Close Enough - June 6 2025

 

Close Enough

June 6 2025

The margin of error was small,

victory

even smaller.

And because paths diverge,

the further you are

the more angles matter.

It’s geometry, after all

and there are rules.

But on a curved surface

straight lines aren’t.

And who decreed

that only rulers rule,

turns are not allowed,

and the aim was true

release exact?

Or took into account

a random particle

wandering by chance,

or act of will

confounding all the protocols?

Not to mention Zeno’s Paradox.

Which suggests that ends are impossible

aim of no consequence

and margins loom large.

Anyway, you’ll intersect eventually.

If planets sometimes collide

and atoms can be split

why not?

Against all odds

and in the fullness of time

your paths will surely converge

or come close enough to count.

The Things I've Lost - June 5 2025

 

The Things I’ve Lost

June 5 2025

The things I've lost.

Car keys, of course.

An odd sock

lost in the dryer.

My train of thought.

That forgotten name

or fugitive word

that would not come to me;

lost

until the moment had passed.

The frayed tapestry of dreams

glimpsed as it recedes,

trailing away

in that limbic state

just before awakening.

Which would still make no sense

if its unravelling threads

could somehow be restored.

Lost plans

best laid or not.

Lost chances,

fingers crossed

it won't be my last.

And, of course

the money squandered and gambles I’ve lost

dice tossed

eyes closed;

all in

after showing my hand,

or crapping out entirely.

Or worse,

the crucial shot

never taken at all.

The temper

I’ve too easily lost.

Which, I regret, is more crudely smelted ore

than tempered steel;

as brittle

as cheap pig iron,

impure

as metal from scrap.

Luckily, lost tempers cool fast;

like a struck match

that burns your hand

but quickly burns out.

The times I’ve lost my way,

wandering

with no destination

or sense of place.

A fugue state

of trying to find

where and what

and who I was.

Lost hopes;

which, like flightless birds

are easy prey.

And the lost loves,

which may or may not have been worth

the wisdom gained.

Youth,

which happens so slowly

you hardly notice

until it’s nearly gone.

And old age,

when it’s loss after loss

like it or not.

But all is not.

The car keys

now hanging in their spot.

The mismatched socks

no one’s bothered by.

And the lost temper

I’ve found again;

the embers may still glow,

but I’ve learned to stop

be more generous

count to 10.

Dreams and hopes,

to love again?

I haven’t stopped looking,

retracing my steps

and remembering when;

finding the courage,

keeping up spirits,

losing my fears.

Which are the hardest to let go of.

And though you might think they’ve been lost

still lurk

beneath your outward calm

ready to be triggered.

Like land mines

from the last war

you’re sure were long defused

dismantled,

disarmed;

buried

beneath the surface

you’re just about to cross.

Openings - June 1 2025

 

Openings

June 1 2025

There are always openings.

Mice appear

as if life could arise

from inanimate matter.

There was the bat,

swooping and darting

this way and that

with acrobatic precision,

while I swatted at it comically

with an old whisk broom.

Creepy-crawlies, of course

which are everywhere;

as present

as the air we breathe,

so ubiquitous

we’ve long stopped noticing.

Cold drafts

leak through the window frames,

and postal mail

pushes through the narrow slot

expressly made for it,

accepting, unquestioning

whatever fits.

But even in a house

as sealed as a secret lab

where lethal microbes are grown

the world intrudes.

Strange ideas

contaminate the break room.

The news seeps in

and it’s mostly bad.

People smuggle in their crises

and personal struggles,

money trouble

love lives

politics.

There is no such thing

as hermetically sealed.

My windows are open, door unlocked.

Fresh air breezes in

with the smell of spring,

evergreen and loamy

and faintly floral

from the first early blooms.

While in summer

I hear birdsong and barking dogs,

the wind

softly stirring the leaves.

Although when it’s hard

the big flag snaps crisply

and I can hear it whistling in

through badly fitting windows

and under the door.

The mice have departed from their winter home,

leaving droppings

like a fond farewell,

dried-up little turds

scattered generously

as if to keep me guessing

where next.

Too bad mail rarely arrives;

I miss the short sharp sound

of the slot clanging shut.

While the bats are happy outside

where they belong,

eating on the wing

and sleeping upside-down.

Needless to say, the creepy-crawlies persist;

always here

no matter what.

The spider in the basement sink

continues to abide

in that inhospitable spot,

apparently immortal

and living on air.

He keeps me company,

sitting calmly

where he sat the day before,

occasionally raising a leg

or shifting half an inch.

Months ago, surprisingly

I saw some baby spiders,

tiny carbon copies

of their jet black father,

apparently having materialized

like cold morning dew

on a lush green lawn.

