Aubade

Some mornings, even Hello is too much,
a friendly wave will do.
I won’t try talking to you,
unplugged from your hearing aides.

My eardrums reel when you empty the dishwasher,
clanking silverware into the drawer
like a drummer.
Mornings, I like it quiet.

And I cannot abide romantic music before noon:
soaring, throbbing, loud.
Measured, predictable Baroque
feeds my morning need

as does the gentle tick-tick-tick
of sparrows stabbing seeds at the feeder,
the brisk oak-a-lee of red-wing blackbirds,
sandhills trilling outside the front door.

Today, crisp daffodils blur in streaming rain,
and, safe from thunder, the dog finds solace beside me.
Before long, we’re left with a slow drip,
and what was frozen melts, what was closed, opens.

Off I go to scribble lines of poetry—
my morning prayer—
as I think of the poet who said
“the dream is always more than itself”

as morning is—very like a dream—
and like a poem, always
something drumming underneath
asking to be heard.

 

Mud Season

I sweep the porch of chunks of mud
once stuck to the tread of hiking boots

in this mucky spell, with nights about to shrink.
End season for setting out mixed seeds for the birds.

At the mealworm feeder: a bluebird. My dad—
a lover of blue birds, of indigo buntings, of blue lights

only on our Christmas tree, who once marched me to my room
for a spanking when he thought I’d sassed my mother.

Sometimes he’d stand on the front porch
and play Mess Call on my brother’s trumpet to call us in

or beep the Morse code letter “K,” da-dit-da
on the car horn to signal he was there.

A stickler for time: he’d lock the door
for work meetings, embarrassing late-comers

but he would gently brush messy bangs
from my forehead, waking me for school.

Even more than a diagnosis or prescription
what people most wanted from their doctor, he said,

was to be touched. Though, in the end,
no measure of touch could mend his detonating heart.

Today, I lean over to remove a chair that clutters
the porch, and it’s heavy in my arms. Once again

I can’t see below the tip of childhood’s opacity—
he, busy with house calls, delivering babies,

an insecure wife jealous of time spent alone
with his daughter

…and so the man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife—
the Bible always falling open to that passage on those

occasions he felt fatherly instruction was necessary.
My puzzled brothers and I would ask each other:

what is cleaving exactly? Was this why
we didn’t see our grandparents anymore?

I often wonder how the son of a chicken farmer grew up
to attend Tufts, and end up as a respected doctor.

In this muddy season of impenetrability—
how little we knew each other.

 

The Manatee

We check the end of the dock for manatees
found in Florida waters languidly grazing
with seven-muscled lips for mouthing
leaves and grasses, satisfying massive appetites.
I see patterns made by an eddying paddle-tail
before she emerges like a thick worm,
or a sunk weapon coming to light.
Brown, round-shouldered, amorphous.
A heavy, floating paradox. She holds her breath
and I hold mine until she oils away
for something more intriguing.

Home in Michigan, I envision the manatee
like anything massive and un-imaginable:
the universe, gravitational waves,
the hidden cosmos underneath.
Though the manatee floats like a parade balloon
drifting on a string, she is as large
and mysterious as time travel. As strange
as hours lost in a dentist’s chair
asleep under false tranquility.
She is as baffling as the earth’s core
or the life of a blind white fish
found in subterranean caves.
As impenetrable as a subtle hint of flavor.

She must be intimate with the divots and hillocks
of her moonscape in a country I can never know,
tucking memorabilia in all the corners
of her messy basement. She’s all id,
below what’s conscious. She is dark desires
I’d rather not give name or harbor to,
a lifelong, closely held secret. The sin’s
lazy appetites indulged, rolled into one.

Barely discernable from murk filled
with tiny particles, she levitates, and
I catch her tail—dragged to sleep against my will—
I dream of her skirting a sunken ship
or camping in the submerged island of Atlantis.
We float down the shadowed hallway
with the silence of a ghost.

 

The Bass Philosopher and the Jesus Bug

Gazing up through sun-pierced prisms in the water’s skin,
this old bass spies a petite skiff with a sleek body
and six legs that skim-glide on a rink with no ice,
that walk the line between water and air.
This delicate, surface-dimpler
can never get thoroughly wet
like me. So many have tried to name him:
water strider, water skeeter,
water scooter, water skipper, puddle fly,
the Jesus bug.

As he stretches out three sets of thin legs
I watch him stride-scoot-skip after mosquitoes,
dragonflies, midges, caddis flies.
He’s not picky. There, he grabs
a fresh-hatched tadpole with his
two short front legs, pierces it
with his mouthpiece straw,
and sucks it husk-dry.

He joins, then circulates, at a small-talk
cocktail party where he sniffs and lunges
after females endowed with a shield
to fend off advances, permit greater selectivity.
But this cagey bug has composed a devious
workaround—tapping the surface to signal predators
so any female under him knows she’s first
to be eaten by the likes of me, she’s spurred
to get it over with, and be on her way.

This flighty strider with all his appetites
is not constructed for deep dives
into the sea-weedy depths I know so well.
He’s hungry, lusty, practical, direct.
He never wonders what else there might be.
He’s no Plato’s cave man eyeing the shadows
where I lurk, gazing up through sun-pierced prisms
in the water’s skin.

 

Photograph Printed on a Postcard: early 1900’s

Eight young men pose in two rows with a rail
holding sixteen carp dangling from strings strung
through mouths baring soft and squishy gills,
their weight pulling them down in resignation.
Two men wear suspenders. Four sport big grins.
One stands arms akimbo, let’s see you do better.
Grandpa’s in the middle, ears sticking out like wings
so I know it’s him—before the Great War, before TB,
before his shoulders curved in to shelter his lungs,
and his burdens pressed a permanent hunch into his back.

Once Grandpa told me he and his cronies
would dig a little bay beside the river,
sprinkle in a lure of canned corn,
watch carp swim in,
and club them. Is this sport?
Did their stomachs growl so much they had to
go after grubbing bottom-feeders from a cloudy river?
Maybe they told themselves the thunk and crunch
were a better end than the slow hook,
death being certain either way.

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  • Katherine Edgren has published two books of poetry: Keeping Out the Noise, by Kelsay Books and The Grain Beneath the Gloss, by Finishing Line Press, plus two chapbooks: Long Division and Transports. Her work has appeared in many journals. Her past work includes heading up a Department at University Health Service and serving as a Project Manager for Community Action Against Asthma, a participatory and intervention research project through the School of Public Health, both at the University of Michigan. Katherine is a former Ann Arbor City Council member, and is a retired social worker. She lives in Dexter, Michigan.