Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                               Seven Haiku for the Pleiades

The seventh poem – think of the Subaru badge – is not seen. That thoughtful poem is the one you will write.


1.  Two Goddesses and a God Come to Visit

All in the same sky:
Luna, Venus, Jupiter
While the soft winds sigh


2.  Barefoot in the Stilly Dawn

Barefoot in the grass
Eyes to the east, the stilly dawn
The stars have withdrawn

.
3.  Dachshunds on Their Dawn Patrol

Every dachshund thinks
That she is a timber wolf -
Perhaps it is so


4.  Summer Lingers

Yes, summer lingers
Crickets sing throughout the night
Their October hymns


5.  A Prison Visit

The horizon has no meaning
If the prisoners look up -
Concertina wire


6.  The Prayers of Planets and Stars

The planets and stars
Need not our prayers; they never sinned -
Do they pray for us?

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 1

“Lest our old robes sit easier than our new”

Macbeth II.iii.37

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day in darkness cold begins
And on the radio the same dark news
That began this fading Gregorian year

The well-turned compost heap of history
On which we flung the grounds and husks of hope
Expecting little, and so not disappointed
No resolutions, then, no black-eyed peas

No cabbage; let the months fall as they will:
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 2

     Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a      
     thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning
     of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is
     only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

     -Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day opens in darkness cold
And on the radio the same cold news
That began this fading Gregorian year

And ends it, churned by a news-o-matic
To be poured into an old plastic cup
As steaming-hot clichés to be consumed
By the devout, obedient faithful

The faithful, who worship a falling light bulb
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 3

     “O moments big as years!”

     -John Keats, "Hyperion"

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day opens in darkness cold
And on the radio the same dark news
That began this fading Gregorian year

But let us face this next turn of the time
With Aves on our lips and in our hearts
With the cold courage of Crusaders
And the cool kindness of missionaries

And may God grant that never again we ask:
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                      A Decrepit Father Indeed!

                                      Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 37

Sitting for an hour at an outside café
Sipping coffee and writing verse and, yes
Discreetly noting elegant mademoiselles -
I never got to Paris, but my daughter did

Waiting for a steamer along the Rhine
Midsummer Night in Finland the Brave
A blessing from Saint John Paul in Saint Peter’s Square -
Not those either, but my daughter did

But now

Flying to that second star to the right –
We’ll all get there in our dreams tonight!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                    One Pleasing Note Do Sing

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 8

V: Where is my shirt; I can’t find it anywhere!
R: Did you look in the closet? In the dryer?
V: Yes! And I put it in the washing machine yesterday!
R: You didn’t tell me! I didn’t wash clothes yesterday!

V: You always wash clothes on Saturday!
R: That’s a pattern, not an immutable rule!
V: You should have told me that you didn’t wash!
R: Am I my husband’s keeper? Have you not eyes?

V: Can we not with one pleasing note sing?
R: Can you not sing to the washing machine?

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                           Shakespearean, with a Touch of Crass


                                                                            …a poor player
                          That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
                          And then is heard no more

                                             -Macbeth V.v.24-26


An old man’s friends – they knifed him in the back
With inky blots, denying him his custom and rule
He was Caesar, perhaps, or Duncan or Lear
His dear ones Brutus, Macbeth, or Goneril

Hopes of the future, campaigners of joy
Conspiring over poisoned chalices
And gnawing like bones the remnants of their souls
Surprised in their plots by a brazen apparition

Who is this who intrudes upon their narrow stage?
Andronicus – to ****** us with yet another new age

The rest is noise

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                          A Rose of Chambray

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 54

Comparisons to a rose are common, even trite
The Elizabethans seemed to write with rose perfume
White roses for purity, red for desire
Innocent petals, Macbethian thorns

How, then, roses for you, rockin’ your jeans
And an old chambray shirt, barefoot at the easel
With a bouquet of artists’ brushes in your hand
And your brow furrowed with creativity

I give you a perfect rose anyway

Comparisons to a rose are common, even trite
But with you the comparisons are exactly right

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                          Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority

                                Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66

The good among us may indeed be tired
Of being subject to the rule of strident oafs
Jumped-up in station beyond ability
Smug in their electronic ignorance

Their shifting, shifty, and unwritten codes
Order awrong what we might speak and write
How we may draw and paint and film and think
In obedience to their fluid absolutes

But then there is you, a spirit free indeed
A reason for all to hope for a better world

Lawrence Hall HSG
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                                                   Behold a Man

