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Richard Greene
Internet Ambivalence When I seek enlightenment I pray to the great god Google and sapience descends on me like Saint Elmo’s fire.
But knowledge was the original sin, so what is it I’m taking in with electronic edification? Am I wasting my life surfing the web in a sort of cybernetic endless summer? Am I becoming obese with information overload? Have I put my head in a cloud? What would Dr. Faust have said?
Beauty and Truth 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Though the beautiful
can be true.
The Ficus The ficus in our dining room, once scraggly and forlorn, is sprouting new leaves I noticed when I opened the shades this morning. We acquired it nineteen years ago with the house we moved into that year. The former owners told us a friend would come to pick it up, but no one did. We nursed it back to health watering it weekly fertilizing it twice a year adding fresh soil moving it to successively larger pots till now it occupies a large glazed one with an old Chinese look like something from a courtyard in the Forbidden City. We took it with us on two moves fussily supervising its loading to the resigned annoyance of the moving men. We did all this not because it was beautiful but because it was homely and left behind.
Weddings I remember the weddings, remember them all.
My cousin Sue and her high school sweetheart on leave from the Air Corps in ‘44 First time I got high. I was thirteen. It was champagne, at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Brother Jeffrey and his Italian-American bride with her large clan at a country club in Pacific Heights. Tuxedos. Live orchestra. Adults dancing with children into the wee hours.
Brother Michael and Alice at her parents’ home on a hill overlooking Boise. Guys with long hair and wire rim glasses. The sky still light at ten o’clock on that far western edge of the time zone. My daughter, four, in her long white dress with strawberries glowing in the twilight.
Brother David and Elaine in their adobe in Santa Fe Elaine and her sisters dancing sinuously while lip syncing to “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” and my son, about eleven, dancing up a storm.
Sister Deborah and Rob in wine country in an old Victorian hotel their friend singing in a sweet tenor “Makin' Whoopee.”
I remember others. Those were just a few. Three of them ended in divorce.
A Few Weeks in June The seventeen year cicadas are back sounding off like steel drum bands, celebrating their freedom after seventeen years under ground, seventeen sexless years. Were I a cicada I’d bust out long before, have a night on the town. Not only are they locked up without parole, when they get out they don’t get a bus ticket and fifty bucks but predators waiting at the gate and the only ones that really go free are the ones the predators don’t eat. Then they get just a few weeks and the males die right after they mate. (I might too if I hadn’t been laid in seventeen years.) O cicada, yours is not a gentle fate, but who ever said that life was fair?
Domestication The rabbit whose burrow is in the bushes in front of our house shows no fear of me. It no longer flees when I come suddenly out the front door. It no longer freezes when I turn in from the street fixing me with one large, lustrous, all-pupil eye. It no longer even stops nibbling the grass when I walk past. It has confidence I won’t pounce. It thinks that I’m domesticated.
Molly You were born in France and wild they say. No, feral, wilder yet. I didn’t think to ask how they lured you inside. Milk perhaps, the feline’s wine. But you were too secure in yourself to pass up free meals and so moved in. Then one day they came back to America and brought you with them Born a chat you became a cat. Did you miss your French terroir? Do the mice speak a different language here? No matter. You made yourself at home. Now you wear a collar and sit in the sun in the catnip planted just for you and bring your masters— pardon me, hosts— birds, and mice and chipmunks as any polite guest would do. They react strangely almost as if repelled. Do they not like French cuisine?
To Everything a Season Spring, summer, autumn, winter, eighty-two times I’ve lived that cycle, for my year began in spring born with the flowers and leaves and grass.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter, always the same yet always fresh. Pity him who tires of the seasons. He tires of life.
Homage to the Egg I don’t know why lay an egg is a pejorative expression. What could be more perfect than those gentle spheroids in their softly glowing white, subtle brown, blue and other hues amiably speckled or plain? Surely when UFOs are found, evidence of civilizations more advanced than ours, they’ll be shaped not like saucers but eggs.
About Love When we say love we mean many things some similar some almost contradictory. There’s Christian love and concupiscent, sibling, parent-child, puppy, platonic, love of friends, of pieces of music, movies, pets, money, celebrities. This list is not exhaustive.
So men sometimes say they love when what they really mean is that they want sex. Young people ask whether they’ll ever fall in love when they already have. A little later they say I’ll love you forever when what they really mean is maybe a few years, though they don’t know that yet.
No wonder we’re confused.
For They Shall Inherit
There was a red fox on our front walk today, sitting there like the sphinx or one of those lions in front of the New York Public Library, calmly licking its paws as if it had just finished an ice cream cone, looking around with what seemed curiosity rather than wariness, calm as if in its own living room.
The animals are getting less and less wary of humans, the deer, the moose, the bears and, oh yes, the rabbit that nibbles clover on our lawn and doesn’t hop off hastily when we come out the front door.
What’ll it be next? Deer nuzzling us for a handout as we plant our gardens? Rabbits hopping into the kitchen to share our salad? Have we lost our credibility?
Northampton Meadows, 1864
I have a postcard of a painting from a century and a half ago of a landscape I can almost see from our window. It could be a landscape by Poussin, for another “Shepherds of Arcadia”; meadows, copses, hedgerows, a tranquil river meandering, and, in the background, low but dramatic mountains. Now the meadows are cluttered with commerce and cars, strip malls, parking lots, boxy buildings, fast food restaurants, dropped down on the landscape no matter how. But on my desk is that view of the scene before progress came, and I look upon it as one might on a photo of a love who has died or taken up with someone else.
Late August Is Here
Pleasant days cool nights the way we’d like it to always be. However I still feel a sense of loss an end to summer fun as if I’ll soon be back in school again even though I’m eighty-one.
