“reminding me to remember what has yet to occur”
~for Jean Fisher~
this poem title lay fallow now near four months;
the poem title, a riddle in and of itself,
my inability/reluctance to bring it to a
spoiled fruition is simply and sumptuously explained,
no idea what it meant and
cause I got an F in future-telling in 8th grade,
when we still believed anything,
even hap-hap-happy was a possibility
all day long fits and spurts;
a sad poem rattles around in every part of my overcast Saturn day,
this last eked out September pretend summer weekend,
bereftness so powerful,
that the weather is slapping me down, hard, for begging,
gray grey sadness in the windless stillness
asking,
why,
do you deserve it?
the death of summer is a tree ring completed, a marker of
nearer-my-death that I dare only utter to my pillow,
hoping it won’t betray my statelessness to whomever makes the bed and plumps up them pillows up into squealing my hidden
truths and trust
birthing the past is easy and not what the title,
words I wrote somewhere, is asking for;
no so more straying and to the
scribbling and pecking
do I attend
that title commenced ironically at the end of May
when the summer man feathered his mental nest once more
and now my blindness clarified.
now when summer commences, was I not secretly reminding myself of what was sure to occur -
that troubles will come in cold and snow,
and no longer will the little house by the sun bathed bay be an available antidote to the real toxins that grow stronger
this then
was the clarion self-hint to prepare,
reminder to self
for the summery summation-end inevitable,
for the perfect ending of this poem
now that I have accurately
predicted my future
the title has borne its
bittersweet fruits
wrote this title down on May 23rd
whenever I stumbled upon it,
no poem came running
until this ugly September 8th
