Lady’s latest poem 8.26.2023
Wildlife Way
Our yard is in this foreign country Cleveland
by the Zoo where Latin music beats up the hill
from Friday cars on Wildlife Way
and we set on magic carpet
of our deck
level with the canopy.
We’re so lucky, we say, this house,
our lucky deck.
It’s wild and undomesticated like you, I say,
and confirm the evidence of fallen branches on the hill
which have settled into loopy silver spaghetti swirls
wherever they can be held, protected by
the poison ivy
I do, I do, I think,
and as I set to write in your notebook
God beams light and illuminates the paper and
in my juicy mouth I taste the tongue from troughs of
dripping maple leaf, from the green humidity all around
and the shape around my body baffles my ears with cotton oxygen
The roots of the green grow from fecund soil
on Folger coffee ground from last year’s leaf
where ants daub distinctly on amber legs made from
rubber cement, chitin segments size of dried up scabs
The locust rattle shakes at crow, caws sing saw in lulls
of cricket fiddle, the opera ladies of the woods
These woods are woods in the city
where they don’t have a big building
and squirrels chuck at dogs and we
saw a raccoon in its hollow then
sleeping on a branch all summer long.
This is the wild by the zoo
where we are. A brush of noticing
cleans the palate’s stage, hears clear air
and squirrels swear and chase each other down
the trees in laughter which later
frogs will answer
They like our talk, I say.
Does your belly does your twitch shake
like a squirrel in a safe haven?
Clearance Frogman Henry, he says.
Whatever the song his hit is,
he sings the song in one voice.
Then he sings exact same words
in a high falsetto then more music
exact same words, and lo –
Bullfrog mode.
We’re probably talking ’60 – ’61 –
Coulda been ’20 – ’29
for all I know.
I learn a lot from you, I say.
I know a lot of useless stuff, he says.
Oh no, I say.
You know, he says, just looking at all these woods
We’re so-o lucky. Our house is surrounded by trees.
there’s life in the life in the life –
There’s eco, echo systems everywhere
from happy sap water
to craft brewery beers and
micro dynasties.
Oh, I say.
My brain and my mouth just skip along, he says.
Sometimes I’m here, sometimes I’m not.
Yesterday I called you God’s fool, a joker,
a professor. Today you’re a bum, I say,
an archetypal bum in a sweatshirt,
two torn off elbows. It’s what I like
about you.
You have to put your head back on
Persephone, I tell him. This weekend.
You’ve got to do that.
I kind of like it as it is, he says.
The antenna balances the load on
her back.
Oh yeah, I say. Sculpture of a load
on the back of a headless woman is a woman,
a Woman’s Persephone.
Oh Dear, Dear, he says. I will fix her
this weekend. The bugs are biting.
Maybe that’s why I itch, I say.
The bugs are biting.
Time to go on in, he says.
Time to roll one up,
come up with dog
– Lady 8.26.2023