True Love
Her voice in the night
drags me from my dreams.
But it is not her voice:
she has gone back home
leaving Clare and I alone.
Our sleeping rhythms have changed
and we wake each other up
when we unexpectedly touch
or startle at the voices in our dreams.
True love is so much more
than an exchange of rings
or a holding of hands,
especially when our lives
are no longer ruled by hormones,
and they’re taken over
by rebellious glands.
Time
Where is time going
when it overtakes me
in its speeding car
and leaves me lumbering
along life’s highway?
It’s after five to twelve
and the morning has flashed by.
The clock is about to strike,
and the afternoon draws near.
It too will vanish, a milestone,
millstone tied to day’s neck.
I remember the old days
when the big handed pointed to XI
and the small hand pointed to XII.
Now the clock is starting to strike.
I have left the last gas station way
behind me and my motor’s failing,
and my car is running out of gas.
Walker
It’s as good as a walker, this shopping cart.
I set my heart on finding one and when I do
I hang on to the handle and goad myself
onward, up the supermarket ramp.
I hate it when people to see me like this,
body and confidence broken by my fall.
For when I fall there’s no safety net,
no security, just an old man lying hurt.
A leaf on a tree, I shake in the breeze.
I pause for thought, catch my breath,
then struggle forward, caught like a high-
wire dancer in the spotlight, my heart in my
mouth, trying not to look down, or fall,
struggling on, fighting the good fight.
Cramp
(Jackpine Sonnet)
Late last night, lying in bed,
cramp laid siege to my lower limbs.
I crawled out of that bed and stretched,
left leg, right leg, in the bathroom.
Aching still, the fear of more cramp
to come weighed heavy on my mind.
I didn’t want to wake my wife
with panic and alarums, so I slept
in the spare bed in the other room.
A great round moon sailed its pale-
faced boat on a sea of silent clouds.
I lay on the life raft of my bed
and prayed for cramp to stay away
and for the mattress to keep me afloat.
Clare
She moves more slowly
up the slope,
pushing against the hill’s
shallow grain.
I knew so well her
swaying grace,
but now she shuffles
with the drag-
foot limp of the aged,
and aged she has,
like a good wine in
an oaken cask.
Her beauty still stays
in my memory,
lodges in my mind and
I see her as
she was, beautiful
in body, slim,
graceful, a joy to hold
and behold.
Her eyes still sparkle
and she bubbles
still with a champagne
joy that draws
me to her, and still she
enhances each
room she enters, filling
it with light.
Le mot juste
Searching for what exactly?
For the exact word, le mot juste,
the word that sums it all up,
catches the essence of the thing
and holds it in the mind forever.
Le mot juste? Think color.
Think color blind. Think blind.
Think of the world we see
reduced to grey scale.
Think of the seven colors
that stripe the rainbow sky,
each with a unique name:
it seems so easy, so simple.
But the world has changed.
Think now of the computer,
its screen more accurate
than the human eye and color
coordinated by a million or more
tiny little pixels that multiply
the seven rainbow colors
by a million or two and every
color numbered beyond
the recognition point
of the human eye: le mot juste
reduced to precision of number.
Think flowers. Think scent.
Think of the limited ways
we describe the smell of things.
I look across the breakfast table
and see my wife of fifty years,
a teenager reborn, walking into
the café where we first met.
I search my memory and my mind
for the words to describe that beauty,
that surge of excitement,
but I cannot find les mots justes.
Brain Drain
I do the daily crosswords,
first on the computer,
and then in the newspaper
when later it arrives.
My wife does the Sudoku,
but I hate numbers
though I adore
the restless energy of chess.
Online games of point and click
deaden my brain and kill my eyes.
I lengthen my winning streak of patience
every day. Twice I have climbed
to fifteen hundred wins, then wiped
them out to start again.
Boring? Not at all. Anything to keep
the old grey matter ticking over;
anything to keep me
lively and alive.
Three Bears Wood
Nobody has seen them,
those three bears,
nor naked nor clothed.
So who now walks
in
Three Bears Wood?
Who now stands
where he once stood
in
the shadow of the trees?
Sometimes
he walks there
in
his dreams.
What magic power
puts him back there
beneath the trees?
What ghosts does he see,
what words does he hear,
what dreams does he dream
in
Three Bears Wood?
rogermoorepoet 