Archive of poems by E. Russell Smith
© E. Russell Smith 070402
Second Horse of the Apocalypse
Corrections /Agriculture Canada
The View from Thirty Thousand Feet
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Posted chronologically and indexed alphabetically.
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Finally -- after days of heat
and humid foreplay, and an hour
of electricity -- comes the rain,
like the upchuck that relieves
a spell of chronic nausea.
Behind my oriel with a glass of wine
I watch the street. It is a river
swept by a witch's broom,
every bristle bouncing.
Tom's wife comes home from work
in a flimsy cotton dress. She pauses
under a spindly tree across the street.
Then, clearly drenched, she grins at me
and walks on into the downpour.
My peonies lift their turgid buds
to meet the wet. I see Noah's
pastel rainbow in the cloud;
the covenanting sun descends
beneath the fleeting overcast.
At the end of the day
Tom comes out with his hose
as usual, to water his perennials.
© E. Russell Smith, Ottawa 060531
Our daybreak dip disturbs
the surface tension of the bay.
A weak wet sun lays flecks
of fool's gold down a windtrack
ominous of weather.
Tall clouds flicker and spill.
Raindrops bounce
on the throbbing lake,
and scour the decks and shingles.
Glitter threads the needles
of unfailing pines, until
a breath of air releases it.
© E. Russell Smith (Eagle Lake, Ont., 060719)
Other pilgrims have stopped
out of weariness or sloth
or bad advice, and settled
for a fantasy, venerating
all the sainted dead enshrined
in holy reliquaries, giving up
on life before they die.
In this citadel at last, far from
the west side of the wilderness,
I stay my course to dance
barefoot on these cold stones.
Here I discover you once more,
my only burning bush.
© E. Russell Smith 060514. E.B. See Browning's "Aurora Leigh" Bk vii:810-811:
"..every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."
The drama was Too True to be Good.
That night we walk the length of
Queen Street, empty but for us,
a floral panoply of hanging baskets,
curbside planters, window boxes.
In the dark we poach two slips
of lambent sweet potato vine
and take them home in water picks
we've saved from pillow roses
courtesy the Prince of Wales.
© E. Russell Smith 060706
Pine cones drop on the cabin roof
and start my day. A red canoe
takes me far along the bay,
where morning would be quiet
but for a celebration of loons,
and a camp of urban savages, mustered
on a promontory, chanting tribal hymns.
I penetrate the heart of marshland,
and its brilliant hush. The redwings
have taken their sabbatical at last.
At midday I retire beneath the trees,
to read another life. A damsel-fly
lights on the page. It punctuates
the passage and the import
of its own and every gift of being.
A cruiser bearing half the world
passes, and is soon forgotten
till its train of bow-waves
trails along the rocky pediment
and reminds me of itself.
In time the hot sun finds me
through the forest canopy. I move,
but still it dogs me, so I drowse
and wait until unfailing Earth
rotates me into shadow.
© E. Russell Smith 060819
Rachel is weeping for her children, because they are not.
Jeremiah 31:15
Before the rain, the hot wind
winnows birch chaff
over spiders' webs,
hairspun nets that camouflage
the dark intentions of the lily-beds.
After a late-day thunder shower
the sun returns to kindle
hanging drops of light
and to inflame the toxic fruit
that glows in guilty shadow.
July 18, 2006
[This month in Palestine the slaughter of innocents begins another generation of hate.]
© E. Russell Smith 060718
In memory of Liam M'Carthy, 1828-1895
At first, he ploughed and planted alien corn
among these stumps. The shallow soil provided
till his stubborn share struck sparks on stone,
and quaking aspens raided at the wild edge.
The shallow land could not bear harrowing.
He prospered, breeding Clydesdales for the camps.
He died in this old house. For years thereafter,
till the fire, the furniture still danced. The floorboards
creaked beneath the mill-end rug. The window-blinds,
half-drawn, slapped up against the glass.
Breezes walked the empty hall, and dust motes
winked in a cold beam just beyond a glance.
Now the earth rolls up and hides behind itself,
a small eclipse. His spirit hovers near,
a hoodless falcon that has slipped its tether.
Here, till dawn, are lights -- the moon, the fireflies,
the phosphor of a rotting stump. The horseman's legacy:
a pit of rust and blackened timber, rank with fireweed.
And in the morning sun, where fireflies have come
to rest, dew glitters on the web-spun bracken.
[© E. Russell Smith 1996. Liam M'Carthy settled near Booth Lake,
now in Algonquin Park, and farmed 1865-1895.]
You can recognize a small truth, because its opposite is falsehood.
The opposite of a great truth is another great truth. -- Niels Bohr
Spruce and hemlock
shade the shallows
where I see my face,
a moment easily forgotten.
Beavers at the outlet
keep the level of the lake --
a small truth, but yet enough,
with little faith, to take us
through a day of paddling.
A greater truth is the lake itself,
its opposite a dry bed,
just as great.
near Mount Uniacke, NS
© E. Russell Smith 060907
Water chuckles, breaking gently,
patiently among the stones till
in a distant epoch it has etched
a record of a million days like this.
On such a day, warm enough
to draw a lone cicada's keening,
fine enough to bring out scooters
to offend the perfect lake,
grace is lost. Even on Sundays, trains
whistle through the rural crossings
taking away our stones to satisfy
an appetite for quicker evanescence.
© E. Russell Smith 060730
for Denis and Audrey Tetlow
A fine day, green and wet,
glows beneath the morning sun
and offers only cloud enough
to decorate an empty sky.
I have no map. An old fell-walker,
now restricted to the dales,
points me with his ash-plant
to my way. His lady smiles.
North of the tarn I find the track.
A devious break through bracken
takes me dryshod through a wilderness
of fell-bank wet with side-hill seepage,
dropping finally to Far Easedale.
Only sheep observe me, and,
as I arrive, my frail guide
shuffling with his stick to meet me.
Grasmere, Cumbria, 22 September 2006
© E. Russell Smith 060922
Witched from his court into another shire,
hunched against the obloquy of three millennia,
the crippled ruler of the Rollright Stones
mourns beyond the circle of his cohort,
seventy-seven poxy minions.
Nearby, three conspiring officers,
grown weary of their whispering,
have nodded off to sleep.
