Careful now about
that porch light. Don’t want those
robins singing all night.
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Each of these is a
trail back to a moment where
everything belongs.
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At least on paper
our being here is easy
to take lying down.
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What is left to say?
Blessed are you unnoticed,
unknown, kind and free.
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A wasp caught in a
spider web. Whose side am I
on? Set the wasp free.
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Being: not what I
have to say but what I don’t
even think to say.
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Art is ritual
embodiment of ways that
both last and nourish.
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Whatever you do
forget this nonsense about
hard work. Keep playing!
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What are the ants up
to carrying home a wasp
wing, a peanut skin?
(The longer Sunday edition of Mosey Time is on vacation.)
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Rembrandt would not
recognize this NASCAR Jesus.
Bless all road kill.
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Monet would paint
nasturtiums rather than lily
pads if he lived here.
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Nasturtium flower
red reaches the summit of
what we call crimson.
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One mention of poop
and you know if the kids are
really asleep yet.
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The mind drops in for
a visit with the heart but
nobody is home.
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I can’t stem the tide
of my ignorance—so I
float on it instead.
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Quiet On The Set
I love stormy summer days where huge banks of clouds drift over rearranging the lighting moment by moment almost as if the whole world, or at least our little quadrant of it, were a movie set. The sun bursts through after a downpour: The hero has arrived! Then an evening shot—though it’s only mid-morning. That’s not a problem here with apertures opening as if on cue between billowy June cumulus. Occasionally we even get a spotlight passing through, landing here on a nearly recumbent mulberry that yesterday was upright—a foreshadowing perhaps? Or just another visual rhyme, the meter instilled through slants of light, the lack of or richness of shadow. A wren the only moving thing for a long while beneath a momentary rainbow.
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I have taken to
blessing things more and more as
it seems that I may.
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Will I ever tire
of where the sound of the wind
in the pines takes me?
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Dianthus reminds
me: the brilliant calico
worn by Dunkard girls.
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While the war wears on—
someone plants a ninth
variety of hosta.
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The moon thinks we can’t
see her hiding there behind
the young locust tree.
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These June al fresco
days, I lose track of time. Why
was I after it?
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At Fifteen
My dad had his back to me and was looking out the sliding glass door at his garden. He had just learned his mother died the night before. I studied his back, his shoulders for signs of emotion. Finally he turned and came back to his La-Z-Boy and sat down. He didn’t weep, so much as seep. His face was all wet. The front of his shirt. His emotion had the velocity and purity of the vaguest mountain spring, slipping up from folds in the earth, between stones, over mossy rocks and thirsty roots from god-only-knows how deep down. Ferns grow in a place like that—where hiding, secrecy seems the best way to be.
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The senses all
coalesce into a wildly
kept, taut awareness.
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Sometimes style just seems
inevitable. Some day
someone would do that.
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Dove coos, from across
the way, pound softly—almost
as my own heart beat.
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Desperate people
require desperate measures.
Let’s just keep away.
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The end of each spruce
branch—an asterisk noting
some little detail.
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I’m waiting here now
to learn eventually
what I’m waiting for.
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The Bower Ghost
I crept through the opening worn into the bushes. Entering my little copse, my enclave, I slumped immediately against the wall and looked straight up along the flat, red surface to the bell tower. Into the coolness of those bricks my back pushed hard while every fiber of flesh and bone listened—both eyes closed, turning black—I waited for darkness and the screech of the Rambler door.
Between these two walls—one brick, one bush—this wink of wilderness endured. A place where small animals came to hide, nest, die. This was where I belonged. On the soft damp ground for a long time, I kept from thinking anything at all.
Blood had stiffened the hair of my temples when again there was the sound of a screen door but no footfall, no car door, no calling of any name. Just a smell I identified with these bushes. A masculine muskiness or even a rotten-dead smell. My nose burned as if someone had struck a match too close.
I heard a plane fly over and very faintly the sound of a woman’s voice. A singing voice. Someone, in the church, practicing. It seemed possible I was hearing the wing beats of small birds as far away as the cemetery.
How long until it would be dark? I had no way of telling. Not until the pole light went on, and I felt things stir again. The thought, the memory turning my stomach, my reliance, my disregard… inside out one last time.
What had been vague in the thicket, some light-colored debris, slowly began to move, became dirty white fur and a long hairless tail—a pointed face. The creature walked timidly, not like a ghost at all, but stiff as though suffering rheumatism, and his tail held up off the ground as if it must not get dirty. A barn owl’s face, the tail of a serpent, and a soft mammalian body. He sniffed the air and, walking away along the far edge of the bush, disappeared.
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Mosey Time is a blog by Mark Mitchell that features daily postings. Most are very short and at least partly in the haiku tradition. On Sundays there are longer pieces of writing. If you like you can subscribe to receive these as daily emails or as an RSS feed.
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