Peggy Day

Peggy will be 50 years into her forties on Monday. This will make her ninety by the fiction of the calendar but I've seen nonagenarians and she's no nona.

At one time she had twelve years on me but since we've been together she has taken off a year each birthday and now I'm older. The disparity in our ages has become my challenge to keep up with her imaginative energy.

Every day I bear witness to her creative burst. She is effervescent, writing a poem a day for the past 8 months. There’s nothing to it when you are plugged into the muse, overhearing the music of the realm and noticing the extraordinary ordinary that passes by us mere mortals.

Even as stenosis narrows her spine she shows no shortness of breadth. Her enthusiasm for life takes her to the far reaches beyond all margins. Her collages are visual poems rubbing disparate images together to create sparks.

Her words on paper probe and extend the limits of language. Often I will run into the market to pick up a few items and when I return she has written a poem based on a casual observation in the parking lot, juxtaposed with some remark from the radio drizzled with a dream figure and an old song lyric thrown in. She breathes a rarefied air.

Even more than the making of a poem is the living as a poet. Peggy listens with antenna ears, sees with connectivity and thinks metaphorically, at the ready to transform this into that. No stump goes un-noted, no night sky; even our short walks find her salvaging a mottled leaf or pod.

She can't be in a waiting room for a minute if she doesn't strike up a conversation with another woman, nurse or technician. She'll make a new sister or she'll be Mom to a young person she didn't know ten minutes before.

Four score and ten is a lot of bubble baths, a lot of quiet moments between the exuberance which people don't see much when she might be meditating or journal- writing or filling her common place book, a chronicle of assorted articles, art pieces cut from magazines, ticket stubs, greeting cards etc... I even made the cut with some of my poems.

Three years ago I wrote:

Four score and seven years ago
your mother brought forth
in the continent of her arms
a new notion
conceived in libidity
and dedicated to prepositions
and exclamation points
of which there is no created sequel.


I stand amazed with it all .......her elongation of youth, an ageless presence, a life fully lived, irrepressible in its wonderment. My only wish is for many more May 2nds in our astonishing life together.