Poems from the Beloved

She has no sick father, reprobate brother,

or an unknown enemy

And it is not that she is fated to remain a spinster

There is a boy He teaches in a school And has no mind to become a driver in New York or a cook in Karachi

She is happy under her tin roof in her house of bamboo walls

When she was not chosen for a role in the community theater she felt no regrets

Just today she was included in a contingent of girls protesting outside the office of the water supply authority

Nobody taught her how to be happy She knew it by instinct She does not know where the poverty-line crosses her body

Her poor country has become independent twice

She is freer and happier than the rest of the world

...............................Christ the Readers Digests’ alone would require their own special section, back issues from 1961 moldering swollen during those sultry Tennessee summers, a sage piece by Art Linkletter or Laughter Is The Best Medicine to while away the still afternoon’s, relieved only by the bleat of the front porch swing and the X-ray buzz of cicadas. 

...............................Maybe the laundry and the fallen leaves

won’t mind if I take five minutes to add Franklin E. Meyer’s Me and Caleb and The Borrowers, by Mary Norton reminding me, how could I forget? of E.B. White, Mark Twain and Marvel Comics   not to mention countless cereal boxes, album jackets and the liner notes concealed within.  But reading the dogs face, a forlorn sphinx haunting an empty bowl, I think I’d best add her name first

...............................hoping to avoid a bloody awful

Comma— With this tadpoled period I may pause a second, swimming among multitudes noting and naming.

Mesmerized by its breath-taking tail I rest, then go on expanding and elucidating, although in this case of hesitating I’ve nothing more to say  and no one’s waiting anyway except for future anthropologists nosing round and carbon dating

But wait, there’s more. With comma’s versatility I may string ten thousand things like beads listing names of every city in the world, every lover, their triumphs, dreams and classic poses or as the evening closes, I may breathe mid-sentence and signify I’ve thought of something else: alyssum, flox, hydrangea, roses

And finally, to show how much you mean to me, my friend, I’ll set your name apart with two of these for rapt attention until I’m ended with that dot I mentioned.

My blue-black fingers  Pilot her fervent verses

To Prime Ministers of the World  A moth at a candle's edge

Flame flickering Only calligraphy at her robe's hem