A Parent Rationalizing

A Mother's Day Poem

The long weight
And the unwrapping -
no ordinary gift
but rather a world
budding off from a world
a giggle and a song
to join giggles and songs

You will carry her
Helpless
Into the world
Until she carries you
Helpless
out
But none are helpless
With such help near

Who could have imagined
A beauty like you
In the bundle of blankets
A mind like yours
In that deepest sleep
A heart for giving
In the cry of need
a mother as you
in infancy?

Had I known
Such a wonder was coming
I may have paid more attention
Or done what books say
But I can’t imagine you
Turning out
a better way
so as you strive to be perfect
and drop down to correct
don’t forget a small pinch
of benign neglect

Let her grow like a weed
though she is a flower
the best gardener
has only an hour
It will help her to get
To tough and defiant
On her way
To self reliant

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The Rotting

A companion piece to the song Spring Saves Me Every Time

Tonight a warm wind came after the rain
Like the dryer at the end of the car wash
A pelting wind
As if to scorn the rain
As if to whisk it away
And leave it no place
Then it went calm

The rain hit what had been frozen earth
Frozen for months and tonight I couldn’t help but notice
the return of smells
and the fact that winter does not smell
a fact I hadn’t fully noted until tonight

Winter is not many things
but I missed the missing smell part.
I know animals hibernate
Or leave altogether
And the stream freezes almost through
But the fact that winter doesn’t smell
Is actually something I already knew;
As a boy my friend Steve
Took a dead and frozen mouse
out into the spring sun,
and as it thawed it had an awful smell.

But I never gave winter the credit due
of forestalling the true death.
Poets for centuries have
made the same mistake
I guess I remember it
but hadn’t put it together.
Winter doesn’t kill things -
They die in the fall.
Winter lets things hold their form
A few more months
until tonight,
when dead things are freed to rot
and feed the pot,
and finally rest in piece(s)

And now how I came to this discovery:
I took a good whiff and smiled
And it smelled like spring – musty spring
Every year I feel the same thing!
But as I looked there was no sign of new life
It must be my age that made me notice -
“It is rotting you smell”
I discovered
and declared it a new and uncharted season
Just before the bluebells
I called it The Rotting, or just Rotting
And felt like Columbus

Winter, then Rotting, then Spring
Some would detail more-
The winter, the thaw, the rotting, the spring
And I see now that true spring
is like the Aqua Velva I used to splash
over hours of sport
A trick my brother taught me
before I learned to be a gentleman

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