Nectarines

I buy nectarines sometimes.

Their skins are red and yellow

and smooth.

Their shapes are round

and plump.

I put them in a bag for several days.

Then I wash one.

I slice it into quarters,

discarding the pit.

I bite into the flesh.

It is sweet and firm

and tender and juicy

and nutritious

and fruity -

next to a lump of coal.

But I had a nectarine,

once.

If I could I would take you to that tree,

it grew in earth near Fresno,

California, in an orchard.

The memory lingers

in my imagination,

but the nectarines were

on the trees.

There was more red in their skins.

They were no rounder

but their plumpness approached

that of the size of grapefruits.

I do not remember washing them.

I do not remember slicing them into quarters.

I do remember sweet nectariness in my mouth.

I do remember juicy goodness running down

my chin and fingers.

They say perfection does not exist,

and even goodness is fleeting.

But I don’t care about all that.

I have tasted what I have tasted,

and I want more.

I will accept lesser goodness

than I have known,

and I will try to savor and celebrate

what is sweet

and somewhat nectariny.

But if I could,

I would take you to the tree,

and we would walk

hand in hand,

and step by giddy, solemn step,

and grasp on earth

as it was imagined in heaven.

And the ants would lick

the juice

from our plump

and sleeping faces

as we rested,

beneath the tree of life,

satisfied,

in the dying

sun.

Father's Day

A young lad,

wearing a red, plaid shirt,

the sleeves torn off,

and an early summer tan,

swung a stick as hefty as his leg.

He kicked at the sand on the path

along the lazy, drifting river.

He shouted out for his dad to come see.

His father, the image of the boy

in years yet to come,

obliged.

The older brother,

a few paces up the path

shouted, too.

A triangle-shaped thingee –

come look.

And then as I approached the mom,

hands on hips,

standing,

waiting,

looking at her boys.

There’s a lot to see when they’re young,

I said.

Oh yeah, she said with a laugh,

as if I were understating the case.

I was, but perhaps not entirely

in the way she was thinking.

I had in mind more of what

I had just seen walking along

the sandy path at my age.

Sky blue holes in the clouds

This was the Sunday afternoon when there were sky blue holes in the clouds when I left the house.

Near Einstein Brother’s Bagels, I walked up the sidewalk

and saw two college men approaching me, talking animatedly.

As I passed, one said with a shake of his head,

“He went up the stairs and he didn’t come down.”

A few steps farther, a young husband, pushing an empty stroller said,

“Let’s turn,” as his wife, holding their child in her arms said,

“Don’t you want to go in and look at the toys?”

Farther up the street I heard the echoes

of the maraca girl from somewhere behind the parked cars on the far side of the street.

When she stopped shaking them – that is her maracas -

a woman talking to another woman walking near me  said,

“I must have pushed the button too hard.”

In front of Central Bank, two girls were trying to find the chords on their ukuleles.

The one with the purple face paint asked me if I knew any Neil Young,

she had a song on the tip of her tongue but she just couldn’t get it started.

She started to sing a song with the words “deep sea diver” in it instead.

As I looked away I heard my name.

 I turned to the sound to see my wife driving by, smiling out of her opened car window,

having just had coffee with a  friend.

A neighbor walking with his wife paused at the light to ask if I thought it would rain.

I pointed out that the holes in the clouds were filling in, but I didn’t know.

On the far side of the intersection, I picked up my pace so that they could continue their own conversation.

Across the bridge, as I was looking out over the Bowersock hydro plant construction

to watch the river,  

a young mother, pushing a stroller built for one but

containing a  young girl and her baby sister,

whom I had just passed moments earlier,

spilled – that is the stroller spilling the girls  -  

at the junction of the sidewalk and the levee.

I didn’t see it, but I heard the baby cry for a few seconds.

As I turned, her mother scooped her up and said,

“That didn’t work so well.”

The baby stopped crying and smiled at me.

I was heading back down, when the robot in the stoplight said,

“Walk sign is on to cross Sixth Street,

walk sign is on.”

The ukulele girls were offering free face painting as I walked by.

In front of Central Middle School a young woman was carrying

a large white puppy across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

She set him down on the grass and he responded to the tug on his leash.

It was sprinkling, but there were blue sky holes in the clouds again.

I went up the stairs of my front porch

and I didn’t come down.

I made pizza with my wife instead.

Alignment

The other day I decided I should check my alignment. I walked to the alley between New Hampshire and Rhode Island starting at 14^th Street. With little along that way that I could run into, I closed my eyes and slowed my pace just a bit. After about forty paces or so, I opened them. I had drifted a little to the right. I centered myself and closed them again. After another short distance I opened my eyes to discover I had pulled a little to the left. I centered myself and tried one more time. This time when I opened my eyes, I found myself walking pretty much down the middle of the alley. So I figure I’m good to go. Oh yeah, my ears work.

Repetition

I have come to the age when I repeat myself.

Let me try that again: I have come to the age when I realize that I repeat myself.

No, I must try that one more time: I have come to the age when I realize that I am repeating someone else.

I am not making any of this up.

That would be blasphemy.

I was standing on the Kaw River Bridge.

I heard the train a comin’ – a rollin’ round the bend.

And then, through the leaves of a tree, at something like more than a 100 yards away, I saw that beveled, blocky orange Burlington Northern and Santa Fe locomotive appear, rounding that last bit of bend and begin to bear down on me, toward a spot well beneath my feet, to be precise. For long, glorious seconds it powered right at me, getting larger, and larger, and then it was just one container car after the next for an age in train years until the tracks were empty.

Mr. Cash said part of that, so memorably, so long ago, in my years.

But as I was saying, it is the words of others that I am writing.

Someone said it sooner. Someone said it more memorably.

Ah, there’s the crack in the universe.

So you don’t forget, language goes back a long time, beyond the tower of Babel, beyond the first writing, beyond the first word. I’ll not elaborate, but reputable sources trace all things back something like 15 billion years.

I frankly cannot imagine who could have made some singularity - some call it that - containing so astronomically much potential - ex nihilo, as some say.

But then how?

Why?

But I will not now elaborate on that much repeated and disputed tale.

I am interested in the blink between the moment of my birth and the inexorably approaching moment when my eyes will never open upon this earth again.

There has been some expansion in the universe since the Big Bang, some expansion in language since the first word, but Ecclesiastes said it memorably, so very long ago in cultural years: there is nothing new under the sun.

Without going back over a lot of thinking and writing that has gone on in my own time, in the time I am interested in at this moment, I seem to be writing in a time of repetition.

Sure, I put words and phrases in different orders, and at the pace we read and listen we may not realize that we’ve read and heard this all before.

That’s the crack.

Our memory.

So, I am not playing on saying something new, something never said before. Only something you’ve never heard before.

I aim to play a note so sweet that it will ring in your memory for perhaps as long - and maybe longer - as it took for me to hear that whistle out well beyond my sight and then I waited, waited for that train to come round that bend. And then I felt what I felt. And I wished I could put it into words.

Maybe one day, with practice, I will repeat someone’s words, maybe some I have echoed myself, having long forgotten the source, so memorably that you will walk out on that bridge and wait – to discover if they are true.