We stretch through that which stretches in ourselves;
We reach for all we see we may desire,
And breathe along the edges of a truth:
That sellers only sell when there’s a buyer

Each nerve and tendon rallied to the cause,
We find our focus, strong and indiffuse:
For humans cannot have if they won’t reach,
And tendons atrophy
From lack
Of use

[Note: the Greek root of “nerve” (neuron) originally meant “tendon”. – Owen]

She looked so elegant the night
That we went to the prom;
Her angry beauty was serene,
Her bitter face was calm

She was in lovely black, the very
Height of teenage fashion;
We spent a night of happiness
In dancing and in passion

So elegant behind the gym,
The ancient bricks that framed her;
One night to lead the blessèd life
Before her demons
Claimed her

.

The first time that I kissed her,
On a scale of one to ten,
Was roughly, oh, a three.
So she said: “Let’s do that again.”

The second time was better,
Some nice form, some good technique –
The third time, we had slipped a bit
But that was not our peak —

For by the forty-seventh time
We’d got it mostly right.
But still, we practiced half the day
And well into the night

For anything worth doing
Is worth doing really well:
And it was great. But I’ll stop there.
Hey, I don’t kiss
And tell

= = = = =

Night and Day

= = = = =

I never met either of my grandfathers;
I’ve heard a lot about them, nonetheless.
That one was kind, a gentle man, a draftsman;
The other was an alcoholic mess

I’d see their photos on the walls, in albums;
A pair of piercing eyes, so grave and sad –
But realized that I would never know them
Not in-the-flesh, the way my parents had

A carpenter who liked to drink – my mom’s dad;
I know his favorite joke, some things he said –
My mom was only nineteen when he passed, though,
From the poor home my mom had lately fled

An engineer for Kodak was my dad’s dad;
Who taught my dad’s young wife first how to drive.
A man she loved, and still calls “Pop” to these days,
Who showed her gentlemen were still alive

Why do I talk about these long gone men now?
Because I realize that all I know
About my grandfathers is in the stories
I’ve heard about them, passed from long ago

And so when my days end, let my grandchildren
Know funny things I did, or things of worth;
Let me leave them a legacy of stories
To show that I once walked
Upon the earth

= = = = =

Prompt : “Imagine yourself at the end of your life. What sort of legacy will you leave? Describe the lasting effect you want to have on the world, after you’re gone. “

Now I’ve been told that no one writes in rhyme.
I seen it writ, and hear it all the time.
‘That isn’t,’ I’ve been told, ‘real poetry.
That’s now the world of abstract imagery.’

Linguistics, I confess, does fascinate:
Potentially, to make both inchoate
And well-developed words take sudden twists,
And turn syntactic rocks to amethysts —

But, usually, I go a different way;
I look for rhythm in what I might say,
And rhyme: a way of flourishing at end
Whatever path my thoughts and words might wend.

I feared, though, often, none would think worth while
Adoption of such antiquated style;
My words would go and come back unremarked,
With no more useless journey e’er embarked —

I’ve done it anyway, and now I find
My fears were groundless, long-since left behind:
For rhyme and rhythm are, I guess, okay –
As long as one has some small thing
To say

(.. . ..)