Challenge: use random rhyme and refrain
A Pair of Ducks
"April is the cruelest month," says old TS, and yes, it tends to disappoint, anointing us with snow/rain/pain and filling the yard with hard white pellets of cosmic despair, with a soggy puddle going pond, dark water signifying frigid erasure. Even my hairs, worming into my head, feel, at the skull, frozen. Cooly cruel. I remember when a pair of ducks once visited, sifting through the wet wreckage, drifting on the odd pond, paddling it with invisible feet. Indifferent, casually cruel, it's a month of broken promise, imperfect resurrection, mundane depression and dejection, rejection, gray skies and dull eyes, the echoes of dead white guys like Eliot telling me how to survive in hollow voices from poetic tombs, when in life they were doomed, dabbling like that long gone mallard dipping its beak into dead water against a dying neighbor's rusty fence... It's early, now, and far too late, as cruel skies slide up, golden red with frigid day one sun. The month has hardly begun and already I feel ancient, dusty, irrelevant. Done.
David, do you remember the letters
we wrote a thousand miles and
a lifetime ago.
Before husband and wives and lives
with kids and pets, mortgages and payments
to windows.
We’ve always been better on paper
separate from the world, confined
to lines.
COuld we return to that cat scratch
marks on steno leaf, or has grief
overwhelmed our minds?
David, do you remember the letters
a thread of words, chords of thought
measured, metered out.
David, do you remember the letters
Haunting! I like the way the poem turns in the middle, as it says “We’ve always been better on paper…”