                                 Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets 67 & 68

He is a man who needs no oils or scents
The arts of makeup, filters on a lens
A touch of blush upon his honest chin
A photographer’s vanity lights placed just so

He is a man who is his own manly self
Washed, shaved, and combed by his own rugged hands
Hands that know shovel, hammer, ax, and saw
A businessman’s hands, a protective father’s hands

He is a man who needs no frippery
For he is clean and honest and just, you see

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                        Shakespeare: But I Gave You Your Start

                          Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets 79 & 80

Once upon a time you and I were alone
I wrote of your virtues and your beauty rare
You posed for me, for a portrait painted in verse
You gave my poor iambics a forever glow

Your best is so much better than my good
And so I understand if you have found another pen
To pleasure you with far more skillful words
While I am left with an empty, unmade page

There are other poets of superior art
But please remember that I gave you your start

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                      But It’s Not About Me

                                   Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62

I have always been convinced that the world revolves
Not around an axis but around me
That civilization began with my birth
And that in every way I’m pretty hot stuff

But in the mornings my mirror disagrees
And shakes an image of some old man at me
Slack in muscle, thin of hair, dull of eye
Something to set on the curb on garbage day

No, not even my small world revolves around me
But around you, you who keep me forever young

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                            Cloudy with a Chance of Happy Tears

                                       Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 34

You have teased me out of the house today
Without Leonard’s Famous Blue Raincoat
Because you said this impossibly sunny day
Would be the sunniest, funniest day of all

I was prepared to rebuke you with the clouds
That roiled and boiled almost immediately
But the dancing tears from your loving eyes
Are magic raindrops fallen from the sun

Not every day is a sunny day -
Except for every day with you

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                             Dancing in a Field of Flowers

                                Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 55

I saw you dancing in a field of flowers
As lightly as a happy butterfly
Or the nimblest, sweetest little honeybee
Pollinating the universe with beauty

Even had I not been there, not shared the hour
You were, you are, you will forever be
Complete, without statue, picture, or poem
For you danced joy into this tired old world

Even so, I still delight in those long-ago hours
when
I saw you dancing in a field of flowers

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                  Shakespeare Didn’t Drive a Clapped-Out MGA

                                  Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 49

A time will come when you will audit me:
My prospects as a husband and provider
The possibilities of a comfortable home
And maybe the Mercedes you deserve

I amuse you now, but not for long:
A studio apartment with a rabbit-ears TV
A hideaway bed for frolics in the afternoon
Sale-table wine and Bugler-rolled joints

Not quite Rod McKuen, to my dismay:
It’s not if but when you go away

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                    Do You Deliberately Disrupt My Dreams?

                               Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 61

Do you deliberately disrupt my dreams
And send to me your flirtings and whisperings
So that sleep remains impossible?
Even your shadowy image keeps me awake

Do you deliberately send your spirit to me
To pry into my thoughts and hopes and sighs
To know what I am about in my desire for you
To ***** by night my happy thoughts of you?

Do you deliberately disrupt my dreams?
Oh, I hope so!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                     Dull Substance Indeed!

                                   Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 44

When we are young we are like airy spirits
Smooth and lean and lithe, strong in limb and hope
Earth, water, air, and fire sustain our flights
Beyond all time, beyond the weight of substance dull

But with age, even the stars grow heavy and dim
The orders four of all created things
Burden our love with distances and walls
Pulling us down, wrecking our happy dreams

I cannot run to you, I cannot fly
And yet I know you’re here, in my poor mind’s eye

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                             Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and You

                                  Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 45

Fire and air sound like a poetic cliché
A pastiche from half-remembered Elizabethans
Cut from Jonson or Marlowe, or Will himself
And pasted to a puerile plaint of love

But there is a reality in fantasy
And you are the fantasy in reality
There are swift messengers of fire and air
And you are sender, signal, and recipient

Fire and air only sound like a cliché
For you are truth, truth clothed in splendid array

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                         Every Morning Begins with Sunlit Hope

                                        Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 33

Every morning begins with sunlit hope
Perhaps an echo of the Passover seder
“Why is this morning unlike all other mornings?”
Because this day our hope will be fulfilled

But it isn’t

The arrows of the pharaoh darken the sun
His beatings and executions extinguish light
We work and sweat and bleed, and are still found wanting
We take to our beds in exhaustion, and we dream

Next year in Jerusalem

Every morning begins with sunlit hope -
Maybe tomorrow will be the dawn of freedom

