The Organ Pipes of the Soul

Terrible Poem number 41

Divesture.

My dictionary says it’s “the action or process of selling off subsidiary business interests or investments: the divestiture of state-owned assets.”

We just went through the Great Yard Sale Divesture.

The subsidiary business interests were the things we had accumulated over 26 years…business interests such as parts of a piano we thought we’d repurpose as funky décor, sheets of rusty tin ceiling that were meant to decorate the gates of the fence but never got installed over fear someone would want the metal. Yes—that silly. Glass jars for their looks more than their practicality, books read and unread (bought because they made the shelves look good) now imbued with mustiness, and lamps to light the dark living room whose gray-primer walls only got their fresh finish coat 25 years after we moved in.

It was also a Divesture of dreams. Wallpaper and stencils never used. Games no one plays any longer. Camping equipment used only enough to make it obvious we weren’t campers. Puppets that were never played with and model railroad gear that never became a layout. Dreams that were realized only partially if at all.

I am learning to let go of other dreams, to divest myself of the unrealistic expectations created in the clash between my talents and my ability to live into them. My talent at playing music: Relinquished at last in light of what it would take to revive it and practice it. Other talents I retain a right to revive: The graphic arts I long identified with my core personality but seldom practiced, and writing, which I practice more often but not often enough. These dreams I have yet to divest myself of. Some day, they will be part of my final estate sale. What they will amount to in the end is still to be determined. But it is clear that the talents God gave me will never be used to the extent that was on offer. And for that, I have no one to blame but myself.

I had to get my 1st novel laid out again. Heather Jarrett, my layout tech (we worked together at Wiley) is doing a terrific job. This not only restores all the missing italics (GRRRR! Still angry I let that slip through!), she's doing a terrific job with line control and design.

Once that's done, I need to figure out how to get it through Ingram Spark and back up on Amazon.

Terrible Poem number 39
God’s Kintsugi

On the landing of our foursquare home,
at the base of the stairs to the upper floor,
is the closet.
It’s too narrow,
and coats on hangers tend to turn sideways.
But this isn’t about that little closet,
the 1916 version of “enough closet space.”
It’s about the full-length mirror on the closet door.

Made of beveled glass,
the silver has flaked off
leaving dark spots and streaks.

Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth wrote,
“For now we see through a glass,
darkly,
but then face to face.”

In Paul’s day, mirrors were polished bronze
or black obsidian.
The bronze reflection was distorted,
wavy and dim.
The black obsidian scrying mirrors
were darker yet,
heavy and hard to hold up to one’s face.

How fitting a metaphor for how we see ourselves
and each other.
We know so little, see so dimly,
and what we see is distorted,
true both of how we see ourselves
and what we can truly know of someone else.

As I sat drinking coffee this morning, I was thinking
of someone I know only dimly, as in a darkened mirror.
I only caught glimpses of her as she grew up,
distanced by time and latitude.
She is addicted to opioids.
The drug has rewired her brain,
forcing her to do things she would never do,
hurt people she deeply loves,
even someone she loves more than anyone else.

We can know so little of what someone else
is going through
or has gone through.
The only approach then
is to love them as much as we can,
to love them blindly
because we see into them so poorly,
to remember that what we know even of ourselves
is distorted,
dimmed and suffused with our own darkness.

Paul promises us this will change.
“Now I know in part;
but then shall I know, even as also I am known.”

Our best knowledge of God,
and our deepest longing,
says that his mystical vision is true.
We will know and be known as we are.

It means, at our end,
when we enter into the presence of God’s grace
broken and incomplete,
we will come out whole,
accurate reflections
of who we are and were meant to be,
the cracks in our lives repaired by God’s golden joinery
with veins of gold,
the cherished kintsugi repair
of our broken image.

Well, here we are in April. Writing has shut down for the most part. I have to admit, it's a choice. Having the first novel not only go out of print, but finding it was so badly laid out as to affect comprehension of the narrative.

I have someone laying it out afresh. I need to get into that and get it back up on Amazon, etc. I have a 2nd novel in a major revision stage. Both projects are on hold for a remodel project that is drawing to a close. So, maybe then.

Rusty.
Rusted shut.
That’s how I’ve been since I discovered that all the italics had been stripped out of the first edition of The Organ Pipes of the Soul.

