A Century of Living Fully

One hundred years of multitudes contained within,

of beatitude, plentitude, and gratitude

which is to say grace, overflow and thanks.

Of living in the Now, with time arrested

when we embrace over nothing whatsoever

except the all of it…

the arrival of the red cardinal from Georgetown

with no sense of direction, the oriole down from

Crestline to yellow our days.

This extravagant life of clarinets and cucumbers,

of Orson Welles’ baritone shadowing you

and Irish tenors with whom you swoon.

 

So, too, I’ve seen you enter your forest.

The window out is also the window in.

One hundred years of solitude, too, are yours

in the silence of the skeletal tree, the hush

of the calendar’s fiction, the interval

between squirrels where you dwell,

a pilgrim on your inscape in the dusk

where tulip bulbs wait before their burst.

 

You live in that unknown space made an aviary

by your loving. Your basket is always full,

an offering of nocturnal scribbles become poems

like a caterpillar taking wing.

 

I gave you the stump of an oak………………..you give me seeds for an orchard, a garden overthrowing its walls.

I gave you a sack of soft clay…………………. you give me a Hopi pot, Navajo rug and Kwakiutl mask.

I gave the Apollonian sun in a cantaloupe …you give me a lunatic moon of cows leaping.

I gave you a compendium of pills……………….you give me a map to my underground spring.

I give you a paragraph of participles…………you give me a poem of exclamation points.

I give you days of devotion………………………you give me moments of dwelling in astonishment.