Native
Star
Stan Renfro
© Copyright 2009, Stan Renfro
2nd Edition
All Rights Reserved.
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ISBN: 978-1-60414-142-9
Mother
Suburbanite you ever were,
A lawn your greatest joy.
You never liked the great outdoors
Except by window scene.
My father took me into trees;
A cabin, as a boy,
Started my poetic quest
To keep our planet green.
Together, though apart,
You grew me up, a man
Moorish by design and yet
Scotch-Irish in Èlan.
Preface
The reception at the wedding
You danced, more or less.
The pace was slow, you were upheld
(embraced) walkerless.
Sedate as Cinderella
At a later ball,
Watched by the assembly,
Godmother to all.
Mother
1
So gradual the phase into
Old age: a door, a hall,
An address at Encino Place,
A view five stories tall.
You've entered every year and
Exited a sager self;
Now you need a knife to reach
The sugar on the shelf.
Recipes have been a pleasure.
The image of you grows:
White haired mother humming music
Everybody knows.
2
Your back is humping now,
Arthritis has your hands;
(Unblent, the halo on your head)
Your thought, circling, reviews
Certain memories more often -
Marriage's pitfalls -
The children still maturing, and
Alfredo needs new shoes.
The beads the elders hang at night
You check along the hall,
Then crumple on a bed before
Six pictures on a wall.
3
Infirmity, after a life
Of firm, decisive acts
Can be a shelter for release
Of legendary facts
Like how you helped so many -
At home, at work - the way
You richened other lives, and
Set your children free
To follow their decisions
Knowing that your love
Is always at the window
On the fifth floor, up above.
4
Even for an elder
You are in between
Those who have a higher story
And those on ground floor.
Never one to call attention
To yourself, you deem
Others by their cleanliness
And style, and ignore
Gossip, think of Lincoln,
Alfredo's broken hand,
Your life a living legend that
A cane can still make stand.
5
Reputation is the sugar
That precedes the taste,
And remains as sweet after intake
And yet will last
Among the many people who
Have sampled simple wares
Produced from ancient recipes
Her enterprise prepares.
6
Chocolate chip or peanut butter,
Gum drop, ginger, too;
Four dozen cookies bimonthly
Escorted to his door:
Mr. Wripple, ninety-plus, respected
For his taste,
With their disappearance will
Request to savor more.
7
Poised above a cityscape of lights
The elders view
The past domain of life they lived
And levitated through.
Gone, the peers and dogs and yards,
The calendars of time,
Come, a place for far review,
And daily lapse of sun.
8
Concoct a bunch of cookies,
Clean overtly every room;
Hum a host of melodies, and
Put the knee brace on.
Line up all the yellow pills,
Don't forget some twitce.
Calendar the doctors' dates;
A do-nut will suffice.
She shares a view upon the world
Five stories in the sky
Midas never treasured
And moneyed men pass by.
9
Take an elevator up,
Enter my mother's room.
A window for a wall opens
By sun or passing moon.
Comets trace a little light
Across the city dream;
Albuquerque traffic never
Leaves the lower scene.
A sepulcher of mothers,
The breadth of life we know.
One by one the windows frame
Humans who passed below.
10
As pawns off of a chessboard
The elders move away,
Shuffled into rest homes
Or coffins for a stay.
Time's a designation
No matter where we go.
Days derive from eons
To eons none may know.
Comet !
1
Slide a comet by the Earth
As silently as sight
Can cast a veil - singularly
Fragile, moving light -
And some will see, as most will not,
Heaven's thinmost tail.
Stellar influence can mean
Vague dimness dawn will pale.
2
Close a comet in with light,
Lunar first, then dawn.
Still, the friction is the same:
An orbit will move on
The ices that cohabit space
With life and haler orbs,
Eventually to shatter in a glow
The sun absorbs.
3
Intercessions by the moon
Do not occlude the show.
Orbit-wise, the comet, closer,
Has an oranger glow.
Delay does not mean loss. In fact,
Wait can mean a gain.
Moons defer reflected light
To ice's dim refrain.
4
A comet shows a lonely course of light
All set to move
Down a sky past dawn, inset
Within a solar groove
That will ellipse into the stars
A chunk of icy stone
And reset a cosmic watch by men
When we are bone.
5
Every comet causes murmur
Among men on Earth.
Comment on trajectories
Ascertains our place.
Marbled on a little globe,
Cities glow our girth:
We a pebble bathed in blue
Orbiting through space.
6
A pale intrusion in the sky,
Diaphanous as breath,
Signals, as an Earth goes by,
Accoutrements of time:
The compilations of the arts,
Additional to death -
Faint illuminations cast their light
Upon mankind.
7
A rhapsody of glimmers
As a comet heats away,
One A.U. and little more
Is close enough a sway
Of light nearing the sun,
An orbit of a gown,
A glob of stone and little more
Suspended over town.
8
We divine divisions of a comet
Will occur,
Dematerialization of dim ices
That inhere
Because water's properties
Without the heat of sun
Firm the fragile ices
Orbits cast to be undone.
9
Loose assemblage, light's interred
Within your gaseous jets,
Released as you fall away. If
Comets came in sets
We would be nonplussed to see
In our spacious skies
Nuclei with fans of light
Grow variants in size.
10
Chunk a cloud a million ways;
Reassemble space debris
Twice as far as Pluto is
From a burning star.
Addle all a little with
A nudge of gravity -
One lone speck will comet by
The sphere where people are.
They will name it and exclaim
And then forget the show
As long as it won't overwhelm
And burst on Borneo.
11
Local augurs, alerted,
Crank out thoughts for men
To predict the consequences
Of the light they ken:
Bluish yellow foreign frieze
Beyond a mop of ice
Boston's size, yet far enough away
To make its pace
Seem slow instead of fabulous,
A rush around the sun,
Herald of the cosmos, Ka,
An eminence in one.
12
Clandestine as the acts of sex
That happen all around,
Comets must begin on high,
Dark angels of renown.
Oort Cloud, beyond the ken
Of Earth's slight atmosphere,