There was rust, decay, throughout the novel. The afterlife had, in fact, been seeing a lot of decay. Arthur had been discovering that he was instrumental (a carefully chosen term!) in creating the Stations. Attached to the Lighthouse compound was a small boat dock sheltering Arthur’s first creation, a small boat he named the Duchess. In the following scene, Arthur and the Lighthouse Keeper are going to try to take the Duchess out to see what’s become of the ferryboat. But first, they need to gain entry to the boathouse:

They reached a dock and a little boathouse. An ornate padlock hung from the door. The Keeper selected a key from his key ring and tried to open the padlock but found it rusted shut. He started searching the dock.
“What are you looking for?” Arthur asked.
“Something to use as a crowbar. We got to bust this lock off.”
They found nothing that could be used to lever off the lock, so the Keeper began kicking at it. But the lock and the door held.
“You try it,” he said, unhooking the key ring from his belt and handing it to Arthur.
Arthur inserted the key in the lock, felt its rusty resistance. He pictured the inside of the lock, the dry tumblers, pictured them covered in oil, slippery oil that coated the tumblers, that loosened the rust and let the tumblers turn easily and — click — the lock opened.

One of my favorite film images comes from Ray Harryhausen’s special effects masterpiece, “Jason and the Argonauts.” In the YouTube clip, Hercules and Hylas have awakened Talos, a giant metal robot created by the god, Hephaestus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaM8htthOzM
You can hear the grind of metal as Talos begins to move. And yes, I shamelessly borrowed that image in the concluding chapter of The Organ Pipes of the Soul:

[Coyote and Josh] heard the dull groaning of stressed metal. The statue of Athena outgrew the pedestal and stepped down, quickly growing taller than the Library she stood before. The shriek of metal scraping against metal carried over the whirlwind. The Medusa-headed aegis turned the vines that covered her to stone and they fell from her. More reached out to her but broke off when they touched her feet. Athena, twice as tall as the Library, placed one foot against the Gallery, grabbed her spear with both hands and plunged the spear deep into the wriggling dome.
The world twisted around the spear. Josh grabbed Coyote’s hand as they spiraled in — the two of them hand in hand — falling toward the collapsing dome. Chunks of debris, the Guests and Patrons, the whole world went tumbling, spinning toward a glowing blue-green point.

I’m trying to visualize the lock on my creativity falling open so that I can write again. The metal shrieks as it grinds together. In my head (and heart), the gears are as decayed as the Antikythera mechanism.


Today's post was going to be a poem, the first Terrible Daily Poem of 2022. Not there yet.
Just grinding gears,
like the time I took out 2nd gear in my 72’ VW beetle,
the snap of cast metal breaking in the gear box transmitted to my hand.
Just pulling nails,
the groan and shriek of a 10d nail
ripped from a beam of age-hardened red pine.
Just starting a cold motor,
the hollow knock of rod and bearing
until the oil has started circulating.
Just getting out of bed,
tired tendons still sore from yesterday,
my inevitable end one pain closer to ending.
Just writing the first piece of 2022.

I posted this flash sci-fi to my regular page. This is that rare thing (for me), a dream that is translatable to story:

The Christmas Tree of Urfg

Yasmin looked at the object Urfg placed in her hands. It was triangular and flat, about a half-inch thick, with a small inscribed border around it. Inside the border were seven jeweled dots, one at the top, then two, then three, then one at the bottom, centered at the base of the triangle. The dots were connected with inscribed lines, each line ending in a delicate semicircle that partly wrapped around the jeweled dot.

It could have been a Christmas tree.

“The top dot is home,” Urfg explained. She took back the object, and Yasmin felt the heft of it leave her hands. “See,” Urfg said, and her claw tip touched the top dot.

In an eye blink, with no sensation of motion, Yasmin was standing on a plain, blue-green clouds streaming rapidly overhead, their roiling undersides reflecting white. The distant mountains were all flat-topped.

“This is Urfgfuen, my home.”

Yasmin reflected on the 320 years it had taken to get her ship to get to Proxima b, hibernating aboard their, now laughably named, “star ship,” travelling far enough that their “we made it” signal wouldn’t reach Earth for just over four years, to a home over two millennia in her future thanks to her relativistic shift. Was anyone listening? Was there even anyone there to listen?

