Short poem

Geof Huth

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Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

What a shame I’ m not good at making my bed
Or washing the dinner dishes.
What a pity I’ m awful at broccoli-eating
And feeding my sister's fishes.
So sad I’ ve no talent for cleaning my room,
All those jobs — it’ s so hard to get through them.
(If I tell you I’ m no good at those kinds of things,
Maybe then you won’ t ask me to do them.)

Diarrhea: what nobody likes,
though a word the French love to pronounce.
They surround it with lips and tongue;
it pleases, like saying cellar door does.
Once I gave a pair of tweezers
to an au pair girl who couldn’ t extract
a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure
for both of us to see that little thing come out.

A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,
holding earth and sky together with her shadow.
She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story,
blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm.
We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing.
We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather.
We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double —
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Now and again
I am here now
And now is when
I’ m here again

I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.

Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other —
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.

When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass.
Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts
and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’ t got
the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and — huh! — there is art.