Too early,  the dreary skies, the cold days.
The warm, the sultry, the windy without-a-coat ones
Were allowed to pass without note
And our opportunities to dust off the bike
To put the canoe in the water
Silently changed from must-do-soon
To wish-we-had-done.

Too quietly, our coats and sock and over-shirts
Took up positions nearer the door.
The sandals became stacked and set aside
The lawnmower found a place further back
Behind leaf-bags and rakes that await
The spaces between rainy days.

Too silent became the phone
Too still the mailbox
First summer, first birthday, first autumn
Without garden and cooking notes shared
Or stories of people I don't know.
Too long and silent will come the winter
Without her footprints in northern snow.

The distance between me and she
When easily traversed by arm extended,
And finger tips, always is;

Nearby means a wholeness,
And in it the reasons to stitch together
This moment and the next;

Savouring the experience of place
It makes more the whole
when we both partake of the view;

The flavours, of the labours,
Of the growing, of the plants, of the garden
Are ignited by them being for her;

The skeleton frame of our days,
Is fleshed with a texture soft and supple,
By the day-to-day of us;

The being apart is the punctuation
In the subsequent being together
Of a sentence we serve as one;

It's that glowing strand of highway
That may go short or long over the hill,
That we discover together.

In the silence of the night,
It's the weight of all the breaths
We will exhale and inhale together.

Choosing a series a words for a ditty,
Those we first pluck a few at a time.
For readers it will, at first, seem so pretty
When they detect that rhythm and rhyme.

But soon, I suggest, it becomes such a chore,
When words strung together do pose
An oft-trodden pattern or insipid score
That bounces and sings as it goes.

The message conveyed in this rigid frame,
Is lesser I fear than than when we escape
From words chosen for just ending the same
Or some fortuitous fit to that shape.

So I tend to lean towards using blank form,
For verses I build by the letter,
And chose the words that I feel will conform
To that which my heart says are better.

Forlorn pleas, angst and aching laments,
Thick like a melange of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes,
And plastics that have melted and burned while too close to the heater.

The teen angst hangs in the depressions and around the corners of this place
Where it is damp and wet in the just-breaking morning.
Among the verdant green, earth-rupturing sprouts
There are flower buds that threaten to burst.

The spring landscape here reveals hewn timber,
And crafted structures
Yet also black loamy dirt
Dredged up from beneath the swollen green carpet
Of ferns and sod,
Marking the unmistakable path
Of an errant vehicle,
That skidded unexpectedly from the narrow road.

It starts like a beige tuft of fibre
Protruding from a large burlap sack.
As we pull it from the hidden source
It gradually reveals itself.
Simple and unassuming,
A uniform, coloured strand
Which we gather up into a tidy ball.

Sometimes another strand is tied
Onto the one we pull.
A different colour?
A change of texture?
And so we pull that one anew,
We build another coil,
While the original strand awaits.
The interesting new thread,
Reveals itself from the hidden reservoir.

The fibre slides through our fingers.
Slowly, when there is resistance.
Quicker, when it comes loosely.
Now coarse and wiry
Now soft and slippery,
Now thick and tufted.
Tough Scottish highlands perhaps?
Or rural Ontario?

Sometimes the hidden source seems like it may be
A hand-knit sweater that we are pulling apart.
The strands are still kinked and twisted in places,
Echoing a memory of a shape it has held for years.

We recognize bits here and there too.
Colours and textures from our own story.
"I had a pair of socks like that."
"Remember our scarves from those cold childhood winters?"

The collection of small skeins increases.
From a sheep's fleece, yes, but now too
From Alpaca, camel and rabbit.
Cashmere from Pashmina goats in Nepal?

But at last the final strand comes free.
You feel the weight of the coiled wool,
And see the diversity of the colours.
And for each coil
We remember again how it appeared
How it felt.
How the strands
Came together
And apart.

A small job, replace a bit of wood
On the old worn deck hidden behind the old house.
Textured with cracks and wrinkles,
The old man of the backyard
Would look good with a new coat.

Pulled away the sinking boards
To find rot and bigger cracks below.
Structure takes a poke to reveal
Oatmeal-like softness.
Many pieces must come out.

The whole thing should be replaced,
But I seek instead to deal with failed parts only.
Others remain solid,
Can hold on for a few more years.

Deft surgery required here, and special tools.
Excise a piece here
Replace a metal fitting there.
Don't make the same mistakes the original builder did.
We can do better than that now.

At the end it will look much as before,
But the proof will be in the putting
Of feet to the boards and walking across
With out the creaks and groans.

Another year, maybe two
And we'll take the whole thing down.
And in its place will be something new
Built out of trees that at this minute
Sway gently in a northern breeze.

They reach for the bright ring
All attention on the extended finger tips
Is a sympathetic squirm in your chair  
Our contribution to the attempt?

Can we lift them to reach further?
Can we have the ring lowered?
Resized?
Delivered by courier?

Give them good shoes
And demonstrate stretching exercises.
And at the attempt, let it be of themselves.
Let them do it alone,
And ask how it went.
Lament the failures.
Blame nobody.
And encourage another try.