(The Rollright Stones, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire --
a circle of 77 stones, a solitary menhir and 3 standing stones of a Neolithic dolmen)
© E. Russell Smith 060926.
1. Advent
A glacial angel, vestal of the great divide,
holds in her glassy cup and paten
secrets of a time between two testaments.
God fancied her with unicorns and dragons,
an afterthought too late to be included,
a brief moth, dust on her frozen wings.
Above a dark baptismal font, prepared
to pardon us for failing to make love,
an unbound falcon stoops to word made flesh.
Jasper National Park, Alberta
2. Christmas
Thomas Didymus skated east of Eden
late in the shortest day. Transparent ice
heaved and groaned beneath him.
He found a captive fish embedded,
inches down, and even as he watched,
an eagle dropped and clawed at it an hour,
unable to extract it from its reliquary.
It is right, thought Thomas, that the fish
remain secure from such assault.
3. Epiphany
In church that morning I perused
the formal liturgy prescribed.
Before it started I departed.
Far beyond the hallowed opulence,
cold air cleared my head of incense
redolent of lurking death.
Going home, I watched three crows
consume the remnant of a fish
discarded on the right-of-way.
4. Shrove Tuesday
Overnight starflight of paper lace
scatters on velvet this immaculate dayscape,
laid to be tracked and gone by sundown.
I am a morning sparrow waking up street
and steeple where once God heard, now,
I think, under snow and two thousand years.
You are there, confessor, hearing old sins
and new conceits at the end, eternal keeper
of keys and ledgers. The snow forgets.
5. Easter
Each fall the kinglets feed
on stink bugs in the birches
by the house, and head on south.
Someone said they had returned
on this spring morning,
but look, they are not here!
See, these are the trees!
But they have gone ahead,
to nestings in the boreal taiga.
6. Pentecost
A river flows between our solitudes,
that was an obstacle in other times
to insolent intruders.
Now friendly vessels carry
visitors who speak in many tongues,
from either side, into the whirlpool,
and in this woodland where we watch,
ruby-throated hummingbirds descend
like flames, out of the hardwood canopy.
© E. Russell Smith 061105
Rain again. Still, for the exercise,
I walk, and I discover change,
wet mutations I'd have missed
through foggy windows of a car --
a footpath, once a muddy track,
now paved by order of a council
finally acceding to persistent
corner-cutters over public land;
a playground full of slides
and monkey bars where once
we Indians and cowboys, packin'
cap-guns, fought for territory;
a bike path where the railway ran
behind a bakery and a warehouse,
with asparagus gone native
on the clinker-dry embankment;
and where there stood a Texaco
garage with pumps and a mechanic,
an ethnic grocery selling organ meats
and ugly roots that probably are edible.
Icons of my lively memory vanish,
landmarks of secure indulgence
cleared propitiously away for
emblems fresh and green and wet.
© E. Russell Smith 060112.
Dawn doesn't break, it bends,
to a pewter shade of icy black.
Pines and spruces hiss and rattle.
Glazed and naked maples quake.
Inside the cedars, sparrows prattle.
The halfway hazard of December
finds the sleeping city unprepared.
Commuters hunched in tired surrender
crunch across the crust to cars
and set out risking fender-benders.
© E. Russell Smith 011130.
The morning sun ignites new snow
in this steep valley. A rusty pump
stands useless where we quarried
granite for the walls that buttress
and sustain these strangled lanes.
Squirrels and chickadees appear,
expecting to be fed. Below us,
rapids tumble. Here, our forebears
once canoed a catastrophic passage,
emerging wet and not much wiser
for the warning. They began the world,
and we, having filled the continent,
now devise, unlike the dinosaurs,
our own impending overthrow.
In memory of Braddish and Lamira Billings
Homesteaders, 1813
© E. Russell Smith 011229.
Idlers watch me fit my skis
and start across the brutal crust.
A cyclist, scarfed and hooded,
clatters past. A jogger
heels her unleashed dog.
An old man inches over glass.
A phantom fox considers me
and vanishes. His random tracks
criss-cross the waste of frozen
goldenrod and milkweed shells.
A rusty camp-cot in the snow
awaits a summer resident,
with more boudoir accessories --
a crippled folding chair,
an empty tea-chest, and
a three-wheeled grocery cart.
Beside me roars black water,
where I dare the river ice.
It groans beneath my weight
and rumbles far along the shore.
Uneasy in this demi-monde
of neither charm nor grace,
I climb the bank. The white sun
drops into the bones of trees.
Idlers watch me stow my skis,
and with a shiver not of cold, I leave.
Ottawa, 20 February 2006
© E. Russell Smith 060220.
A vaulted firmament of stars
soars above the western chantry
of Our colonial neogothic Lady,
filled with choristers and brass.
Pleated pillars painted green
uphold a species of authority
and semblance of an antique order.
Capitals flower in gilded plaster,
purity of the fleur-de-lys
mingling with acanthus leaves
whose spines convey conviction
and the trenchant dole of sin.
On this Mithraic observance
of the return of heavenly Light,
a distant bishop, far to the east,
celebrates a Word made mortal.
Notre Dame Basilica, Ottawa
© E. Russell Smith 041224.
Today in Baghdad, convicted
by a duly constituted court,
depravity incarnate, human in form
but void of any sense of turpitude,
suffered quick disposal at a hempen end
before his sycophants could rally,
or misplaced sensibilities
could raise a voice against it.
He should go nameless into history
lest his martyrdom be assured,
lest the hatred of his minions
and our own antipathy smoulder on
through morbid generations.
© E. Russell Smith 061229.
I bring you gifts,
you who can purchase
anything you fancy,
but do not.
You need, as I do,
love, and touch,
and beauty,
and another's fair regard
an indulgent wish, this last,
but self-approval only
is a quick-step
to a partial measure.
© E. Russell Smith 061222.
Stephen Harper
I turn right when I reach the street,
follow the curb, turn right again
at every crossing that I meet,
until I'm back where I began.
Jack Layton
I do the same by turning left,
and thus, as every walker should,
I face the flow of traffic and
uphold the law and public good.
Stephane Dion
I alternate from day to day,
and can be swayed to change direction
if one goal remains in sight --
to triumph in the next election.