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                 Shakespeare: Honoring a Muse is Sexist, They Say

                                    Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 38

They say that honoring one’s muse is sexist now
That the nine goddesses plus one are victims
Objectified passives honored in name
But neglected when the royalties are paid

But a muse is a goddess of power and truth
The artist or writer does indeed gaze at her
But the goddess gazes back, informing your art
With her beauty and her sternest truths

They say that honoring one’s muse is sexist now -
Ignore their jealousies: obey the goddess

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                    I Might Compare You with Helen or Adonis

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 53

I might compare you with Helen or Adonis
Or yet some other bright-marbled Hellene
An Aegean deity perfected to rule forever
Over that sea where the sunset kisses the stars

I might compare you with those Aegean winds
Who whisper warriors home to their lovers’ beds
Sailors to sea, philosophers to their pens
And all to sing the eternal verities

I might compare you with Helen or Adonis
But they would defer to your majesty

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                 I’m Not Going to Press Charges

                                   Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 40

I gave her my love freely; she did not steal
It only feels that way, for she is gone
She could not steal that which she was given
And she could not possibly leave it with me

The lock is broken, my poor room is rubbished
The neighbors saw nothing, my dog didn’t bark
The unseeing eyes of any cameras are dark
Love has no receipts, no inventory, no insurance

And so, officers of love, there is no report
Except that I lost my case in a higher court

Shakespeare in the Pork

Is this a protest which I see before me,
Clichés to abuse the script? Come, let me meme thee.
I have a master’s degree, so hold still.
Art thou not, sign waver, a Democrat?

Or art thou but a pale Republican
Proceeding from the heat-oppres’sed drain?
     (that swamp metaphor, remember?)
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As a 1950s fraternity boy

Civility thickens, and threatens life’s play
So all ideologues, just
                                           go
                                                      away

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                             I Will Write of Your Youth

                           Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 63

I feel weary and weak and worn-out tonight
Because I am indeed all of those things
And none of this was part of my master plan
Which never was; I lived, and now I am old

I watch you in your youth and your kingly grace
Limber and lithe for hunting, warring, and wooing
A champion in all the arts of life, of love
Even as I was – maybe only yestermind

I limn in lines of ink the story of you –
Forever youthful, brave and brash and true

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                      Let’s Meet Again Next Week or Next Life

                                  Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 32

To ask to be remember’ed is good
Both for the humble asker and for the asked -
For both will pause to consider mortality
And both will pause to enjoy the happy now

We understand this world will pass away
That all created things must collapse and die
And yet we are promised them back again
And each other too, in saecula saeculorum

Then, yes, please, do remember me, if you would -
To ask to be remember’ed is good

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                               Let Us Proceed to Sonnet 32

                                Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 31

There is a reason why Boris Pasternak
Did not recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31
To the Soviet Writers’ Conference in ’37 -

It’s a mess

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                       Love Abandoned Along a Desert Road

                                Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 51

I wonder if my love forgave me at all
For tossing my sleeping bag, my books, my clothes
My typewriter and my dreams into my old MG
And pointing everything west into the sun

Shakespeare speaks of a slow return to her
But I stopped at the Pacific, and lingered for years
A few ‘phone calls from far away, some letters
And then forever silence

Relationships are not covered by a funeral pall

But still

I wonder if my love forgave me at all

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                       Shakespeare: Love is Our Queen of Freedom

                                   Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59

I must dispute King Solomon the Wise
For in you there is something new under the sun
A singing voice that before was never heard
And a merry nymph who never teased

Grasses were never tickled by such light dancing feet
The moon never shone on one more beautiful
The stars never wove for others a crown
Of lights that never graced a mortal queen

I must dispute King Solomon the Wise
When I look within your fairy eyes

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                Shakespeare: Maybe We Need to See Other People

                                  Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 39

Perhaps if we separated for a few days
We would find more passion in our love



                       (Please note all this artsy empty space)



After fourteen empty lines I find
My deep, abiding love for you stronger than ever
But who’s this…you’re seeing some other man?
THIS ISN’T WHAT I MEANT!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                  Our Eyes Don’t Really Meet

                                   Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 36


Our eyes don’t really meet, nor do our hearts
But from across the room we still are one
(with complimentary champagne to enhance the mood)
A secret one unknown and never to be known

Our hands don’t really meet, nor do our lips
But from across our dreams we still are one
(you whisper to me from my hollow pillow)
A secret and sweet secrets still to come

Our lives don’t really meet, but they will, you see
Some moonlit night when at last our world is free

