Frances -- A Poem

The room is full.
She's waving at me.
Daddy sees someone else
He'd like to speak to.
Two chairs lean against a table. One for me.
Not one I'd choose.
I can't speak to anyone until I've spoken to her
Thanked her for saving our seats.
"Where's Gene?" Daddy asks.
She says,
"He told me to find my own way home."
She doesn't need a way home.
She needs a husband who cares.
Who thinks she's got something to say
She needs him to listen to her speak
Just speak.
Listen to her speak.
I drive her home.
I say,"The sky is gray."
She sees yellow flowers in the median
She doesn't know what they are.
I don't know what they are.
So practiced in silence,
She says nothing more.
I drive her home.
"Thank you," she says.
"Have a good weekend," I say.

I watch until she passes from sight,
She passes from sight.

The Floods of Felsenthal -- a poem by Grace Wagner

Grace Wagner

The Floods of Floods of Felsenthal

Every November, so says my father, the floods follow the ducks to
Felsenthal:
blue-wing teals, mallards, black ducks and gadwalls,
They gather in covens and bring the rain
which soaks the shallow roots of the loblollys
who stand evergreen over the pine-needle stratum; the rain
which gluts the earth till it brims and breaks, flooding
until it fills the basin of itself; the rain
which gives new roads to the fish, crawpie and walleye, largemouth bass
basking beneath the pine-filtered light of dawn.

As the water follows the birds, so my father follows the water.
He takes me out on its face, breaking
the water's waiting tension with the prow of our canoe.
Here two months ago my grandfather stayed, camped close.
But the flood takes it all, swallowing campsites and parking lots, slow
Southern apocalypse meandering in oxbows and bottom lands,
gathering itself in sloughs and buttonbush swamps.

Now the loblolly pines grow from water.
A small hill rises artificially high, bearing the weight of man-
made brick and mortar, restrooms for the campgrounds
when the ground was still visible.
My father sits in front of me, back to the trees,
rowing us through their shining corridors.
We say nothing and the nothing echoes
back to us across the water.

I look over the edge but cannot see
the ground only three feet below me.
The water shows me the sky and pine-lace.
I look up and see the same vision, sky and trees,
a perfect mirror of the water.
The light ripples as I move
beneath it, concentric circles radiating
from the centermost point of my eyes;
mandala in pine and sky.

The ducks watch us, augurs with webbed feet
sculling beneath the polished surface,
their buoyant bodies swiveling
to watch us pass.
They know we are not here for them.
They know the rain will soak and sink 
into the land, damp leaves left like carpet
after a hurricane.
They know my father will die
some day and that I will follow him.

A tackle box sits at my feet, but my father does not
open it. Does not pull out the assemblage of jigs,
of spinners and spoons and flies.
The buzzbaits sit unsummoned, sullen
in their rubber skirts.
Today my father does not pull out the rod
or the reel.

He rows
in silence through the trees,
knowing as I know
that nothing
needs to be said.

This is one of nine poems by Grace Wagner published in the Spring 2017 issue of Skidmore College's Literary Journal, Salmagundi Magazine

I is for the Internet

     If you have time and even if you don't, the internet is out there to inspire, intrigue, and irritate you. I use it much the same way that I've used the dictionary all my life. I have a particular word to look up. I find it and along the way I find another that I must check out, which of course brings up something else. Before I know it, hours have fled, the laundry's not done, and the dogs want to be fed.

     Today, before I decided on my I-word, I was surfing http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/p/a-to-z-challenge-sign-uplist-2014.html. This is a list of bloggers participating in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. I've been dipping into the blogs randomly, sometimes because I like its title, sometimes because it's next on the list, and sometimes I click on one by mistake.

     This morning I clicked on Amrita @ The Book Drifter (BO.) Who could resist The Book Drifter?

  

Iridiscent by KM #atozchallenge   

     Oooooo. Shiny. Pretty colors. An ammonite! I am hooked. And a poem. Not just any poem, but a witty, word play, anagram. This was my inspiration for today.

     I've been enamoured of ammonites since my first divorce thirty-six years ago. Lake Texoma's bed is limestone. (If you research limestone . . . But that's another story. And so is Lake Texoma.) Suffice it to say that limestone is often rich in fossils. Ammonites are the most unusual (at least to me) and certainly the biggest fossils on the shores of Lake Texoma.

My small pieces of non-iridescent ammonites

 





     My as yet unpublished book Murder on Ceres would not be possible for me to write without the internet. NASA's website is invaluable.  http://www.nasa.gov/  They have amazing photos. If you've never surfed NASA, you're in for a treat.

     And Youtube's video of  Chris Hadfield's cover of David Bowies 'Space Oddity' while aboard the ISS makes me smile. Check it out  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

     The Internet!