Gilles Duceppe
Peu m'importe le chemin
je suis toujours le tour du Bloc,
un Quebecois surtout, malgre
le manque d'interet du ROC.
© E. Russell Smith 061203.
This afternoon a hundred crows
fly east, silent, except for yelling
"Hawk! " at a pair of circling red-tails.
There's been rain, and Sawmill Creek
is high, here where it enters the city,
before it's channeled, cribbed and curbed.
I push through shabby second growth,
tracing the line a king's surveyor
drew two centuries ago
with plane and alidade, and I
emerge (like him, I must suppose)
arrayed with burs and beggar-ticks.
Close to the Transpo overpass,
across the ravine from the railroad track
where the O-Train glides to town and back,
I sit in the sun on the crumbling pier
of a vanished bridge where early settlers
crossed the creek, and think I see
in craven crows and hungry hawks,
in streams confined in concrete walls,
in the craft of humankind arrayed
against the supple wilderness,
brief rivals only, in a neutral
cosmos that can never lose.
© E. Russell Smith 061123.
No one walks across the Causeway! --
only I, weary of art deco , seeing
too many homeless, sleeping rough
on the South Beach sand, I seek
the grace of Renaissance or Baroque,
far back in time -- but I have time.
The sun is high, and I set out on foot
across the Bay to Coconut Grove
and the Villa Vizcaya, exotic folly
of a merchant prince who left off selling
harvesters to build a doge's palace,
with imported antique ceilings, frescoes
and mosaics, porcelain and tapestries --
a classic room for every period.
Briefly an old man's winter home
protected from the sight of poverty,
it has outlasted hurricanes,
rogue tides and negligence. Now
visitors will pay to wander through,
at once enchanted and offended
by such a spectacle of riches.
© E. Russell Smith 070105.
"What's that you're writing?"
asks a U.S. Army grunt
who joins me at the bar.
"A journal," I reply. He says,
"I tried that once. I couldn't hack it."
"Sure you could. You should!"
"No way. I turn out bullshit!"
At his table, he's been drinking
in the keeping of a watchful sister.
I persist. "Just do it! Let her read it,
no one else. You'll get the knack of it."
We talk about Iraq. He fortifies himself
before reporting for his second tour,
becoming more convinced wih every drink
that his service is a patriotic duty, and
that he could blog about it brilliantly.
© E. Russell Smith 070105.
In old Grand Pre, Evangeline
stands young in epic bronze,
raised on a plinth to gaze
toward heaven. The pending season,
cold and golden, quickens her
to follow her abducted lover.
Far to the south, I find her
once again, now grey and old,
in lonely marble by the church
of St. Martin de Tours.
Her hands are clasped; she rests
her sabot-blistered feet.
Apres le grand derangement,
centuries beyond the heartbreak
and generations of diaspora,
she figures forth one truth
in all the fantasy and myth --
the faithful sinew of old Acadie.
© E. Russell Smith 051104.
We rise five miles
into a darkening sky,
high over iceworn peaks,
pawprints of man,
the lower river and a city
where the falls reverse.
The horizon over Fundy curves,
subtending in our solar space
this Goldilocks roundel.
13 February 2007
© E. Russell Smith .
Distant from the hoofbeats of the sea,
an ecclesiad of wooden churches
hallow the ice-choked anchorage.
We moor at Mader's Wharf, and stroll
the sheltered lanes of painted cottages.
The townsfolk welcome us,
strangers from the cold,
to chowder in an upper room,
safe harbour, still and distant
from the hoofbeats of the sea.
Mahone Bay NS, 16 February 2007
© E. Russell Smith
A favourite for half a century,
tonight, in black and white
(like all of us) and standing tall,
Harry hosts the opera gala.
Two thousand voices sing to him
(an honourary citizen)
a "Happy Birthday," "Bonne Fete",
with full symphonic orchestra.
He thanks us for our kindness
after Nine-Eleven and Katrina,
for sanctuary to draft-dodgers and
deserters from wrong-headed wars.
And then, assuming the prerogative
of contemplative age, he warns us
of the folly of a failure to support
the Arts in our curricula.
The Governor-General gave him lunch.
No one warned him, so he says
with twinkling eyes, that she's a woman,
Haitian born, and black, and beautiful.
Ottawa, 17 February 2007
© E. Russell Smith
The cottage where his children grew
faces the frozen river, one of a row
that once were village dwellings,
now a faded cloister by-passed
and cut off from urb and suburb.
Traffic hisses by on flooded asphalt.
Water percolates along the curb.
He chops the ugly black ice back,
can't wait for spring to have its way.
Invisible beyond the fog, new children
chase and shout beside the stream,
tempted to cross it one more time.
To warn them off, he ventures over
through the silhouettes of naked trees.
A little snow persists where skis
of spectral passersby have tracked.
Instead of children's laughter now
he hears ducks gossiping together.
A flush of mallards splash and forage
in melt-water on the parkland turf.
The houses that endured with him
another wretched season, watch.
He turns away from winter's shades
to chop at black ice on the roads.
© E. Russell Smith . 070314
After the mid-March thaw, we thought
the skiing season had expired,
until a fresh fall yesterday, eight inches,
just enough to cover bare and icy spots
along the trail to Herridge Lodge.
This morning we skip church, and ski
the three miles in, and back again,
under brilliant sun, just cold enough
to keep the new snow dry. A brisk wind
sweeps it from the fields and sculpts it
over ditches. Sheltered where we are,
the forest road reveals an honest world.
Juncos on the ground are watched
by one barred owl that always lurks
close by the lodge. Circling blue jays
cry alarm. Last night a hunting ermine
left a track across our way, and blood.
All is in order. This is our dominion.
© E. Russell Smith 070318
I'm supposed to bend my elbows
at right angles, roll each step
from heel through toe, fast enough
to make the aging heart beat faster.
I walk for fitness, pocket radio
tuned to CBC for sanity, a mile
to circumambulate the block
(my minimum). Two miles
in one direction or another
takes me to the bank, post office,
public library, grocery store
or cleaners, to my in-laws
who will give me tea, or through
the Little Wood that has been left
untouched, forgotten by the Council,
and is now abandoned to the birds.
The more abjectly I persist,
the more I scruple to observe
the rigid rules of this regime,
the longer will this sentence last.