“And this,” Urfg said, “is Urfghab, where I live now.” Her claw shifted down to the jeweled dot in center of the device. In a flash instead of 320 years, without thousands of years of relativistic shift, they were on a red planet, perhaps further than the mere three light years Yasmin had traversed. Yasmin wondered if the red sky meant sunset, or if the dusty plains that stretched unbroken to the horizon had colored the sky, or if they were in orbit around a red star? Was the distant twinkling on the horizon a city?

Yasmin looked at the object in Urfg’s hands. Seven jeweled dots, seven planets, but her own was not one of them. Nor, she hated to admit, should it be one. For as much as it saddened her that everyone back home she ever knew was dead, that she and her voyage could well be forgotten, the true pain was that on the blue pearl in space where she came from, her species of bipedal ape descendants might have destroyed itself, perhaps taking much of the biome with it. It pained her more to realize that it was for the good of the universe that humans were so isolated, that the barrier between her world and Urfg’s worlds was so nearly insurmountable that she and her kind were effectively still quarantined, because humans were too dangerous to be one of the jewels on the Christmas tree — unless some time in the last 2,021 years they had learned the message and meaning of Christmas.

Well, at long last I am moving forward with a reboot of The Organ Pipes of the Soul. I have the files, a tech willing to work on them, and a ton of questions! I need a new ISBN because I want this book to replace the one so badly laid out. And the three libraries that have a copy are local. I can replace copies for local folk. Of the rest, I suppose a free eBook could be arranged.

So, I am looking at Smashwords of Ingram Spark to distribute the book, perhaps arrange to print it (I have an online quote to compare theirs to). By going with Smashwords instead of Amazon, I can get MARC information attached to the book (and the ebook) so libraries can order it. THIS is why my local library did nothing with the copy I gave them until I asked them to order one through Amazon.

So, I begin forward motion on book 1. And today, I took real steps to revising book 2, Resurrectorium 1920.

When the bad news outweighs the good...

I got my cover files etc. back from Tommy. He doubled the agreed on price. Sneaky. But I have the full 39.6MB cover. Now I need to find a layout tech.

And I need that more than I ever knew, for it finally hit me that Aaron's layout techs really botched things up. Not only did they replace my indented paragraphs with spaced paragraphs, which is totally unlike fiction, THEY REMOVED THE ITALICS. I had used italics to indicate inner dialog. All gone. The reader was left to figure it out. And I am mad as hell. I can't send new books out. I will replace the copies at my three local libraries. Maybe a few others. So disheartened at this.

After waiting a month to get my Organ Pipes files, it looks like I might have them next week. After that, I have to figure out how to get Amazon to let me republish them. No idea what to do there. That's part of why I've not been posting. Just too down about it all.

On the good news side, my university's in-house arts and letters publication, Etchings, accepted a poem of mine for its Fall 2021 issue. It was an updating of a 16th century poem by Edmund Spencer (one of those poems that shows up in anthologies all the time). Here it is, as well as the poem that inspired it.

Robert Springer (1953–)
One Day I Updated Spencer’s Poem of the Strand (2018)

One day I wrote her name upon the shore,
But waves rolled in and washed away the sand.
I wrote her name upon the sand once more,
But tide rose up and covered all the strand.
Proud man, she said, as if your words could stand
Against the slow decay that’s sure to be.
As if you could delay the waters creep and
Stay the tide of time that comes for me.
Not true, I said, I swear the world will see
That you are more than just the name you wear.
Our frames, these feeble houses seem to be
So frail, but not our love, to this I swear.
That day when death has swallowed time and chance
We’ll burst death’s bonds and so renew the dance.

Here’s the poem I updated:

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand (1595)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.
Not so (quod I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

Characters vs. Stories.

We’re familiar with the idea of the same character or characters appearing in multiple stories. Sometimes the stories are sequels to each other. And sometimes each story stands alone. In both cases, the characters and the worlds/settings rarely change. Sometimes they may be further forward or backward in time.

But what of characters who appear together in different stores, but the stories are not related. They are of different worlds. Like space ships one time and sword and sandals the next. Ancient Palestine one day, the Roaring Twenties the next. Artificial worlds with no correspondence to any world we know.

What then? The characters could change. Evolve without touching on the fact they are in different story worlds. Like actors in a troupe who one day play Hamlet and the next day perform Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Harvey and Pygmalion.

