No one calls
these Sunday afternoons

It’s a mixture
of peace and desolation

I watch the light
as it keeps changing

I watch clouds
voyaging the sky

I hear the cicadas
frenzied in their singing

The season is getting
ready to shift

Too few monarchs pass
through heading southwest

I sit and ponder, tracking
myself, eluding myself

Unable to stop
doing either one

The days are shorter
as my days are shorter

I can’t say what I
may have learned

Advice irritates me
even when I give it

Green acorns fall,
first leaves float down

In my heart, there’s
soft and shy music

Into the white of my beard
I am disappearing, becoming blank

as if my life was a cargo at sea
that once seemed to have value

and to be heading for friendly ports
eager to receive it and unload it,

to send it off into the commerce
of countries that I hardly knew

but time has changed the conditions
of the market, the terms of trade

so that my life has become quiet
and completely beside the point

I whisper to myself and I hear
the sound of myself escaping me

Into the white of my beard
I am disappearing, becoming blank

perhaps this is wisdom, but not
wisdom that can announce anything,

not wisdom that can give counsel
or point to coming catastrophe

Should I report myself, I wonder,
as a missing person, one among

so very many or should I simply
go on going on, becoming only white

the color that reflects all light,
and disguises all colors in its mix?

Memory, the interior decorator,
works in myriad styles, appeals

to all the senses, borrows from
everyone everywhere, or should

it be called stealing, for memory
recognizes no property rights

is no simple keeper of the books
but a capricious potentate with

purposes of its own including
rewriting of the history it tells

over and over again, so I fall
asleep one place and wake another,

whether it be tent, castle, mud hut
or even prison, without my knowing

the charge or having a chance to plead
(who can plead against his memory?}

Memory, the interior decorator,
keeps busy plundering my life

in order to furnish me differently
than I could ever have imagined

Thunder in heavy August late afternoon
puts me in mind of peacocks strutting
before a storm, blue green tails making a dry
rustling sound, anxious at fear’s near edge,
the multiple feather eyes moving perhaps
an inch back and forth and seeing nothing.

My mind can wander because it is of my
body, organ inseparable – these peacocks
were on another continent and long ago
and yet I house this within myself, how
beautiful the peacocks were, how strange
the dry sound before storm, those eyes.

Am I more fully myself being older
or am I not – no way to answer and
perhaps even foolish to ask as the rain
that was heralded comes pouring down
I am reasonably sure the peacocks took
no notice of me as I was taking them in.

After rain comes the scent of mint in
the green soaked garden, luxurious,
and the black eyed susans are blazing,
refreshed, quite the opposite of subdued ,
the peacocks strut in my mind and make
that dry rustling sound as their tails shiver

I don’t think things out
I think things in

What I think in changes me
I’m partly new to myself

The reclusive tempts me
I can’t declare myself

I can’t pass customs
I seem a witless witness

What is in me can’t be traced
What’s in me compounds

I can’t please and can’t plead
No matter what I’d like to do

What I think in lodges in me
Enjoys considerable freedom

I go on listening, knowing all
I have thought in listens as me