My arachnid Lothario,

even though I never saw a mate

and he hardly seemed the type.

The secret life of spiders

I will never know.

And the holes

they scurry in and out of

too small to keep closed.

Stopping to Ask - May 31 2025

 

Stopping to Ask

May 31 2025



You don’t know when you’re happy.

It’s only looking back

you understand

perhaps even envy.

Because in the moment,

in the flow,

in the ungraspable now

you lose yourself;

immersed, and unselfaware.

If life is a river

  — running from its source

in a bubbly spring,

and ending in a slow silty floodplain —

it’s the whitewater stretches you live for,

swept

down a rocky narrows

or steep descent;

when, in the mad rush downstream

your next breath

is all you can think of.

You don’t know

how good you have it,

my father would chide when we complained.

Was I happy then?

Or is it memory

playing its usual tricks

of conveniently forgetting?

The bad, the good

   . . . it all depends.

Of course, definition is key.

Is happiness joy

well-being

contentment?

Fulfilment

glee

possession?

Or simply living with integrity;

being true to yourself

even when no one’s looking?

Are hedonists happy

is that the key?

Do ascetics have the secret to the good life?

Or is moderation the answer,

the average man

taking care

of his average family?

Should we even be seeking

or does that push it away?

Am I happy now?

Or is the question self-defeating?

Is the act of asking

like fighting the current instead of riding it,

like clinging to a rock

while the thoughts flood frantically in?

Which they always do

when I stop to ask.

So will I drown in introspection

or am I better off surrendering;

becoming water-in-water

and losing myself?

They say that bad things have salience. After all, selective memory for the bad serves survival: we should have a negativity bias. You don’t last long or pass on your genes if you forget the place where the leopard jumped out. So it makes sense that when I examine my past, I’m hard on myself and tend to focus on regret. Yet it seems most people don’t. They look back through the golden haze of nostalgia and the bad things recede, fade, get dismissed; while the good things emerge clearly: brightly buffed, their rough edges smoothed off.

There is a perennial debate about the definition of happiness, about what makes “the good life”. Is it pleasures of the body, the moments of contentment? Is it sensation, meaning, love? A life of creativity? Leaving a legacy? Living with purpose? Achieving some goal? The US Constitution extols “the search for happiness”. But the key word is search: which I take to mean that happiness is not the destination, it’s the journey. So it’s not something you aim for; it comes of itself when you find the life that works for you. And although the word “happiness” sounds shallow, ephemeral, and almost brittle, the founders — who were well-schooled in the classics — understood it in the Aristotelian sense: a complete life of virtue and balance, actualized through reason and ethical behaviour. Happiness is not just the momentary thrill of a roller coaster ride, or the feeling of satisfaction after a good meal with friends.

We’re told to be self aware. Good advice. But too much introspection — which I’m certainly guilty of — isn’t that; and instead of adding to happiness, can detract from it.

But while all these thoughts appear in the poem, it’s mostly a celebration of the so-called “flow state”. I think this is where we find ourselves truly happy, or at least most happy. It’s what all our happy moments have in common. Fortunately for me, my easiest way into it is writing. Every poem arises from a flow state. So instead of a rushing river (an apt call-back to my younger days as an avid whitewater kayaker!), I lose myself in words.

Conflagration - May 30 2025

 

Conflagration

May 30 2025



Dense smoke this morning.

Upwind, wildfires rage

and I can taste the acrid smoke

in the thick grey air.

The smell of burnt wood

has me on edge,

my pulse quickening

all my senses alert.

A primeval feeling of threat

I can't suppress

wells up in me,

time slows

my focus narrows.

I am a small woodland creature

smelling danger

that can’t outrun the blaze.

In a world on fire

when it’s hard to breathe

and there’s nowhere left to flee

it’s how slow suffocation must feel,

every breath

sucking deeper

as air thins and panic grows.

Fleeting thoughts

and futile regrets

race through my head,

of lessons that should have been learned

and human arrogance,

of forces so vast

we can't understand

let alone effect.

But thinking gets me nowhere,

feeling hurts,

and my eyes burn

in the poisoned air,

so I return to the house

pull down the shades

and go back to bed;

still coughing

as I toss and turn

and pull the covers up over my head.

Taking refuge in darkness

and the reassuring weight.

Our forbears were fatalists

who calmly accepted

their own inconsequence.

While our contemporaries

put their faith in God

and pray for rain.

Or whatever god, by whatever name

the devout invoke,

and if not for rain

then a change of wind

or unseasonal cold.

So I, a non-believer, try to surrender as well,

as unnatural as it feels

and as unpracticed as I am

at letting go.