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                          Our Fair Lady Moon is Jealous of You

                                         Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 43

I see you best when I see you in my dreams
By day my vision is distracted and dull
But at night you are brighter than moonbeams
And among all the darkness brighter still

At noon you are a shadow in the glaring sun
But in the night you are the brightest light
Our Fair Lady Moon is jealous of you
And stars vie with each other to complete your crown

Maybe a vision in the day is not what it seems -
I see you best when I see you in my dreams

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                      Rhy­mes and Crimes

                                 Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 35

I plead guilty as an accessory to crime
In aiding and abetting a violation
Against the peace at a certain time
Arrest me now; write out the citation

For you are both the criminal and the cop
Handcuffs for both the abettor and crook
Don’t let our crimes continue, and yet don’t stop
And please don’t give back the thing that you took

For you are a criminal, the most skilled at your art
You darling little thief: you stole

                                                    my heart

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                            Schrodinger’s Lover

                                      Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 48

I have always kept things carefully hidden
Especially the secrets of my heart
But a lover cannot be secreted away
Nor would anyone want this to be so

And because you are no one’s possession
You cannot be kept from the gaze of the world
Locked away in a metaphorical box
Because of anyone’s inappropriate fears

I have always kept things carefully hidden
But you, brave happy spirit, will not be bidden

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                               Somehow a Desert Came Between Us

                                     Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 56

There lies between us a long desert interstate
Distance and time, scrapyards and tumbleweeds
Abandoned railway towns and empty shacks
Rusty barbed wire defining futile dreams

The hull of a DeSoto, a cast-off shoe
Beer cans, a license plate from ‘52
Cemeteries of young men urged to go west
Where they eventually died, buried with their hopes

Lost lives, lost loves along that lonely way -
But surely you and I will be okay

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                There are Treasures and Keys, But not Like These

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 52

We are a pair of diamond rings, you and I
Rare treasures sometimes hidden in a chest
And sometimes sparkling on each other’s hand
As though to dazzle the world with our full-hot fire

We are a pair of diamond rings, you and I
Odd bits of carbon firmed and formed by pain
By pressure pushing us into completion
And by our power we made our love victorious

We are a pair of diamond rings, you and I -
Others can only envious us,
                                                              an­d sigh

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                           The Wandering Elizabethan

                             Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 41

I know you are young and handsome; you know it too
I know you are a high-born gentleman; you know that too
And most annoying of all, so do the girls
Including mine

Or, rather, not mine, because she’s fallen for you
I don’t like it, but I understand
When a beautiful woman chases a beautiful man
Including mine

You are tempted, for she is a beautiful she
But
You leave a rather lonely world for me

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                      This Time the Mind and Heart Agree

                               Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnets 46-47

My eyes delight in the beauty of yours
In all the catalogue of your sweet charms
Visions and scents of dreamy summer flowers
Blossomed in anticipation of love

My heart delights in the happiness of yours
The generosity of your saintliness
The rigor of your analytical mind
Your kindnesses to all humanity

There are perceptions and appearances, true
But then there is the perfection in you

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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              Shakespeare, Venus, and the Travelling Salesman

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 19

Dear Will,

About your obsession with mortality:
Transitions and death are essentials in life
And we must face the obsequies of ashes or earth
But there are other topics upon which to write

Let us not consider funerals today
Let us sit upon the lawn and smoke our pipes
And write about new leaves on ancient oaks
(You’ll pen far better lines; you always do)

Today we’ll ignore our own mortality
And tell inappropriate jokes about Venus
                                and a travelling salesman

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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              When I Have Seen So Many Dependent Clauses…

                                 Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64

When I have seen…
When I have seen…
When I have seen…

Oh, yes, I would miss her, very much so
But
Some of these dependent clauses have got to go!

(Maybe someone woke up on the wrong side
Of that second-best bed…)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                 William Needs an Intervention

                                     Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 42

Will, we need to talk:
                                                       this is all your grief
Your friend and your lover aren’t grieving at all
I’ve seen them swanning around The Swan in Southwark
Catching Pembroke’s Men in The Isle of Dogs

They saw your Julius Caesar here at the Globe
But were mostly canoodling high up in the back row
I cannot imagine they were admiring your wonderful verse
Grieving over the deaths of Romans, or thinking of you

Give over your hoping, your moping, your sighing, your wishing -
The Avon’s down the road; we should go fishing

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                         ­    You are Eternal

