ODD MEN OUT
In 2020 Xanadu Press published my chapbook, Time on the Move, a collaboration between my poems and the images by photographer Barbara Rosenthal. The dominant theme of those poems, as I neared my 80th year, were age-appropriate: time passing and one’s mortality. Now, five years later, I’m still attached to that theme but have been able to escape it by developing character sketches. Parts of me are no doubt, in many of these individuals, but they are there accidentally.
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A tantrum, a laughing jag, quiet weeping are expressions of self. Nonetheless, I feel the act of making a poem is an escape from self. These characters are all fictitious but for the penultimate poem, “The Chief.” I wish that one was a made-up character.
THE I AM VARIATIONS
I’m an old engine waiting
for a shot of oil,
a lubricant that's smooth, thick,
dark, and viscous enough
to slather my pistons so
they'll suffer no friction
driving me home.
I am the hungry mite chewing on daisies;
the yellow in the middle, the petals too
compose my day.
No mild butterfly am I
though they too suck
and cause some local trauma.
We occupy the same territory.
I am lassitude itself, last on the list,
lolling about in a ring,
drifting with a license—to be
my father, long underground;
I am him and my children well-fed –
all the family, the living and dead