I have just stoked up the wood burning Jotul,
and just in case we are inspired to song,
put on the heater in the music room.
By my wing-back
is the copy of Great Jones Street
cover curling from the damp
bookmark in place.
I have just cooked turkey in mustard
with old-fashioned mashed potatoes,
loose leaves of lettuce on a serving plate.
We eat the leaves the way you might eat bread
alternating with the main dishes
to refresh your taste buds.
Normally I don't cook,
but S was obsessively ripping up plants
by the roots,
with a pitchfork,
clearing the way for timber men
who come next week
and fell the huge dead almond.
As usual, once the plants are out of the earth,
S is in anguish
until there roots are once more snugly tamped
into soil in some new nook of the garden.
We have the only jetset irises on the island.
Their lag is six months,
but I suspect a new variety
is in the making, an iris genetically evolved
to thrive
on displacement.
Actually, given the world we live in,
where homelessness is not only from war and acts
of God,
where even our village of two hundred fifty souls
has a man living in the treehouse
built by kids, who offered it
when they noticed he was sleeping under a porch
by the parking lot – living in such a world
I started to say, it's no wonder
that all nature
is becoming extremely transient.
Not only do species die,
billions of new creatures are born,
most of them viruses
threatening the human race.
It's the world fighting back.
All the animal minds are calling on their brothers,
the primordial forces of the earth,
the volcanoes, the very geological plates,
the winds, the sea,
and, in the heat of Africa, another microbe
was just sent on its trajectory
toward the total destruction of venal man.
Now it's time for a couple of tokes of female dope,
if there is any.
Searching this cupboard and that close,
she comes up with a jar
of just the right thin,
except the flowers from 1991 have mildewed
to a damp mass of funky green
fuzzed up at the edges with white mold.
Another jar says female, no year,
but turns out to be okay.
Now comes the hard part.
What to do the euphoria?
Read a little?
Look a Schubert?
Put a few words down?
Deya c. 2000
Patrick Meadows 1934 – 2017.