Here’s where the problem, for me, would lie: John Wayne vs. Burt Lancaster; Jack Nicholson vs. Dustin Hoffman: Actors who play different roles but are always the same vs. actors who play different roles but are never the same. As a writer, if all I could rise to was to the level of Wayne and Nicholson, where this character never really changes even though the stories never repeat, I would think myself a failure. On the other hand, if the same character grows through each of these non-repeating stories, it would make for a worthwhile writing career.

Terrible Poem number 32

I don’t want to write this.
We are on holding vigil
as someone dear to us prepares for….
What?
We all have our own take on what is next.
Thus our vigils are different.

Is what follows a repose, a sleep
from which we shall awaken?
Do we rest in death
until we hear Gabriel’s clarion call
rouse us to resurrection? And then what?

Do we fly into interminable light?
Greeted by loved ones who died before us
to be ushered by them into the immediate
and non-judgmental love of the God
who IS, after all, LOVE,
who will give us back all we have lost but loved,
right down to the least puppy?

Or, for those who are wrapped in fear,
do we fall, sinners we, into the hands of a God
too angry or too weak or too unloving to save us
now that we can no longer make
the legal contract they call salvation?

Some say we dissolve into the bliss of God
until we are neither more nor less
than the Bliss itself,
our petty egos melted
in the great Solution of Brahman,
what we call ‘we’ gone
along with our unique pains and joys.
But how is this different
than the atheist’s endless nothing?

We each face death as we face
the other great transition: birth.
In the end, thrust through death’s narrowing
into it this new state alone,
we enter into death not knowing
what — if anything — awaits,
yet somehow sure,
or at least hopeful,
there is more.

In the meantime, we all live
as if this great change will not happen to us
because it will happen
to some distant us we cannot envision
until someone close to us
approaches the threshold
and finally passes beyond it.
Then for a moment,
we see our own end is the same,
and the great Equalizer will be applied to us,
and we, too, will have passed into Mystery.

Terrible Poem number 31

A waste of oak.
That’s what I get for working when I am too tired to work.
Too many bad cuts on a piece of oak trim,
and I’m off to Menards to get another.
Working when tired.
There should be an acronym for that:
WWT. Like DWI or the new version, DUI.
“Son, you’re WWT. Working when tired is a ticketable offence in these parts.”
Working when tired.
That was the norm during much of my career in publishing.
Working when tired.
Or bored. Or disheartened, i.e. “heart sick.” There’s a term for you.
Sick at heart working a job that paid just enough
to keep me there and never enough to keep away
the feeling the wolf was at the door.
And isn’t that too many of us?
Maybe most of us?
Is it any wonder people are waiting
for the Covid super-unemployment to end,
rather than work 40+ hours and bring home the same thing?
And all because we treat people like commodities.
Wheat futures. Pork bellies. Low wage jobs.
“We hired your back and your hands.
We hired your brain.
We didn’t hire your heart.”
There’s a special kind of tired when your work does nothing.
Doesn’t
make you proud,
give you joy
have a spark of life in it
“Welcome to McBurgers. May I split your shift? Short your hours?”
“No thanks. I’m a whole universe.
A one-of-a-kind, once in the history of the universe deal.”
But McBurger-world won’t see the universe within us until we do.
And that’s why visionary fiction is needed.
Stories that remind us there is more
to life
to us
to God, whom McBurger would like to serve in a box.
Chicken nuggets of spirituality.
“Get your ticket to paradise. Purify yourself and go to heaven when you die.
That way you won’t disturb this world we own.”
But God isn’t just over there. On the other side.
God is within us. We are all God peeking out from the inside,
—Namaste—
sometimes sneaking out into the world through us
and maybe even shaking McBurger world up.
What could be more radical than to love your neighbor as yourself?
To “act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God”?
It’s an idea so radical, McBurger world doesn’t want to hear it.
Might even kill the messenger
(thinking it will kill the message).
But to you, I say, be a radical.
Love radically.
Live radically.
Art radically.

Projects and Deadlines

I’m nearing the end of one project, and fast approaching the deadline for another (not yet started), and yet another project will begin soon.

So, do you work by project? That is, do you have defined projects that you complete before moving on to another? Or do you juggle so many projects that the term no longer really has any meaning you just have an “everything I have to do” category and you work at keeping it all going, even if a little here, a little there? I’m not saying one is better than another, but for me, learning to prioritize on project over another has been essential to making progress on anything.

