SAMPLE POEMS

copyright © 2024 by Rennie McQuilkin

The Lost Cane

for Sarah

Searching everywhere for my cane,
my beautiful blond sycamore cane
with the clever face, upturned nose,

eyes knowing how to home,
and the grip that fit my right hand
as if known by heart – searching for

my precious cane,
that steadied me when I lost balance,
I think always of you, my best support.

As my hand snugs the lost cane
in reverie, I feel it curl about gone parts
of you, my belovèd I am never without.

Another Worn Path

after Eudora Welty

Against loving advice from you, dear daughter,
I had to travel alone down a worn path,
though you were deep in my heart.  Forgive.

I set forth with final things packed for hospital,
just in case, necessaries and memorabilia
of my belovèd, a prelude for rejoining her –
headed out on the road worn by so many others
for an examination I feared.

Down Crestview I went, past the high school's
garish graffiti – out-dated history of young love –
continuing to an industrial wasteland
pocked with enormous potholes, passing
grim tractor trailer lots, crossing rusted tracks,
reaching Cottage Grove Rd. – no cottages, no grove,
just rage, traffic out of control . . .

Mirabile dictu, I made it to the uninviting grounds
of a sprawling medical center, then finally to a waiting
room into which I limped painfully, undone
by the loud maledictions of a patient cussing like
a Weird Sister from Macbeth.

When my name, sounding strangely foreign, was called,
I was led to a roomful of Dantean, truth-loving machinery,
into which stepped a white-coated man
who assessed me in silence and listened to my wheezing:
Take deep breaths and say EEEEEEEEE . . .
At length he smiled and pronounced me salvageable,
no ventilator in my future.

Oh joy, I can unpack
my mind.  I head out, my own parade in celebration,
straight to another body shop to erase my low pressure
light.  Happily, I am inflated to the right psi and turn

left on Park for Pasticceria Italia,
close as a parking permit permits.  Using two canes I am
a replica of deer dancers she and I saw on the high Hopi mesa,
my body bent to the front legs of a deer, talisman for
long life.  The door chime might as well be the ringing of bells
at spruce-clad ankles.  Oh perfect, they still have fresh-baked
blueberry muffins, I tell you – your favorites.

Back home, I gulp air joyfully and undo what I have left
undone – water your dry mandevilla plant with a mix of
Epsom Salt for magnesium and blue Miracle-Gro.  May it
bloom again!  I tell you my living is merely a postponement
and the plant drinks in its libation with a small kissing sound.

Next morning I hear something other than a band of angels –
a Carolina Wren, up from down the coast, serenading,
underscored by a raucous Redwing.  Hosanna in the highest!

BEYOND SEEING

First thing each day I look to the garden.
Each day it is not the same. The first aconite
has pushed its gold cup through a crust of snow
or one purple hyacinth has appeared.

The eye of my eye wants more. It wants
to see more feelingly what sort of rough and velvet rub
the aconite and hyacinth know on breaking through
and if their knowing is anything like a lover’s knowing

that registers only in a knot at the top of the spine.
And what in the all-knowing scheme of the universe is
the equivalent in a plant that, as we hear, knows
dismay if we hate it and blossoms for sweet nothings.

And what knowledge of colors do these bringers of color
harbor? Is it something like taste or smell or hearing
or a sense so foreign I can never understand but still love
to delve deep underground to speculate upon. That seeing.

MOUNT HOPE MOMENT

for Nern and Archie

Somewhat alive on a vibrating Tempur-Pedic bed,
I emulate a Roman sculpted on his sarcophagus
but have in mind something more.

I am thinking of Mt. Hope Cemetery, my daughter
with her swain walking that city of the dead,
Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony nearby.

How alive this garden place with its blossoming
Thundercloud Plums, Star Magnolias, Pink Dogwoods . . .
How the dead must feel a sort of resurrection.

On a hillside near the Poets’ Garden
Nern and Archie are level with a treetop, seeing
eye to eye with what happens now.

Two Pileated Woodpeckers, their dance finished
(around & around the maypole of a larch, much pecking
of tree and beaks, exposing of long neck by the lady),

they move on to the main feature. She lies flat out on
a limb and he, having withdrawn to a far oak, flies
in, white wing escutcheons flaring angelically, onto her.

UNDERWINGS

My father’s tool shed was a serious place
smelling of dirt and fertilizer, sharp
with the tines of tools for his Victory
Garden, counter offensive against
the Germans.

It was important but not the magic
of the outside of the shed with its cedar
shingles where the moths I loved hid from
day, their almost invisible wings merging
with the shingles.

I would approach them slowly, carefully
place a hand beside one and wait
for it to lift its upper wings as if to fly,
revealing red, tiger-striped underwings,
so much

like easing into bed next to Mother
on the far side from Father, waiting for her
eyes to flash open, showing deep blue
for a moment before Father groaned and I
had to leave.

Despite the drab shingling of later years,
I wait for moments of such shocking joy
when a song, a taste, a sideways glance,
an act of unalloyed love
lifts the veil from another world.

TRANSFORMATION

for Robin

In the beginning he was kin to the animals,
all that crept or swam or flew in the garden
of his youth, housed them in his bedroom –
newt, box turtle, fantail, milksnake, luna . . .

Now, a lifetime later, having lost so much –
his spleen, half his pancreas and bits of liver –
he settles on one creature: red-combed
Black Australorp, Wyandotte, Plymouth Rock . . .

The hens settle on him, arms, shoulders, head,
yellow feet warm, voices a subtle chortle he
understands, responding in kind, leading them
out to forage in the wild he watches over –

Big Plym, Ginger, Tina, Marlene, Griselda,
Thumbelina, Pepita.
Others nest deep in his heart, remembered
by a flowered memorial in his rock garden –

Pretty Penny, Cri-Cri, Aigline, Ursula, Bandita –
names he recites as he passes their nook,
recalling how they, like their living sisters, made
of tasty dirt, grubs, and earthworms

such multi-colored eggs – beige, olive, umber,
tan, cream, many shades of blue . . .
heavenly eggs, gold at the core, reason to hope
we too may translate lowest life to loveliness.

Amulets

for Robin and E.A.M.

It is my son’s time
of life and death, time
to wear an ornamental
tsuba, hand guard
from a Japanese sword,

protective pendant
once balancing its weapon
in samurai battle,
still providing balance
in the weight of its sway.

I too, in my similar state,
hold a talisman close,
otter carved into a stone,
precious gift from Mother.
It rests in a pocket

over my left hip, the one
invaded by a riddling of
cancer advancing on me.
The otter reminds me to play

and returns me to riding
as a child on the belly
of my mama, as the young
of an otter float at ease.

It is thus my son and I thrive,
defended by supposings
of our minds so real
they will us long life, long life.