tree frog
making ends meet
*
he had the directional uncertainty
of a clouded sulphur butterfly
*
when the Talkies came in,
Squeaky got the gate
*
deer have eaten the day-old morning glories again
*
even though I never was, I identify with the has-beens
*
her first tart strawberry
in a world of ‘try this’
*
irises rain-shower wet
how gloriously transitory, the bearded purple
*
the alluvial age of the lost galoshes
*
the summer I had to look up every word
*
I learned the dead man’s float
in the Upper Darby creek
*
he wasn’t the kind of guy
anyone would miss
*
he thought the strength of the dragonfly
must be in her shoulders
*
he had the late August posture
of a sunflower
*
people make me nervous,
yet I think about them constantly
when they’re gone
*
the black bread of quiet study
I could feel the heat beat of this colluding natural and human nature poem in real the.
From the “tree frog making ends meet” with the “directional uncertainty of a clouded sulphur butterfly” speaks to the hazy uncertainty of human existence, striving for survival and search for meaning. And when we cease to resist the flow of life as it comes, only then we would have “learned the dead man’s float” and like the “late August posture of a sunflower”, we may bend but not necessarily break. It also explores to paradoxical tension with our fellow human earth dwellers when the poet writes “people make me nervous, yet I think about them constantly when they’re gone” and gets further philosophical when he writes of the contemplation on man as “the black bread of quiet study” Studying this poem awakened me!-Jacques Fleury, author of “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self