Fires too big

for us to stop,

too numerous

to even keep watch of.

And too little rain

that’s too short and too late

to save us from ourselves.

Salgado - May 29 2025

 

Salgado

May 29 2025



He worked in black and white.

In contrast

subtle greys

shades of light and dark.

Because it’s never either/or.

The world is not categorical

or compartmentalized,

even though it’s tempting

to see it that way.

He understood how colour distracts

seduces

overwhelms.

All those frequencies of light

making too much noise,

cancelling out

and reinforcing.

A cerulean blue,

so beautiful

in and of itself.

Life

as we already know it

so fail to see.

While he has gravitas.

His photographs cut to the core

cull and distil;

a captured moment

rendered monumental,

and for however long

posterity lasts.

So his work

is not black and white

but in between.

Because purity

is impossible,

and those who claim or seek it

cause endless suffering.

Black, the absence of light

while white is its entirety.

But as he well knew

there is no black

cold as the end of time,

no white

like the moment of creation.

When, out of nothingness

a blinding light burst forth

containing the universe,

expanding out

in all directions

as fast as light can go.

The entire spectrum

compressed into a single beam

as white as white can be.

Yet as far from pure

as any mongrel shade.

The great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado recently died. One of his obituaries contained the phrase “he worked in black and white”, and it immediately jumped out at me. The simplicity of the statement, yes. The word “to work”, yes: a humble and unassuming choice for an artist. But mostly, it was the double meaning: how black and white thinking is categorical and simplistic, while the subtleties of black and white photography somehow create powerful images that elicit great depths of thought and feeling. Not in the least simplistic. So really, he took black and white pictures, but didn’t “work in” black and white at all!

Purity is the bugaboo of ideologues. The Nazis and the “woke” left of today have absolutely nothing in common except this: either the purity test of race, or the purity test of accepted leftist ideology. Both exemplify the falseness, futility, and danger of black and white thinking; of a right or left, good or bad, in or out worldview.

Sweet Corn - May 25 2025

 

Sweet Corn

May 25 2025



How soon

sweet corn’s sweetness is lost;

the sugar turning to starch,

and the bright yellow niblets

losing the crispness

that gives them bite.

Not exactly cattle corn

but just as disappointing.

Precious cobs

in their short summer season,

whisked from garden to kitchen

in less than a minute,

then swiftly husked

plunged into water

brought to a boil.

Fresh corn,

buttered and salted

and nothing more.

A simple pleasure

but exacting nevertheless.

Which,

like scarcity

secret recipes

and the company one keeps,

means as much as the taste.

Because when something comes too easily

what's to savour

why wait?

And what about memory?

Because nostalgia colours everything,

sepia-toned, as it so often is.

Did the sweet corn I ate as a child

really taste as good?

Have I somehow forgotten the mealy cobs

past their prime,

the toothy ones

picked unripe?

Or is fond remembrance

also prophetic,

so even middling corn tastes better

in the afterglow.

Not to mention

how sweet anticipation

whets the appetite.

So I savour this simple feast;

warm butter

dripping down my chin,

yellow specks

dotting my lips,

a greedy hand

grabbing the next

from the freshly steaming pile.

Then count the naked cobs,

stacked like trophies

on my overflowing plate.

As my father once did;

a temperate man

delighting in gluttony

his better self would sniff at,

an orderly man

ignoring the mess

he'd have normally condemned.

How fleeting

are the good things in life,

as fleeting

as life itself.

And how precious

the simple pleasures

in the brief window of time we’re allowed.

Sun Shower - May 24 2025

 

Sun Shower

May 24 2025

Sun showers

remind me of lightning in a snowstorm,

oxymorons

contradicting themselves.

And both are like a man at war with himself,

unsure

who he is.

which way to go.

But still, when a warm sun breaks through

cold drizzle

on a dreary day

I'm filled with hope

that all ends well;

that misery doesn’t last,

that this too shall pass

if only one waits.

And lightning

when it’s clearly out of place

proclaims that anything is possible.

That nature has a logic

we can only watch, not control.

And that beauty can also be dangerous,

a femme fatale

if you leave yourself exposed.

Which brings me back to the man

who’s eager to be seduced

but still can’t choose;

blond or brunette,

spring or fall,

right or left?

As if every fork in the road

is clearly marked.

As if in a messy world

seasons are pure

boundaries rigid

and men singular.

An ambivalent man

and ambiguous weather

have me whipsawed

on edge.

Waiting for the sky to clear,

knowing

that it’s just a matter of time

until the rain returns.

Sun showers out here today. So what else to write about? Except I won't allow myself to write anymore “weather poems” unless I can make more of them than another same-old descriptive yawner. So this is how it turned out.