Summertime
As a child I spent my summers with a crew of cousins at my grandfather’s house on a lake in Michigan where we passed much of our time swimming and trooping into town for ice cream, or movies. Horror films were a favorite, Igor pouring molten metal on us, in three dimensions, from the tower of Dr. Frankenstein’s house (which for many years made Victorian houses synonymous in my mind with horror), the Incredible Shrinking Man fleeing a housecat bigger than a rhinoceros, rubber dinosaurs rampaging through The Lost World. The youngest of the gang I took all this seriously peering out from between my fingers through much of the show clamping them shut when the going got too scary.
Then there was the amusement park only 12 miles away (which at the time seemed far to me as if distance stretched in inverse proportion to one’s size), the fun house with its whimsical mirrors and the forced laughter reverberating from its loudspeakers, the papier-mâché monsters in the house of horrors exciting more hilarity than terror, and a large flat cylinder of a ride that rotated so fast you could hang on its inner side defying gravity, a sensation that visited me in my dreams.
The cousins with whom I spent those summers almost three quarters of a century ago are still young in my mind splashing into the lake, filing into the little theaters in Coloma and Watervliet or heading out rowdily for that amusement park.
To Everything Its Season
Through the open window next to my desk this summer day I hear the voice of our young neighbor naming things. “Daw” he shouts, full blast. “Yes, dog” his mother says. “Daw” he shouts again. Then “tee.” “Yes, tree” his mother says. It was only a month or two ago, after long seeing him carried from house to car and back (no light-weight he), one fine spring day I saw him totter down the walk. Now, merely a few weeks later, he not only walks the walk he talks the talk.
Listen
to the sound in a seashell of blood rushing through your inner ear, the sound of streams rustling over stones, to waves pulsing against the shore.
Listen to a chorus of crickets filling the quiet of the night, the boom and racket and chirp of frogs, a lone owl hooting, the twitter of early morning birds, the coocooroo of mourning doves, the clamor of crows, geese announcing autumn overhead, the quiet clucking of hens, a rooster’s fanfare for the sun.
Listen to the sound of wind soughing through the trees, the patter of rain on a roof or its voluminous tattoo.
Listen to the sounds suffusing silence.
Granny
My grandmother was ignorant, superstitious, opinionated and full of odium. Half old world, half new she believed nuns were bad luck like black cats and was fond of describing people’s clothing as looking like it came out of a cow’s behind.
She didn’t like girl children and was hard on her daughter and granddaughter but indulgent toward my brother and me, pushing food at us without asking my mother or sister if they wanted more, making special dishes for us, and remarkably tolerant of our shortcomings, though she did turn dour after she found a photograph of a nude in my dresser, under the socks, when I was 13. She didn’t say anything about it, but it disappeared, and she gave me grim looks every time our paths crossed for the next few days.
She was five feet tall and called herself “peanut granny,” for she had a sense of humor along with her paranoia and scorn.
She was married twice, and, not surprisingly, twice divorced, and didn’t have much education, but she made her way in business and took care of herself without anybody’s help, even giving my mother a nice sum of money toward a house.
Then she suffered a stroke. When I visited her in the nursing home she still recognized me but called my baby daughter Helen,
which was my mother’s name.
Comfort
I heard a boy crying across the street and went to the window to see why. I was about to go out to try to help when his mother came and picked him up he three quarters of her height and I thought to myself how nice it would be if we had mothers big enough to pick us up throughout our lives. If we weren’t comforted, at least we’d laugh.
Still the Same
Somewhere are young women I once knew some 50 years ago, still young— somewhere, with feline fealty, in cities I know, though no longer the street or house— still the same, unwrinkled slender supple hair still glossy voices velvety… somewhere in the lanes and alleys of my brain.
Confession
I’m a serial poet. Many times I’ve committed poetry, taken an image, a feeling, a thought, a phrase and manhandled it into a poem. I plead in mitigation that it’s a crime of passion. Or is it temporary insanity?
Poetry in the Suburbs
Sure, there’s poetry in the country with its fields and woods and hills and waters and welcoming sky, and in the city with its multitudes its landmarks its storied neighborhoods. But in the suburbs, among the frantic highways, shopping centers, office parks, overly neat subdivisions and other conformities?
It’s there. You just have to catch it out of the corner of your eye.
Nothing New
Tonight a year ends. Some will see it out tooting and hollering. Not us. My wife’s already in bed and I’ll join her soon. Were it not for this poem I’d be in my armchair reading my eyelids succumbing to gravity, and my head may still be on its pillow before the clamorous hour.
What’s all the fuss? The planet goes round its star and after a certain time passes the point where it’s arbitrarily said to have started, whereupon, all over Earth, waves of humans bellow and hug their fellows, as if this carousel hadn’t gone around a few billion times before.
The Hospital Poem
My muse sidled up to me as I lay in my hospital bed and tapped me on the arm. Write a poem about being in the hospital, she said. It’s hard to write lying on your back, I said. Besides, what’s to write about? You can write a poem about anything, she said. Hospitals are the antithesis of poetry, I said, you’re wheeled about poked and prodded cut open and sewn up stuffed full of things like a culinary concoction, and you’re always on your back looking at the ceiling or others’ heads and shoulders as if you inhabited an upside down universe while everyone around you is privileged to live upright, and what with the noise you couldn't sleep even if they didn’t wake you five times in the night, and the food tastes like it's been through the laundry. No wonder the wards are filled with moaning. And all those bodies being jockeyed around on gurneys, like some kind of carcass race, crowds of visitors coming and going— you’d think they’d come to see a show— attendants bustling as if their exertions kept the world turning, and the strange words that fill the air osises and itises and otomies and ectomies like the buzzing of insects. How is one to make any sense if it? There you go, she said.
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