My heart sees all the better

my eyes can’t see as well anymore
but my heart sees all the better

my ears have begun to fail me
but I hear the quiet budding of success

I move more slowly now
but have learned to be still with myself

my aching body is stiff and sore
but my spirit has never felt so fine

my memory is slipping
but I’ve got a firm grip on what it is to live

my head is going gray
but I have found all my true colors

I get out of bed earlier
but still have plenty of dreams

I live more softly
but don’t back down from doing hard things

my teeth are getting artificially replaced
but my soul is real and all my own

my bones are brittle
but my resolve is strong

I no longer bounce back
but continue to look forward

I tell the same stories over and again
but become a new me every day

I’m nearer to the end
yet I have only just begun

Terri Guillemets

Battery

my youth is caked over
with heartache and pains
regrets and inflammations
and sudden calcifications
of ligaments and spirit
not-bothers and defeats
that went to my head
and bruises that take
too long to heal
cracked teeth and
why-tries and i’m-tireds

that which galloped
now rolls in ruts
my blonde has passed
to mousy and gray —
everyone i know
looks tired and frayed
sagging from the weight
of time and overbusy
and too much stuff
in too-big houses —
it’s too much life
and too little living —
no vitamines will fix this

Terri Guillemets

Out!

Come, abashed Self! admit one thing:
You have been indoors too much of late…
You should have been out wrestling with the sun,
Or running races with the rolling Earth…
Where’s the old smell of you, when, nostrils dilated,
You were drenched with sea-salt and soil-odor?
Where’s the lusty tang of your voice, cleansed by strong winds?
Your sun-burnt cheek?
And the animal magic of your eyes?
Out of the house with you…
Into the water! Into the sky!
Over the hills!

—James Oppenheim, “Out!,” War and Laughter, 1916

March Night

I shook off the house like a hooded cape,
And came out, free, into the March-blown street…
At a lash of the gale, at a sight of the cloud-tattered skies,
As a coat discarded,
I shook off civilization
And became wild,
And my naked soul raced the clouds,
And the flavor of the Earth was fresh and primitive…

—James Oppenheim (1882–1932), “March Night,” War and Laughter, 1916

Ex Libris R. Le G.

“…multum ille et terris jactatus et alto
Vi superum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram,
Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
Inferretque deos Latio:…” —Virgil, The Aeneid

Having no home, what should I do with these,
Tossed as I am about the sounding seas,
Sport of exiling winds of change and chance—
Feet in America, and heart in France.
Homeless, ’tis meet I find my books a home:
Coffined in crates and cases long they lay,
Distant from me three thousand miles of foam
Dungeoned in cellars cold and nailed away,
As in a sepulchre, till Judgment Day.
Lost to their gentle uses in the tomb,
Cobwebbed companions of the spidered gloom,
At last they rise again to live once more,—
Dread resurrection of the auction room.

Books I have loved so well, my love so true
Tells me ’tis time that I should part from you,
No longer, selfish, hoard and use you not,
Nor leave you in the unlettered dark to rot,
But into alien keeping you resign—
Hands that love books, fear not, no less than mine.

Thus shall you live upon warm shelves again,
And ‘neath an evening lamp your pages glow,
Others shall press ‘twixt leaf and leaf soft flowers,
As I was wont to press them long ago;
And blessings be upon the eyes that rain
A tear upon my flowers—I mean on “ours”—
If haply here and there kind eyes shall find
Some sad old flower that I have left behind.

—Richard Le Gallienne, “Ex Libris R. Le G.,” May 1905

Death lights heavy

Hummingbird mama
abandons her nonviable eggs —
but keeps checking back
a few more times, just to be sure.

An arm falls from a sickly saguaro
and breaks open on the ground
like a prickly green eggshell —
after decades of desert still-life
a few seconds of death-motion.

But the night breeze is so beautiful
those breezes are — so beautiful
it’s hard not to get swept away.

Terri Guillemets

Talons

Owls are hunters
Humans are mechanical separators —
separating by metal machines
      meat from bones
      life from death
      fat from essence —
but in Nature, where Man used to come from
a long time ago — remember it? —
none of those things is separable.
      BRAIN  from  SENSE

Terri Guillemets