12-line stanzas, though I can’t reproduce the format.
That’ll Be Enough Now
Enough of that, old fool, he vows,
scarcely for the very first time.
Enough of your familiar, predictable sighs
on looking through the window,
especially in some ebbing season,
the mind reeling in all
that isn’t but must once have been–no?
Today he’ll take in what’s out there,
straight as hard liquor, unembroidered
as a burlap sack, unfanciful as gravel.
He’ll start with the hazy blue sky,
the sort of commonplace miracle
he’s bossed aside precisely for being common.
There’s late-morning sun,
wan as communion wafers
and his old hound’s out in the dooryard, arthritic,
soaking up such warmth as it may offer,
enough, apparently, for him,
whose jowls keep whiffling as perhaps he dreams
of a chase around the woods.
Around and around and around the woods
after yet another hare
among the scores he used to harry.
Dog, sky, dead sweet-fern and bramble,
trees on the ridges claiming fall color:
a tableau, the man insists–
or strains to insist–
that, however jumbled, ought to suffice.
Can he follow through on that notion?
He wonders, did the hound delight
in those old pursuits, each so redundant?
That is, does he conjure pleasures out there
beyond the sun’s dull heat?
Does he dream at all?
Nothing is certain in this world.
Owning up to it, the man must reject
his own redundancy– reflexive
elegy for what may never have been.
He means to fight all retrospection.
Still he recalls some words
he heard as a boy from an aged preacher.
The Reverend Mr. Hoff, as he’d almost forgotten,
had a withered leg from polio
yet a cheerful and hardly unthoughtful outlook:
It’s never too late in any day, he claimed,
to start that day all over.
In childhood the old man dismissed such counsel
and much else the good lame pastor uttered.
A Handful for Autumn
an endangered warbler
a keening train
a dory
civilization
a welter of rain
a harbor
a made-up story
Having taken the picture, I, techno-Neanderthal, I don't know how to get that onto the site.
Sydney, I am just a sucker for what you do. I love your words. But the cheapened and undesirable substack format is hurting you. Please just take a picture of the actual page the poem is on (in manuscript or book) and presto! the format is reproduced and your best foot is put forward. You deserve to be read correctly.