not been long
I don’t remember
whether I loved you

I do but not in memory
you were someone else
and I was something else

We were not clever enough
to twist our different types
of loneliness into a single break

Or mend the past that made us
neither calm nor accepting
but pushed us along blind

Hoping in the light we saw
when it was the comfort
or living earth that called

Our names to rest our heads
against the shoulder of soil
and the only God of darkness

————————————

“Because I Doubt” is from the book, Being Human: Poems of Resistance & Renewal, by Guarionex Delgado (Rim of Fire, Nevada City, CA, 2001).

Guarionex Delgado

Guarionex Delgado is a Nevada City poet, activist and co-founder of Earth Justice Ministries.

He explains it this way:

“The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” is the fifth video in the Symphony of Science series. This new video differs slightly from previous ones, in that it features many more scientific thinkers than usual. It includes (in order) Michael Shermer, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Carolyn Porco, and PZ Meyers, all contributing their personal views on what science means to them and how important it is in our daily lives.

Have you ever seen Richard Feynman drumming? Or giggling? Or listened to Carl Sagan singing whale songs? That’s the state-of-playful-mind it helps to attain in order to get the most from these videos. Don’t judge them too quickly. So what if they’re sentimental? Can you imagine sentimental and profound?

It may turn out that to see clearly, we have to see through tears.

           Stroke

I walk away from dad's bed.

Mr. Dugan, his roommate, gestures to me:

                 "Say, give me a hand here.

                  Help me get my truck started."

             Embarrassed, I say,

                 "I'll get the nurse."

             Mr. Dugan asks Jane to help. She says,

                 "Mr. Dugan,

                  you're in a hospital bed."

             Later, at work, I tell Brian. He says:

                  "You shoulda helped him

                   get his goddamned truck started!"

             Brian's right.

             Stuck in a snowbank

             outside South Bend

             with a dead truck engine

             is a good place to be

Don Pelton, 10/11/91