Two Poems

 Continuum

 

Take it from me, a lapsed pharmacist,

don’t discard that ointment, those capsules.

It is just a made-up number for computer sake.

People, certain people, go on past their shelf-life

with a passport to another realm.

 

She lives in an un-named region

between synapses. She whispers,

sometimes she sings beyond

the genius of the kettle and the wind.

There is a light, unextinguished.

An interstitial spring with a potency gravitational,

overthrowing the fictitious expiration

of calendar or clock.

 

I take it back. Pills do break down,

lose some milligrams and die of subtraction

even as she multiplies.

Vapors escape from apothecary jars

with the elixir of life. It is her breath I inhale,

a small gust that moves my keyboard.

________________________________________

Table for Four at Saladang

 

Is there anything we don't cover

over undocumented Pad Thai

and corn fritters in reconciliation? 

Three genarians, (two septua, barely or not quite 

and I a late octo) chew over the menu

of what went wrong or just went.

While Democrats wrangle and ice floes melt,

we talk of second and third bananas,

the poetics of baseball, old flames extinguished,

and reed instruments from the renaissance,

dropping names like fumbles in the backfield

from Mark Taper to Mark Twain,

to Bosch not Hieronymus, and others anonymous,

Hector and Achilles to the Greater Antilles,

(even though life doesn’t rhyme, sometimes I must)

as a fly finds low-cost housing in my noodles,

with Peggy presiding from the empty chair

blessing our table.