Poems for Bigs by doida

The fruit flies are back 

hovering the banana bowl

compost tin

and kitchen crevices

where colonies of coffee grind escapees 

nestle.

Aerobatic motes.

Lively nuisances

reasserting their stubborn tenacity

in spite of Clorox wipe-downs

and genocidal chemical spray-overs.

Summer has ticked its cyclical presence

on the planetary calendar

and with it

these new drosophilae flies,

insistent

through their dizzying audacity

that I am actually 

not in charge here 

after all.

I took a troubled trek in leaf-green mountains,

and cogitating,

missed a turning of the trail.

Soon other walkers with their dogs 

faded into silence far behind me,

but I, oblivious, ambled forth

taking a timbered timegone track

where lean watchers laughing into paper kerchiefs

rustled their mirth at my mindlessness.

Eventually I sloped downward where

a high levee of cut sticks interrupted the path.

A beaver pond, bowled in stillness

floated just above my head,

the seeping creek bed, reimagining itself below me

burbling onward.

For a long instance I stood very still.

Their work was simple, rough, and beautiful.

I exhaled then, gratefully,

understanding almost comically

which direction I must turn

to find my way again, 

my true way.

Birch saplings quivering delicately danced before their mothers

as I stood unlost among the trees,

weeping.

At sixty-five

He became old.

The day before,

he was still a strapping man

in the prime of his middle age.

On the day before he turned sixty-five, 

he still had all of his teeth

and remembered where his keys were.

The next Thursday his knees folded up like a card table,

so he put them away in a hall closet and 

hobbled about in supreme stiffness.

On Friday, his heart fried-egg-over-easied

onto his whole wheat toast

in a golden glob of cholesterol, the bad kind.

By Sunday night his wrinkles began to overwhelm

his outfits, the checkered pajama bottoms and 

faux leather slippers,

wrinkles deepening into fissures, fissures into catacombs,

catacombs holding nothing but bones and dust.