© E. Russell Smith 070323
The aged priest awakens
from his stolen forty winks
to voices of angels (so he thinks)
who "out of love for the truth
and the desire to bring it to light,"
are posting their radical theses up
on the distant western door.
Wiping his hands on his alb
he raises the pyx and offers it
to the empty, echoing nave.
The Church is the Body of Christ,
broken for you, flat broke,
bankrupt, for sale to catechists
of faiths more militant, or
to money changers, zealous vassals
of the Book or of the Bank,
given to extremes and dreams.
This could become a bingo hall,
or worse, the meeting place
of humanists, holy or profane!
He weeps, and limps to the vestry,
using his crosier for a cane.
© E. Russell Smith 070405
he believed in Law, and called it God,
believed in Love, and called it God,
a God so radical and so simple that
the temple priests arranged his murder
on Passover eve, two thousand years ago.
His followers preserved his faith
and passed it down to us, disguised
in myth and metaphor, in stone,
stained glass and gilt, but still
a timeless truth that few can bear.
She left O'Brian twice a widower,
once of a snake bite, so they say,
and that was on their wedding day.
Her angry bridegroom swore, b'gar,
there are no snakes in Ireland,
and he would go to hell and back
to save her. This he tried, and failed,
searching the bottom of a whiskey jar.
And so, for him, she died again.
He lived out his redoubled pain, singing
songs to his guitar, to charming boys,
to bog birds, berry bush and rocks. At last,
when overcast was all his life, a court
of thwarted mistresses assaulted him.
More useless than a priest, they said.
He faltered, sloughed his human carapace
and only thus did he rejoin his spouse,
to her Eurydice an Orpheus.
After reading Ovid's Metamorphoses
and Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche
(The Midnight Court), 1780.
© E. Russell Smith . 070403
I drive from Ottawa to Montreal
one fine clear morning,
two hours with the radio off,
in an outer space of my creation.
The road bypasses every town.
Here are flat and fenceless farms,
with silo clusters standing tall
and safely stowed with corn.
As I cross the shining river,
Monteregian hills, with towers
and temples, rise on the horizon.
Later, over and over, I am shown
the apocalypse I missed. I mute
the commentator's quavering voice,
jealous for my careless peace,
stolen in the impact of that moment.
11 September 2001.
© E. Russell Smith 070429
In Grade Ten, we school boys were told
to learn the manly art of fisticuffs.
They matched me with a boy named Michael.
He was just my size but better built.
I thought he'd win the bout quite handily.
Our gloves were not "best quality and new"
but otherwise the Queensberry rules
were conscientiously observed.
We squared off at the scratch. I understood
that I should try, in three, to plant
as many blows as possible on
Michael's head and upper body, while
I warily avoided such from him.
We crouched like fools behind our gloves
and danced the ring like Cassius Clay.
Our teacher bellowed loud encouragement.
I placed a trial jab on Michael's fists,
which he returned, but when I tried again,
regretfully I missed, and suddenly
his nose was bleeding like a drain.
The bout was stopped, and I retired
to my corner and forever from the ring,
relieved and happy that the other fool
recovered quickly, and went on to be
the flyweight champion of the school.
© E. Russell Smith 070508
They say we must appreciate and care
for our good atmosphere, and keep it pure.
I go outside and sniff. It smells like air,
like any other day, and yet they say
"It isn't good enough. Let's clean it up,
and expurgate olfactory stimulants."
A nose more sensitive than mine detects
accumulated greenhouse flatulence.
Here comes a second carboniferous age!
The first one wasn't all that bad.
The dinosaurs were flourishing.
For safety our ancestors only had
to keep from being stepped upon
or swallowed by a sabre-tooth.
Some of them moved into trees.
We'll have to do the same, forsooth.
© E. Russell Smith 070509
You laboured, happily or not,
on my small shore, with tubes
and burners, Petri dishes,
microscopes and scalpels,
rats and fruitflies. You
explored the field, acquiring
specimens, mosquito bites
and sunburn, hugging trees.
For thirty years I launched
your paper boats. Now high tides
wash your shallow keel-tracks
from the beach. Once my charge,
you have become my immortality,
and now you contemplate your own.
© E. Russell Smith 070522
Good sense fails while idle hope prevails.
We abuse our bodies, act the fool,
assume a new religion, style of speech,
peculiar passion for a sport or party;
feign an alien sexuality;
adopt capricious dress and conduct --
all to win the fancy of another
who has snared our transient humour.
Falseness risks approval. For a time
it holds a foolish bond beneath its spell.
It wavers when its object is secured
and so the trifling whimsy dies as well.
© E. Russell Smith 070522
We light on these hardscrabble shores
like frigate birds, our pouches
swollen and inflamed, to nest,
to harass native occupants
into disgorging our requirements.
We snorkel in freshwater streams
and brackish pools, with dabbling ducks
and sergeant fish. We plunge
with pelicans into the Himalayan breakers,
just beyond the tide-line rocks.
Lateen-rigged on a simple craft, we glide
through mangroves on the glass lagoon
to dine in silhouette against a fiery sunset
on chimichanga, lime and chicken soup,
tequila-flamed bananas.
Our cenote pantheon exhibits no
Corinthian capitals, but dripstone
columns, hanging bosses. No birds here,
but fruit bats enter by the oculus
above the liquid opal where we swim.
The feathered serpent Kukulcan
once hovered like the frigate bird,
soaring over Yucatan. At equinox
he slithered down at Chichen Itza
bringing life and law and learning.
We can read his cryptic words
still visible among the shards.
It is the season of his Evening Star,
whose setting signals times of war...
Our airbus joins the frigate birds.
© E. Russell Smith 070527
While I await the boarding call,
I watch the world go by --
suited businessmen or politicians,
mother with a toddler in a stroller
and a crumpet in the oven, seniors
with excessive carry-on,
a "Senator" with hockey gear,
calling home to Trois-Rivieres...
The pilot causes turbulence,
an obvious excuse to send
the children to their seats.
Buckle up, he says, which doesn't
please a trumpet-tonsilled boy,
unmuted even by the white
cacophony of engines and the slip
of rare cold air across the fusilage.
Somewhere over Kansas or Nebraska
I consume my tuna sandwich
and set out to walk to Colorado,
up one aisle and back the other,
stopping halfway in the galley
for a stretch and contemplative
deep knee bends. The cabin crew
should organize a congo line.
