To Be A Poet

 One of my earliest memories

is waking from a nap and looking

out a low second story window

in a house I otherwise do not

remember.  The window is open

and the sound of spring gently enters

the room.  My mother is talking to

a woman on a porch of another

house in back.  A huge white sheet

hangs flat from a clothes line beside

her. I can not see my mother, but

I feel her smile . . . but the white

sheet, glorious in the New Hampshire

noonday sun transfixes me to believe

my world is now safe for words.

This memory is almost seventy years

old as I sit in the shade of my patio

looking out  at rai upon rai of even,

green rice fields.  A gentle breeze

as if moved by the wings of a million

butterflies runs unimpeded over the

flat fields to me and to nowhere else.

Like memory itself the breeze reminds

me again that the world for some lucky

ones will be forever safe for words.

FG     2/2/2014

A rai is something less than half an acre (2.4 rai = an acre).

I was watching a science program which suggested that recognizing color occurs at the same time we begin to recognize words.  Speculation may not be much in the way of poetry, but . . .  Burn It Where It Lays and Fire are two other poems where I diddle with this theory.

The butterflies are from the chaos theory which I think I use in the poem about Mrs. Zeller.  This chaos theory can’t work every time, so there should be a theory for a lesser god, no?

Got the miseries, again.  AKA gout attack.