Design

An early "unglued" draft collage this morning as I think of cider and art and loss and abundance and  the stories people tell and how once in a while, someone reveals something so close to the core (sorry) that one can taste memory and reality being remade.

Sometimes one needs to shift to epic mode. Thus, a tanka instead of haiku.

Robert Frost, that ol' trickster, wrote the most trickster-ish of poems, "Design," which isn't about design at all, but about the foreground of coincidence against the background of an indifferent universe. (And there's my modern poetry course in one sentence.) Yesterday's confluence of cider and art and loss and abundance and stories would have Frost chuckling into his shoo-fly pie.

I'm being a little opaque here, because this is my husband's poem to write really. I was just listening. I don't even like cider, except in the form of donuts. But I gleaned this tanka from the experience, and perhaps a haiku or two, and the opportunity to say, George, go write the poem.

*

memory's arc—
the pears from
his grandfather's farm
the blight, the burning
of the trees