Riffing

(for my prolific friends)

I have fears that I cannot finish this response
in a final fifteen minutes of an hour’s planning.
Countries fall and are born in blinks of eyes.
What is time to God?

Nothing sticks to cinderblock but thickly,
though not so much carefully, sloshed paint
on a morning or afternoon before the natives arrived,
and when they did the seas churned and heads rolled.

Our office-seas, full of the sighs of souls in limbo,
not so much churn as percolate & drip:
laugh, belly-laugh, chuckle, chortle, snort.
On a good day, one ecstatic humbug after another.

On a side note: when the teacher died,
who paid no social club dues,
were there no cards, no flowers, no ice cream
only the ninth shipment of books arriving to no avail but ours?

I’ve given up on unity, Blondie,
but I must comment on your genius, here.
Whatever paths you choose to poet-maker-motherhood
you will find yourself in a poet’s acres, not alone.

And not birds only, but a growing boy, who will one day
appreciate that the inventions of before his time allowed
his mother to chart the minutes, days, & years of his (and her)
growing (together) in music, not metrics, like how we measure in memories not percentiles.

And I see my lines are growing, too.
I, too, am a Bartleby, a scrivener, a part-time scribe,
a full time friend (though few & far), and a proud, proud daddy
walking the same line as you & you, my friends.

I prefer not to be angry,
but a must confess an untranslatable irritation & a partisan indifference.
I do care , but in tiny bits, all I can gather (Faith is my weakest strength).
Every day I think the poem might come that changes it all.

Then there was the poem that I should have written if I were you.
You chart all our legacies with ten strophes of perfect truth.
I am ashamed of this answer, this cop-out for comment,
a poetic reply that shamelessly riffs, bows its head and goes back to work.

There is no quatrain that can answer the two of you.
There is a sacredness to four lines, to three similar souls,
to two friends who are good influences,
to having the [one] last word: gratitude.