Poetry of Space, Place + Time Poems

Note: This poem was written in response to a New Yorker article, “What We’re Watching Under Quarantine”. It makes reference to several of the science fiction/fantasy shows we’ve been streaming over the last months.

Life is stranger than science fiction
when “Devs” seems oddly anodyne and quaint –
when I respond to the queasy colors
of “Dispatches from Elsewhere”
with a longing I usually reserve for
a wish to return to the expansive fields
of my most moving meditations
when I am filled with the substance
of a true elsewhere –
when “Omniscient” rolls its gritty Brazil
and surveillance of indignance into the asphalt
of parking lots where a betrayal of shocking proportions
is meant to confound us,
but it is as nothing when the surveillance is real
and being used to do a better job in Asia
at corralling a killer than the
so-called great-again nation –
when “Ragnarok” is so delicious
in its icy Nordic-ness
because we can imagine that a virus
could not survive the glacial conditions.
Life is stranger than science fiction
when downtown Las Vegas
seen from a drone’s eye
looks like a movie set,
not because of the schlocky neon glare
of misplaced Eiffel Towers,
but because it is completely empty,
waiting for tumbleweeds to tumble through
a minute before high noon –
when one beer company advertises that it is pulling
all sports investment to support the work of
The Red Cross caring for people in stadiums,
and they seem like the good guys
to an avowed non-drinker  –
and when another obliviously runs ad after ad
during every break showing pretty people
drinking like gutted fish,
gills pumping to suck in the missing air
squandered by non-existent respirators.
Life is stranger than science fiction
when a national president calls a state governor
“that woman” because she dares to demand more,
and refuses to let the Vice President speak
to those deemed enemy for disagreeing.
Life is stranger than science fiction when,
walking down the driveway to my mailbox
to place a letter to the father I cannot see,
locked down in his nursing home,
I stop for a moment in the sun
and discover a cedar waxwing at my shoulder,
allowing me the gift of his brilliant yellow tail
and the serrated snap of super-saturated
scarlet wingtips
and the delicate brush of ivory eyeliner –
colors more cardinal than Dispatches from Elsewhere,
and I realize there is nowhere I would rather be.

Note: This poem was written in response to a Shelburne News (Vermont) article, “Split-Second Decision Saves Life”. The “K-9 Billy” of the poem is a rescue dog who saved the life described in the article.

It’s starting to feel like grief.
I have a frame to the future
and I know where this will all go
             eventually
                                                                good places
But there may be so much more pain
along the way
The two pushy angry older white men
driving unVermont
their rage
            and frustration
                                     and fear
                                                  and fury at lack of control
            and pentup energy
                                                             usually used to eat competitors alive
and will their wives into compliant submission
blast the doors off my car as they pass
           over a double-yellow line
                       in a school zone
that now means nothing for a time

while “elderly white male”
             wanders in the woods
                          of his wintery mind
and the landscape outside a front door
he does not recognize

I have a frame to the future
and I know where this will all go
             eventually
                                                              good places
But you know when you lose someone you love?
Those unexpected moments
            that catch you
                        unawares
creep up behind you
             and hitch the grief up out of your bruised
                          heart
and into your mouth?
And then the grief is loosed
I looked into the eyes of K-9 Billy
and hitched in sorrow
for what has to be lost
on the way
             to reclaiming
what we have overlooked.
“The male had left his residence
without shoes or a jacket
with the air temperature
at 22 degrees”
It was devastating.
In this moment of global solitary confinement,
it was devastating
to be – in my imaging –
that anonymized elderly male
wandering lost in the woods
and in his mind
The loneliness
the absolute emptiness
of knowing he ended up
down an embankment
             alone
lying on the ground
next to a stream,
in trees,
where he tangled up in the underbrush.
But K-9 Billy saved him.
And in K-9 Billy’s eyes I see all the humanity
that humanity has lacked in calling down
this corona scourge
so that maybe
perhaps
one day
it can
see
with the eyes of K-9 Billy.

Note: This poem was written in early February 2020 and accepted for PoemCity Montpelier 2020. It had ended up being presciently reflective of the experiences with the relativity of time induced by the “corona pause”.

The hunched granite imagines that time flies for the evergreen.
The lush shadowed pine imagines that time soars for the rolling pebble.
The shock of birch imagines that time frees its leaf, and wonders the sights it sees.
The leaf imagines that time stands still for its white sheltering stand, and wishes to be home.
The field sedge imagines that time is an eternal wheel,
and the visiting dragonflies figments of the imagination winking in and out of existence.
The dragonfly longs to catch up with the hummingbird, wishing time would stretch its sap
and freeze the hummingbird in place.
The bark knows time only as it is carried away by the beetle.
The beetle awaits decay, the time when it can do its work.
The child imagines the rain will never stop striping window with prison bars, 
time-robber of spring when life comes out to play and time disappears in the face of the Sun
who wonders if she will ever catch the tail of the Cosmos.

Note: This poem was written in response to a Seven Days Vermont article, Sunset Drive-In to Re-Open Friday and a New York Times opinion piece, Covid-19 Reality Has A Liberal Bias.

Opening with abandon
Open to buy, buy, buy
Pushing pubs and pork and pills
Which is what got us here in the first place
But P.S., I am not a consumer
I am not nostalgic for the 1950s
and the veiled and unveiled glee
at a killer roaming the land,
doing the wetwork that certain 
starboard-tacking tribes of this age’s Reds
enviously wish they could do openly –
and increasingly are –
picking off those deemed worthless:
non-consuming
non-producers
brown folk
babies
elders –
cheering on the viral brother in arms
for its sniper efficiency
and fanning orgiastic dreams
of vanilla sundaes
and green lawns
and root beer floats
that are now decreed by law to be blond
as all shades of brown have been banned –
but otherwise you are not to tell the vanillas
what to do
or what they cannot buy
I am not nostalgic for
carhops and mad men and poodle skirts
and credit card slavery
I am not jonesing
to oil an economy 
that eats its own
to die for the Dow,
so much sausage for the grinder

Note: A close friend observed while riding on a bike path along Lake Champlain during the pandemic that families walking the path were “weandering” (pronounced like “meandering”). Such a cool concept and brilliant new word, so it of course immediately sparked a poem. Thanks, KS!

Some would call it aimless,
but let’s call it the new meditation.
Some would call it listless,
but let’s call it being.
Some would call it dazed,
but let’s call it relaxed into release.
Some would call it unaware,
but let’s call it animistic ecstasy.
Some would call it pointless,
but let’s call it beauty.
Some would call it weak,
but let’s call it love
that cannot be breached.
A surprise found in the dark.
The hyperdrive turned off.
The separation of distraction
powered down.
The dominating of space
replaced by drifting as dandelions
with no particular place to be.
A papa in the path – no cellphone
A pea from the pod – no TikTok
of time running down
A little greyhaired girl of air – no wrinkles
flinging arms wide
on a blue bike
while daughter watches
mama’s years fly away
in silvered threads.
We are weandering,
bonded into new orbits
that may we hope
shall not pass.