be afraid, be moderately afraid

You are searching. The sun is painting another coat of burn on your tilted neck. Sweat drips--one drop, two drops, three drops--from your underarms and creeps down your side like the spider you're just absolutely sure it is; and you squeal--not much, no one has heard, but still, for a moment there you thought you were a goner.

The tall grasses reach your thighs, tickle your bare, bramble-pricked legs, and manage to sway despite the absence of breeze. For that, you are jealous. What you would give for the slightest, ghost-finger of wind, right now. Among other things, you'd forfeit the ball you are searching for and drop one of your myriad others. Drop it somewhere cushy, some tuft of turf amenable to a solid, if amateur, shot. Maybe reach the green in regulation for the first time all day. But no, it's hot and you're in it now and you're lazy and it's easier to just keep trudging the bramble and marsh reeds, plucking other hapless hackers' Top-Flites from the caked-mud earth.

And then you hear it . . . clonklareee, clonklaree . . . the demoniac screech of the red-winged blackbird. He rises from the foliage like some demented ninja and hovers, flapping, chittering, beak agape--it's your warning to scram or suffer the perils, the seething, hateful perils of . . .

oh wait, he flew away. Seems he was all clonklaree and no bite. It was a good effort, you suppose. For a moment there, you thought you were a goner again. You hackled like a frightened kitten and you bowels clinched, but no one heard, no one saw. Go drop a ball.

skull lull

I am watching the nether rounds of the NFL draft. Surprise, Ether. The passivist poet loves football. Specifically, I am waiting for the Redskins to pick--my team since the Virginia days. Among the hundred other heartaches in the last 20 years--those knuckleheads have contributed a fair share. Every fall, the crows have a field day from elsewhere watching me suffer the sundry slings and arrows of outrageous pass protection. (To borrow irreverently from Shakespeare.)

Meanwhile, it is storming in the southeast. I woke to thunders throughout the night, and now the rain comes in torrents. Needless to say, golf plans have been exchanged, only half-begrudgingly, for nap plans. One thing is for sure, this post is likely to be the most productive thing I do today. Unless, of course, like the lightning outside, a strike of fortuity rattles some dormant creativity in my brain during one of my nap-dreams and I wake up full of the ideas that have been AWOL since I [a]finished writing my novel and [b]started taking Lexapro. As they happened concurrently, it's hard to tell whether [a] or [b] or both is to blame for my lack of inspiration. I suspect it's both. As a matter of fact, if it was not for these occasional conversations with you, I reckon I would not be writing at all.

Here is a poem taking on both of today's themes. The storm outside my window and the lull inside my skull.

Weather

A three o’clock evening
In the afternoon. Clouds
Shoulder the half-day’s
Heat and droop
A makeshift awning.

A fox squirrel drops
His beechnut and noses
The air. The sudden wind—
Ratcheting, ratcheting—
Draws things near,
Hunched and huddled
Like the piebald cat
Against the screened back-door.

And the things to do:
The chicken dinner,
The weekly sit-com,
The bedtime read,
The clumsy career towards dementia.

Electricity muscles heavy
Air and booms, rattling
The loose window panes.
All night the muted
Xylophone of rain
Against the chimney grate
And gutters is just soft
Enough to sleep by.

In the morning--
A ten o’clock dawn.
Clouds loiter, obscuring
The already busy sun.

And what must briefly wait:
The cornflake breakfast,
The weekly trash haul,
The morning read,
The goofy trundle towards decay.