                                Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65

We are told that all things will be renewed
And so this moment with you this springtime day
This scene, these leaves, these trees, this happy breeze
You
Are as eternal as an Ave Maria

I will write about you, but is that real?
The living you of beauty and kind words
Should not be subject to paper and ink
No
But only to the verities of Creation

A memory in ink is but a transient thing
For eternity lives in the realm of the King

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                          You are the Transcendence of Dreams

                                 Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60

Susurrant waves along the shore sigh our minutes
Sunrises and sunsets sign off our days
Seasons and feasts solemnize our years
But you – you are the transcendence of words

Words to graft your elegance onto the eternal
A wave that never falls upon the sands
The sands of an immeasurable dawn-lit strand
Where minutes, days, and years are memories

And you – you are the transcendence of dreams
Made eternal in the galaxies’ glowing streams

Shall I Compute 1 Thee to a Summer’s Day?

                              A Lament for the Unlettered

They launch no voyages of discovery
To sail beyond the sunset 1 of their dreams
No pages open to them; no books, no boots,
No paths lead them to Constantinople or Rome 3

For the horns of Elfland 4 they listen not
Nor for the unheard pipes on a Grecian urn 5
The Red Book of Westmarch 6 is forever closed
And lines of lyric verse sing not to them

They cling to their precious palantiri 7
And launch no voyages of discovery


1 As Shakespeare did not say

2 From Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Heinlein used the phrase as the title for his final novel.

3 Patrick Leigh Fermor and Hilaire Belloc

4 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

5 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

6 Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

7 Tolkien again

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                 Dancing Among the Apple Trees

She danced through the orchard in the long ago
Barefoot among sweet summer’s apple trees
And she was the sweetest apple of all
A taste of Creation hymned with the lingering bees

The orchard is mostly gone

                                                                   Her dancing is forever

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

               She Had *** with Her Brother Says The Daily Wail

She had *** with her brother says The Daily Wail
And was eaten in prison, there without bail
By vampires who live in deep tunnels beneath
A park bench situated in Hampstead Heath

Amelia Earhart’s plane has been found again
She was married to ******’s identical twin
And ******, you know, was secretly straight
Cruisin’ for chicks near the Brandenburg Gate

DNA proves that a Kennedy son
Lives under an alias in Area 51
And commutes to Stonehenge on a weekly basis
Transported by Martian hydroponic stasis

But back to the man who had *** with his sister
Did he use preferred pronouns whenever he kissed her?

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                            She Loved Waiting for Godot


                 “Like impatience etherised on a table”

                               -As T. S. Eliot did not say


She said that he loved Waiting for Godot
That for her it was a great work of art
I told her to go wait in someone else's life
Because I have built some meaning into mine

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                                  Shelter in Place

                                  “Go inside your houses, please.
                              All these people will be taken care of.”

                               -Police Commander in Doctor Zhivago

Blue and red lights flicker across the face
Of the rigid black-clad police commander
Whose admiral’s stars all shiny and bright
Are meant to reassure us that we are safe

Blue and red lights flicker across the night
Front yards now blue now red now blue now red
The curious from their houses now blue now red
Like corpses discolored in the summer’s heat

Blue and red lights flicker across the wraps
Of a world heaved into an ambulance

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                  Shelving Children Instead of Books

                        “…it is estimated that Germany…destroyed
                          over 100 million books in Europe.”

             -Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War, xv

In Texas

We ban children’s books
We don’t ban guns;
And thus we discard
Our daughters and sons

HISD to eliminate librarians, turn some libraries into discipline centers at 28 campuses (click2houston.com)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                                            She Made Life Fun

She made life fun. And then she died. She died
This is her coffee cup. She drank from it
She drank from it sitting in the break room
Making jokes and reading ****** novels

She made life fun. I’ll drink from her old cup
Maybe I’ll make life fun for others as she did
If there is magic in this cracked ceramic
A cup of blessings to be shared all around

She made life fun
And then she died

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                        Sherri’s Husband’s Grandfather’s Sandwich

                                     Memories of Our Grandfathers

                                  With gratitude to Sherri Woodman

A sandwich all wrapped up for a fishing trip
That was never taken, a receipt for a hat
From a clothing store closed long ago
His pocket knife, a note, some coins, some keys

His driving license due for renewal next month
The Hemingway book you gave him for Christmas
His typewriter (“They don’t make ‘em like that anymore”)
An unfinished fishing fly still in the vise

A paper bag of his little odds and ends
And each a happy memory that never ends