And what part do deadlines play in your creative process? I hated deadlines in my years in publishing. Probably because the job brought no joy, so meeting a deadline was worth an “attaboy” and that was about it. Better for the performance review and for keeping the boat afloat. It was when I entered Grad school that I found the deadlines a powerful focusing tool. Of course, I preferred Grad school to publishing.

I am nearing the end of the living room remodel. Ceiling and walls have been repaired and painted. Instead of no lights in the ceiling, I have a bank of three switchable between the main entry and the entry opposite it. Then there is a bank of six for general lighting, a bank of two for the sides of the fireplace (where the windows are), a single above the fireplace, and a bank of three on the opposite wall. All the lights are dimmable. The windows have had new sash cords installed, and the woodwork has been painted (sadly, we concluded that restoring the woodwork was not a viable option) — with the exception of refinishing the fireplace mantle (and effectively and aesthetically closing off the flue). That and some wiring (speakers at one end of the room will be connected to the stereo at the other) is all that remains to be done. A pro is going to refinish the floor. Six months (perhaps a little more) of my life went into this. And it went faster than any other major remodel because of the focus and the deadline (i.e., before classes begin in September).

I have to prepare for classes, and, obviously, teach them. Then the next big project begins: Revising for publication my MA novel — Resurrectorium 1920, with a deadline of December for a draft deliverable to Aaron.

Whew. Deadlines and projects.

Terrible Poem number 30

July 13th. My “daily” poem count is 30. It should be over a hundred and fifty.

My life. Perhaps I can blame it
on not getting the piano I asked for.
Or, it’s just how I am wired.

When I was a boy, my Aunt Mary had a piano in her garage.
I could get lost in it, in the sounds it made
when the pedal was down
building chords, cascading resonances,
taking me out of this world.
I asked if I could have it.
Aunt Mary said it was not her piano.
It was her sister Lottie’s. She would ask.

At home, my older brother played cello,
and he taught me some of the basics.
With his few lessons
I learned to play a segment of what he was playing
(even if not as well): a tarantella.
I still can hear it in my head.
I practiced until I could play that part of it by ear.
So, mom took me to brother’s cello instructor, Mrs. Johnson,
and I played the tarantella for her.
She set me to playing scales, instead.
No word to me about my tarantella. Nada.
Just whole notes and half notes in scales.
Don’t use your ear. Read the notes.
And never will you catch up with big brother
who is stronger, smarter, multi-talented
and entirely focused.

Fast forward to a conversation with my mom years later.
A dislocation to live with an aunt to escape big brother, later.
A sister who thought you were a cousin
when you moved back home
because big brother went to college
finally freeing up a room, later.
All the teen years, later.
Years in factories instead of art school, later.
The dalliances with su***de, later.
I can’t remember the conversation but for where it ended.
“Mrs. Johnson said you were more talented than Tom.”
Never in my life have I gone to red anger so swiftly.
All the pain.
All the shadow boxing with a big brother
who always had the upper hand,
who even had his own cello
and didn’t need to lug his to school and back for practice —
that vulnerable wooden target for bullies.
The instrument I played because it was at hand
and not the one I wanted,
not the piano in Aunt Mary’s garage.

“Mrs. Johnson said you were more talented than Tom.”
“NOW YOU TELL ME?!”
My life focused into one sentence.
I stormed out of the house,
slamming the door so hard I broke the glass.

Perhaps if I had been given the piano in Aunt Mary’s garage?

But it was Aunt Lottie’s piano.
Cast off to her sister’s garage
when Lottie bought her daughter a baby grand.
Once Aunt Lottie found out,
I was no longer allowed to play on it.
Better to let it rot in the garage.
Because Aunt Lottie hated my mom.
Because Aunt Lottie hated her sister, Helen.
Because Helen
youngest sister and my grandmother —
was not a good girl. She was a flapper. A jazz baby.
And so came my mom, the visible target of Lottie’s wrath
because Helen had the temerity to die young.
All the wrath and no where to put it. Except on mom.
Who bore it with grace. Like everything she had to bear.
To Lottie’s mind, we kids the carried same taint mom had.
Thus, the piano was made off limits
to grandmother’s bastard’s kids.

So, I had no instrument to get lost in.
Nothing I wanted to play, deep down.
Just the school-rented cello.
I practiced out of duty,
just enough to fulfill the requirement,
and that set the pattern of my life.