At L-A-X, while I await my lift,
I watch another world go by --
jaded crews, emerging first, and
hurrying toward layover fun,
an anorexic woman, tanned like leather,
cradling a poodle, and a victorious
"Mighty Duck" with hockey gear,
calling home to Trois-Rivieres.
© E. Russell Smith 070621
Sas-Bahu
In a valley of the Aravili foothills,
Lake Baghela shines in winter sun.
Across the water from the dusty road,
have stood for a millennium
two sandstone temples,
"Mother" and her "Daughter-in-Law,"
once vandalized by Moghul raiders, now
by poachers hunting souvenirs --
but still, in flourishing geometry
remains a decorous pavilion,
portaled in the four directions,
pillared with a deep relief where
minor deities and nymphets rut and frolic.
Here Lord Shiva the Transmuter
meditates in manifold apotheoses.
There an empty cell awaits
the coming of Lord Vishnu,
Second Person of the Trinity,
preserver of the universe, governor
and spirit of all time and being.
In the meantime, human life persists.
Below the ruined Mewar fortresses,
on steps of a ramparted ghat
a modest woman in a sari washes clothes,
and gleaming boys are bathing.
© E. Russell Smith 080223
"...the name by which he is called is The Word of God.
And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him..."
Rev. 19:13-14
"In the Inuit tradition... in the beginning there is no word.
In fact there is no beginning."
Alberto Manguel, "The Bricks of Babel"
In grand Creation's changeless Law,
certain as tides, we place our trust;
this is our justice, sole and true,
and here we watch, as watch we must,
stand guard, not only for ourselves,
but every hour in our small place
for other living things with whom
we humbly share this time and space.
Glad in our own creative gifts,
fearful to trespass, we take care
to know how every creature lives,
and this must be our only prayer
for lives to come, our progeny --
that they may know an ordered world,
and clad in white, proclaim their faith,
as wisdom's banners are unfurled.
[Can be sung to Tune: Jerusalem, by C. Hubert. H. Parry, 1916.]
© E. Russell Smith 080519
regret
the shambles you inherit --
fevered world
of melting ice
and acid tide.
Our fetid breath
poisons your air.
Your daily food is fuel
for our infernal engines,
while you starve.
You must change
the present paradigm,
to pipe a better future
into our account
at the unknown,
unremembered gate.
© E. Russell Smith 080714
I may have wasted twenty years
trying to discover how many muses
dance on the point of a metaphor.
© E. Russell Smith 070630
Christmas afternoon. We walk
through empty streets of homes
where other weary celebrants
recover from their gifting,
and await the evening turkey.
Barbara's tree has vanished.
On the flood plain of the Arboretum,
an uncouth spite of weeds
stands ragged in the snow
in place of her memorial.
Our climate does not suit catalpas.
This one had suffered surgery.
Its neighbour has already died
and they have taken it away.
Perhaps its fall from grace
destroyed the one we planted
sadly, such a little time ago.
I will inquire. We will restore
a living stock on which to graft
the tribute that endures.
© E. Russell Smith 2008
I thought the ritual proceeded
well enough, with backup
from a well-trained team --
candle-lighter, lay reader,
storyteller, suppliant,
greeters, ushers,
choir and director,
organist, a manager
of sound and light...
The snowy churchyard glows
beyond the darkened vestry window.
Over coffee, some approved the homily,
but one complained that she
had listened vainly for a word of hope.
She despairs of human vigilance
but does not countenance
the thought of our extinction.
Her need for faith subdues
all urge for freedom. Mystery
seasons reason, to save her
from the bleak and the absurd.
Faith like hers presumes indefinite survival,
no man-made apocalypse, let alone
a cosmic cataclysm, and it trusts
in myth, where comprehension fails.
Reprieve is not beyond the Law.
I have strung white lights around
a half-grown serviceberry,
not the tattered balsam fir.
© E. Russell Smith 090106
As children we trusted them.
They told us God is everywhere,
like Eli told young Samuel
that it was God who spoke.
We trusted without being told
what God is. I could now dissent,
but just in case I'm wrong,
I don't -- what I believe
does not affect the truth.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
One late November Sunday,
I trudge two miles to church,
following frozen footpaths.
Other walkers pass...
Our lives are adequate;
we protect our little space --
no superficial intercourse,
no unguarded eye or word.
We go our distant ways,
too mean-spirited
to speculate on strangers
or risk a new dependence.
Squirrels and chickadees
forage in the underbrush,
ignoring me as well.
In snow-pent January
they will come to hand
to take sunflower seeds.
© E. Russell Smith 2008
Each one
may know,
by a grace
sui generis,
and name
with no word
the Word that
comprehends
every Self.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
It says here that God
made Man in his own image
a work in progress.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
A boisterous day of warm winds
quickens the thaw. A season's litter
rises from the curb-side snow
blackening in the steely sun.
Melt-water trickles to the drains,
and I migrate into the countryside.
One pick-up stands beside a fishing shack
where smoke is rising, but the lake ice
grumbles under heavy snow.
Seepage surfaces and spreads.
I leave my vehicle ashore.
Skis bring me to the island
in an hour and a half. I skirt
the Narrows where dark water
rushes fast. No one else appears,
only commonplaces of the wild --
an eagle creaking in the sun,
a raven croaking on a rocky point,
a bobcat crouching at an opening
to drink, two turkeys, and an ermine
trailing its black-tipped tail.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
A savoury onion is our faith.
Peeling it raw reveals no core,
and yet, if left to flourish
it celebrates in pyrotechnic bloom,
sets its seed and multiplies.
I've spent my life unlearning
Sunday School mythology,
a well-done pabulum, wisdom
braised with onion
and tastefully received.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
In the street this afternoon,
I met a solitary woman
walking toward the mall,
pulling a shopping cart --
not remarkable, except that,
considering her gray hair,
I think that both of us were
children of the Great Depression
and grew up in wartime.
I discern my self in her.
Strangers, we have walked
the strict and radical middle
between two angry lines,
caring for lost parents
and our surprising offspring --
Baby Boomers, X, Y, Z...
and walk on, strangers still,
into silent solitude.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
I found it in the fireplace last night --
bad luck for it, I thought, but surely
not an augury of death. A redwing,
possibly -- so begrimed with soot
it could have been some other bird
behind the glass, afraid of me.
