the face in the corn

nostalgia

          

                                                    nostalgia

                                                                  

              for as you know what we call nostalgia 

              is for the life we did not live

                                           - Gerald Stern

                                                   

the girl with the cat-

eye makeup asks

me what i want        to be

15 & saunter

into Vinny's Pizza on the corner of 86th 

& Lex    lean against the counter curling

smoke rings from my mouth one

inside another    to watch

Big Tony's stubby

fingers spin the pie high till it rises

to the tin

ceiling then slams

down a swirl 

of sauce a toss

of cheese    to hear 

the jukebox chant

Gene Chandler's Duke Duke

of Earl The Drifters making love

under the boardwalk    to gaze in

to her feline

eyes & murmur

                            gimme

a slice

& a Coke

yardwork

Last week, crows & hawks. This week, turkey vultures. The rewards of yardwork. Every fall, I resolve to clean up the garden, compost the vegetable beds, maybe get some garlic in the ground before the winter rains. Every fall, my ambition outstrips my effort.  I'm sure I deserve some kind of government subsidy for fallow fields. I don't dislike the work; in fact, once I get going, I'll work morning to evening. So the work usually begins in February or March when the rain subsides for a week or two. Something primal or maybe just ancestral stirs. I dig out my mud clothes, my gloves, boots &  favorite weeding tool. I start slowly. My winter of weights, yoga, and Tai Chi helps me unwind, but the garden muscles, tendons , and joints have been sleeping deep in the body. At first, I bend for the weeds, then squat, then sit, my right leg straight, my left foot pressed against my right thigh. Garden yoga maybe. As morning warms, the tool in my right hand reaches deeper into the earth, finds the roots. My left hand pulls the weed, tosses it into the pile building behind me. Sometimes, I'll work on a poem, turn a line this way that. Sometimes,  I'll think of wise words to send my children then forget them as the rhythm of the work brings me to silence. Over the years on this piece of land , I've learned the nooks and crannies, the subtle slopes beneath the grasses. I know the time for the first mowing before the mower will be overwhelmed. I recognize the different grasses and how they will respond to the blades. I've learned how low to duck beneath certain trees to save my scalp, how to balance my weight as I cut sidehill, how to slow as I descend the steepest slope. And every year something new appears. Maybe a new grass or a volunteer oak emerging from a tangle of blackberries. Or what is new is how I see a microclimate that has evolved over the years. Usually my dog is the first to find these places. As she grows older, she values the cool places in summer, the warm in early spring. I try these places out to understand what she has learned. And as I watch the hawks, crows, the jays, the flicker who comes the last two days  to feast on the ants in the rotting wood bounding the garden beds, my body slows to the earth, becomes one more changing constant in this place I call home.