Or did it?

Perhaps this lack of daily practice of my arts
is how I am wired up.
My God-given slack.
One brother got all the focus on earth.
The other is always trying to leave the world.

How long did you live in the kingdom of heaven?

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

So, how long did you live in the kingdom of heaven? I think I lived there through about the 3rd grade. Here is a poem, early in those days, when I walked the alley between my house and my Uncle Joe’s house:

One Summer That Day

When I was young you would wait under that always blue sky,
standing amused, a few steps ahead with your hand open to me,
waiting for me in the long alley of sparkling black cinders
as I ran one two one two around great potholes,
chuffing up clouds of hot ash, blackening my sneakers.
You would take my hand as we walked past the field
where the night's crickets hid in corn-tall greenness
that smelled of milkweed, bee balm and Canadian thistle,
until we reached the lilac-framed gate that led to your garden.

When I was young the garden paths were longer
and looped around beds of iridescent tulips as high as my head,
and I could hide from you in the p***y willow tree
amid quick shadows that danced on shimmering silver fur.
Butterflies in daily pilgrimage to your hallowed place
slowly flew black and gold or full crisp yellow against that perfect blue sky,
and all summer long the lilacs scented your garden purple.

When I am young again,
and I have gone where pain does not follow,
I will see you under that cloudless blue vault waiting with an amused smile,
and take your hand once more to walk with you into your garden.

* * * *
Yes, small disturbances arose at times: A squall was explained to me as the world turning upside down; my older brother learned to tease me and I failed to deal with it. But still, even when a tornado that toppled my ‘climbing tree’ (the only one I could climb), life was still innocent enough.

That ended the next year. A strange year. A strange school. New things to think about, like just HOW different boys were from girls (sure, we’re all aware there’s a difference a lot earlier than that).

The year after that when the outside world intruded and our president was shot. Our close relatives gathered at our house and there was much wailing. My grandparent’s generation could not imagine it. Like hearing the king had been killed. The order of the world was out of order.

And the next year was, as Matt Groening declared in his comic strip, Life in Hell.
As was the next. And the next. And the next…

Hell ended in 1981, to be exact, when I met (re-met, to be precise) Susan at a Sunoco gas station. Sure, we’ve had good times and bad since then. But that is the big punctuation point. Today, I enter the kingdom of god in the trinity of our relationship, built through all we’ve experienced together.

And what has this to do with writing? I put some of myself in The Organ Pipes of the Soul. We all do that when we write, don’t we? Our characters are bits of ourselves, bits of others we’ve met, others we’ve known through those close to us, and still others we’ve assimilated through a lifetime of engaging in narratives.

But those years since I left the kingdom of heaven are still a closed subject for writing. I can’t even approach them cautiously through poetry, my medium for dealing with pain using words.

It’s impossible to know if this will ever change. I am not sure I need it to. Wrestling with personal demons on paper is what some writers do, and some readers want to engage with. As a writer, and as a reader, I don’t. That may be why science fiction is my favorite genre. Ideas. Concepts that connect to the universe at the largest scale, not the smallest one.

P.S. I’ve occasionally written about form (shapes of stories), and of course, poems have form. For a class I took, I rewrote the above poem as a pantoum [A pantoum is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The pattern continues for any number of stanzas, except for the final stanza, which differs in the repeating pattern.]

Which do you think works better?

One Summer One Day
(a pantoum for Uncle Joe)

The garden paths were longer when I was young.
You would take my hand as we walked the long alley of sparkling black cinders
Past the field where crickets courted among stalks of thistle and milkweed
Until we reached the lilac-framed gate that led to your garden.

You would take my hand as we walked the long alley of sparkling black cinders
Or stand amused, a few steps ahead
Until we reached the lilac-framed gate that led to your garden
Where butterflies flew daily pilgrimage to your hallowed place.

You would stand amused, a few steps ahead
Pausing while my short legs caught up, there
Where butterflies flew daily pilgrimage to your hallowed place,
And all summer long the lilacs scented your garden purple.

Pausing while my short legs caught up, there
You would wait under that unfailing blue sky,
And all summer long the lilacs scented your garden purple.
Because pain does not follow us there,

You will be waiting under that unfailing blue sky
in your lilac-scented garden of iridescent tulips.
Because pain does not follow us there,
The garden paths will be longer when I am young again.