I'm not equipped to catch a bird;
neither could I leave it in the ashes.
Released into the house, my guest
flew straight into a window pane,
and stunned itself. I put it out,
and heard it later, scolding from
an alder where it perched to groom
and repossess its ruffled dignity.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
Joshua in Canaan
left not a soul remaining,
but utterly destroyed
all those that breathed,
just as the God of Israel
commanded, forty
centuries ago.
Today the God of Joshua
is called upon
as "Allah" by
the Taliban.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
Miguel the keeper rests
from trimming rosemary
to chat with us, to let us
snoop inside an old stone barn.
In the dusty gloom we find
Life Magazine, October '38, with
Carole Lombard on the cover.
We walk the canyon trail,
looping higher to return
by splendid belvederes.
Haze hides the distance;
colour inspires the nearer slopes --
sky lupine, purple nightshade,
redberry, and the golden state's
official poppy; buckwheat
for butterflies, and tarweed
for future days of famine;
sacred datura to keep the soul
united with the body
(or, lost to it forever,)
Our Lady's Little Glass,
and six-foot flames of
Our Lord's Candle, burning
after many patient years;
Spanish broom to ward off evil,
and the pale blue yerba santa,
its grey-green leaves sacred
to phlegmatic Luiseños --
all less thirsty than exotics
in our irrigated city gardens,
but not here for the taking.
Back with Miguel, the paths
are strewn and redolent still
with rosemary for remembrance.
Deukmejian Wilderness Park, Glendale CA, 12 May 2009.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
After church she helped with juices.
"Here's the serving wench,"
I noted, with a grin. She bristled.
"That's offensive," she declared,
regarding me as she would
the slime left by a passing slug.
"Sorry," I said, without conviction.
She repeated her indictment
to be sure that it got through,
and went off in Stygian pique.
I registered surprise, and then
regret, vexation and dismissal.
All unfortunate -- I had been
disposed to like her. Now
we are each other's prig and lecher --
a gap of gender and generation
aggravated by one's feminist chip
and the other's careless banter.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
In Algonquin -- wary and wet,
I paddle hard for the portage,
a long walk under my canoe,
or at day's end, a small tent,
and bannock over a reluctant fire.
On the road home, raindrops
bounce like flowers of evil. Tires
plane on the glassy pavement,
wipers beat, barely coping,
and I peer through spindrift
from looming semitrailers.
In the city -- dry as ledgerbooks,
I watch in doubtful safety
from a glass tower, swaying
in electric cumulo-nimbus.
Commuting rain-struck
in sodden shoes or on a bike
that sprays my hunkered back,
I wish myself beneath my
solitary roaring roof, behind
rain-rattled windows, safe as
a squirrel in the scantlings.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
A twenty-minute walk around the block
used to be a mile, but now they say
it is a kilometer plus. We got slower;
then you dropped walking altogether.
Too many years have idled past since
last we went to paddle down the Barron.
A green canoe hangs in the carport,
drying out, like us, and needing care --
neat's-foot on the thwarts and gunnels.
I could paddle solo, but to get it down
takes two, two drivers too, to organize
a two-day paddle down the Barron.
I'm looking through the fridge for
something near its best-before date
that should become our dinner.
Those freeze-dried packages
would boil up easily for camping fare,
if we should paddle down the Barron.
The weather's fine, and I could golf,
nine holes perhaps, but I have phoned
around for company and everyone
is busy. So for exercise I vacuum floors.
I clean the carpet on the stairs --
and we'll not paddle down the Barron.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
I paddle solo a backcountry river,
dark flat water flecked with spume
from a high cascade above, marbled
by the random eddies, clearing to reflect
a blue intenser than the sky itself,
and high white cumulus gleaming.
One red maple in the general green
portends the season's imminent change,
and under it, inverted also in the stream,
stands an old gazebo, only clue
that this is not a wilderness, although
throughout this whole long afternoon
I've been alone, down this slack reach
and one white spate that I must drag
to reach my launching site again.
How has it served, this edifice?
-- a trysting place perhaps, or setting
for untroubled family gatherings,
where parents sat in friendly shade
on summer days long past, and watched
their naked children splash and shout,
swing and drop from the knotted rope
still hanging from a shoreline tree,
straight from green to glassy green.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
We ignore the forecast,
and suffer October rain
the seventh thru eleventh holes.
The turf is waterlogged,
but under bumbershoots
we keep our club heads dry,
and in the end, we win
against the odds, the card
too wet to save the score.
We finish after six
in rosy light, drive home
into a full moon rising.
(Near Ashton ON,
4 October, 2009)
© E. Russell Smith 2009
"I AM THAT I AM." Ex. 3:14. (KJV)
Law and Beauty prove,
through all creation and within,
to proffer grace.
A thrush is potent
as a poet's measured voice,
to ears that hear.
A wind print crosses
fields of barley, truth unveiled
to eyes that see.
A sudden certainty
conceived in wakeful night
contents the soul.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
I envy mediaeval monks their chance
to walk in solitary cloistered bowers,
and read from breviary, Book of Hours,
or Testament -- a consecrated dance
between the spirit and the intellect,
a virtuous stewardship of precious time
from prayerful Matins to the hour of Prime
when on our vast Creation they reflect.
This afternoon, in scarf and Tilley hat
I quit my sheltered house and cosy hearth
to face October's sunny chill instead;
I found a plastic garden chair and sat.
Without a colonnade around my garth,
I did not ambulate. I simply read.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
...'Tis wonderful
What may be wrought out of their discontent.
W. Shakespeare, King John III.iv.179
Someone else must tell of our abuse,
in times of stress, of the Acadians
(their expulsion still too little known),
of Japanese Canadians, or the Jews.
First Nations' tellers must record,
before they die, their suffering
in our patronizing schools, and voice
the folly of our Inuit dispersals.
In due time victims will recount
the fruits of our environmental
lethargy, and our self-righteous impositions on a poorer world.
The best tale turns around adversity.
My generation lacks all discontent;
we enjoy our serendipity. Surely
I'm too lucky to be competent.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
"Did he take his cell phone?"
Alone, first of the season,
he broke his own trail eastward
on the lagg beside the Ridge.
The pale sun cast no shadow
on the new snow, cold and dry,
but this incipient winter
had not yet frozen hard
the jeopardy that lay beneath.
Two miles out, a caking slush
fouled his glide and bindings.
Skis off to clean, he couldn't
make the right boot hold again.
Turning back, he tried to scooter,
with the one ski not attached.
His foot slipped off, punching down
through thin ice below the snow.
Water poured into his boot.
Pulling out, he fell, exhausted,
in the hip-deep powder,
one pole out of reach.
The light was failing, and
a freshening wind raised a drift
across the mire. The sudden white-out
hid his fall from grace, and filled
his traces leading back to base.
Did he make it back? If so,
he never told a soul about it.
Mortified, he might have kept on,
eastward still across the pond
to some obscure horizon, and beyond.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
So faith, hope, love abide, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
Taking a chance beats worrying.
I lift off in a winter rain,
with faith that this machine
will rise above all obstacle
to fly me safely home,
and with hope, ephemeral as
the overcast we pierce, to cruise
above the dazzling cloudscape, hope
that snow, perversely from the south,
will not imperil our arrival;
and all of this for love,
which Paul suggests is greatest,
and he might have said as well
that of these three, the least is hope,
less helpful even than forbearance.
© E. Russell Smith 2009
1893-1932
Left-handed, couldn't spell.
Paints, not words, her medium
for any surface -- doors, walls
and furniture bore her landscapes,
figures, flowers and fantasies.
Men and women loved her,
in sustained succession.
She laid aside her brush
to give cold access
to her perfect body.
She kept her purest love
platonic, for one old bugger
who became infatuated
with all her passing men
in turn. When he died,
she took a shotgun to herself.
She bungled that as well,
suffering disemboweled
through hours of harrowing
to end her life with brush.
© E. Russell Smith 2010
Rosa ranches in a canyon
of the thirsty chaparral.
Aurora's village lies between
the muskeg and the tamarack.
Neither takes to whisky.
For myself, I keep
in both their cupboards
a selected single malt,
aged ten-twelve years
in hand-picked oaks --
on one shelf, mellow Speyside
for the cool Pacific evenings;
on the other, Islay, redolent
of peat fires and iodine,
for snowbound winter nights.
© E. Russell Smith 2010
Here, through more than forty years,
we raised our children, and lived on.
Here their mother died, and here
I now have only space and things --
millstone, albatross, and anchor.
Here is the port of my departure,
where the young sailed long ago.
I'll go create new memories,
when I can jettison dead traces
of times and worlds now altered.
© E. Russell Smith 2010
Love graces the beginning
of our isolation. Rain is silent
but a fitful breeze shakes
large drops from the oaks
that overhang our noisy roof.
The far shore and its dark horizon
separate the firmament above
and lake below our island perch,
both brilliant mirrors of the cold,
through silhouettes of foliage.
We huddle by a wood stove stoked
for comfort and for making tea.
The heedless wild lives on
beyond our shell. Self-titled
phoebes nest below the deck.
A loon yodels to a broody mate
tending their single egg
on a nearby shore. A vireo
claims the forest canopy, while
chipmunks chatter on the floor.
At evening they have lived
a day that we have simply spent.
At dusk the clouds slide east.
A star-drift fills the empty vault;
we find the only grace we can.
© E. Russell Smith 2010
A week of heat
breaks with a thump of thunder.
Little Leaguers in the park persist
so long as the rising gale is dry.
Wind buzzes the French doors
of my fourteenth-storey balcony.
A passing pigeon tosses like
a sere leaf in the willful air.
Far hills first and then
the nearer towers vanish
in a luminous mist. A few large drops
chase the players home.
The leading edge of the storm's wing
carves the sky, until the falling sun
paints its under tail coverts,
and it flies away.
© E. Russell Smith 2010
Today she told us
she will go away.
She fled the room
to sidestep our objections
and to hide her tears.
In shock, we wonder
whether we should
look for someone else.
Some think not,
to save expense.
Some think her role
is past its usefulness.
Much as we love her,
we agree to say she
simply cannot be replaced.
At noon I buy her lunch --
a salmon salad sandwich,
and a puréed pumpkin soup,
with sour cream, and parsley.
Parsley eases pain.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
"And there came another horse, bright red, its rider empowered to take peace from the earth."
from Revelation 6:1-8.
I have climbed this summer field
so often, to its sunny summit,
reminded only rarely of its horror,
while the meadow bloomed as always —
buttercup and Queen Anne's lace,
purple vetch and hawkweed.
But now arrives November.
At the bottom, dead leaves gather
in sodden heaps, with rubbish
left by after-season tourists. They
have heard the battle rattling in
the limbs of naked trees, and
turned their backs. Three horses,
white, black and palomino,
join a wild bay mare, abetting
conquest, war and murder,
such pragmatic union useful to
their diabolic purpose. Riders
in Prussian helmets goggle back,
repossessing former glory,
mindless of artifacts broken
under hammer-hooves and strewn
in bloody pools. My eyes cast down,
and now I see in the water darkly
their reflections thundering into
imminent oblivion. To walk in
radiant fields of flowers again,
must we forget?
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Desmond Tutu
disapproved,
but in November
a thick-skinned
black-skinned
Porgy and Bess
set in Soweto
entertained
near Tel Aviv --
unconscious
of a prick of paradox
or cynical twinge --
entertained illegal
West Bank settlers
while their walled-out
neighbours couldn't
get there from
apartheid villages
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Six prison farms have recently been closed
because the Government was not disposed
to keep three hundred inmates of their ilk
supplying flour and vegetables and milk
to penitentiaries. They said the skills
they learned in gardens, stables, fields and mills
would not, as sentences served here will cease,
prove very useful after their release.
Besides, the savings didn't cover cost,
and too much time and energy were lost
on convicts meant to be in durance vile.
But then, perhaps the mild bucolic style
of life would heal an antisocial psyche --
and we'd discover one that we could like.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
The land lies freshly whitened
by the blizzard yesterday. We fly
above it through a constant dusk,
keeping pace with a setting sun.
Dark forest interrupts, then yields
to bare and crinkled hills, profiled
by weak light from the west, a sky
still bright and blood red at the rim.
A spot of yellow light betrays a town
tucked in the oxbow of a stream, or at
a junction of two right-angled roads,
leading to (or from) the landscape's
four extremities. There people sit
at dinner, each with a reason or
a motivation that they never question,
asking only for that light and warmth.
The yardlight of a solitary farmstead
by its quarter section punctuates
the crease of gridiron laid across
the arrant randomness of streams.
They wander aimlessly, it seems,
with neither purpose nor utility,
but have in fact inspired direction --
the inevitable way to distant seas.
Nebraska, 2 February 2011
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Let us give up golf
(fairways are toast)
and also water sports --
the reservoir too low
for boards and skis,
kayaks well-nigh useless
in the scanty trickle down.
The city pays the farmers
in the thirsty Valley, just
to leave their fields in fallow.
Let us sit in the confusion
of lawns and lotus garden,
wallow in the warm jacuzzi
and complain about the price
of salad greens in February.
San Diego, CA
© E. Russell Smith 2011
I miss the daily skate downtown,
and passionate skiing weekends.
Christmas is so white, but so is a beach
beside a green fairway, and I can play
on either one in summer shorts,
wander semi-naked in the semi-desert
through red-rose blooming ocotillas.
Here no sculptured ice on a frozen lake,
the signature of temporary winterlude;
sturdy bronze instead -- Cubist Lipschitz,
perforated Hepworth, Rubenesque Maillol
and malleable Moore, inverted in a pool
with lacy locusts and old acacias.
I walk at will, without my balaclava,
boots, mitts, scarf or overcoat, to scent
magnolias and flowering almonds,
weathering a short pink flurry, confetti
for an old affair that's now permissible.
Petals lie where they fall on patio stones
of havens and retirement homes,
pink or white or brown side up,
in random encounters, like dissidents
in Tahrir or Tiananmen, Times or Trafalgar,
fixed in a moment of waiting, waiting
for a shriving, for a shriveling,
for an acceptable number of deaths,
for the morning when the sweeper comes.
Los Angeles, February 2011
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Three time zones east of yesterday,
still I rise early. A pale moon fails.
I find a coffee, walk the vacant streets.
The horizon of an ailing city
rises out of ashes, dark against
a glowing sky of blood and roses.
A carrion crow relieves the owl of
its night watch of my wakeful hours.
High-spirited Sunday sparrows,
starlings, larks and winter finches
forage in the gutters; no other life.
This cruel cold may cauterize
two years of weeping lesions.
I fly before the dirty weather strikes.
Detroit, 20 February 2011
© E. Russell Smith 2011
I'm not useless yet -- been here before,
but the virgin camouflage, white and cold
in early morning light, has me mystified,
and I'm the first bushwhacker to the site.
There is a way. I search a stupid hour
before I find the opening that never freezes,
not a secret, but obscure for good or ill,
through the knotty tangle to the mire.
Later I take a mental memo, here recorded:
once I pass the "No Trespassing" sign and
reach the winter heartland, I must strike
along that open freshet till the cattails part.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
I wasn't shriven this last Tuesday.
There was no extravagant parade;
no Bourbon Street carouse, only
an ecclesiastic pancake supper,
eight dollars cheap for three small
buttered flapjacks, maple syrup
freshly boiled up in the bush,
two tiny breakfast sausages,
and a string of purple beads.
After simple decorous festivity
I came home for a top-up snack
of beer, a baked potato and
my own leftover chicken pie.
A shriving now would be in order.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin
(from 'Love', George Herbert, d.1633.)
The guilty sin is not in dust
that rises from your wasteland
in a scourge of sudden scruple,
like a plague of god-sent locusts
westbound on a tropic wind.
Guilt seeks excuses for audacity
in fireworks of chrysanthemum
and reckless guarantees of love.
Here is the acid test, if you pay heed
to auguries of alchemy or creed:
Love is neither gratified nor troubled
by untimely consummation;
Love yearns to offer welcome,
once the urgent leg is over and
the carnal appetite is surfeited.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
He says they meditate
each morning and evening,
precisely twenty minutes,
with a timer. She admits
she would be delinquent
if he didn't keep her at it.
He has instructions
and a silent mantra to
anaesthetize the mind...
ten minutes for a starter
sit up, feet flat on the floor
empty the turgid brain
ignore distractions
traffic in the street
choir boys in the vestry
laughter in the corridor
breakfast bacon Sunday
persistent scrotal itch
Get a grip! this is religion...
high altar, silver chalice
stained glass and candles
steeples, towers and transepts
Jesus, Jacob, Jeremiah,
original trespass (as in Adam)
Jonah in the belly of the whale
also much cattle, Apostle Paul
bedazzled near Damascus --
This game leads nowhere.
No exit to this labyrinth.
I can't think of nothing...
Beep! Ten minutes.
Was I sleeping?
© E. Russell Smith 2011
"God said to the serpent...
you shall bruise his heel."
Genesis 3:14-15
Before I call her,
I walk in the park,
a narrow glassy footpath,
frigid wind, but a sun strong
and warm, open beechwoods
to penetrate, dreaming
old wilderness.
Before I call her,
I limp that country mile
of spring ice and frozen slush,
spasmodic hiccup of a winter
dying, east of Eden -- a hard
mistake, on a heel bone
bruised by a fall.
When I do call,
her time is not her own;
she works the graveyard shift,
nine-day rotation, like myself
out of step with the world.
And her father is ailing
(my old friend.)
© E. Russell Smith 2011
Alien coltsfoot waits beside
the rugged foreshore road,
a flicker quenched by shadow.
Spruces die of beetle blight,
and birches die of urgent age.
And so the rocky prospect widens,
just where stands a vacant church,
a whited sepulchre with porch
and gothic lancets, tiny tower
and probing steeple, up for sale --
only seventy thousand dollars,
antique oaken pews included...
Unobstructed sunlight falls,
and hardy coltsfoot gilds the
harsh grit of the rustic shoulder.
© E. Russell Smith 2011
the scent of lilacs,
town parade,
boy on a pony
(someone's grandson),
tortillas, rellenos,
refried beans for lunch,
knees touching
under the table cloth,
delights we might have shared
when we were young
together,
as we are once more,
fifty years onward...
© E. Russell Smith 2011