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On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter (prose poem)

On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter
(prose poem)

So my friend calls from Indiana. I tell her of my sister’s new job. I am relieved and happy, because my friend’s been struggling with sufferings that would drive me mad. She sounds well and has a chance to tell me some about her family on her way to church to help lead (in technical matters) a Bible study there. It is cold here. It is colder there (single-digit degrees for many days). When she must ring off, she does. I am at the coffeemaker and place the backside of the phone on a spiral burner on the stovetop (everything turned off). While the coffee’s cooking, I clean out some plastic bottles into which I put tap water to drink throughout the day. Not thinking at first, I place the cleaned-out bottles just outside the burner circle set upon the stove. When I’ve done this four times, I have four empty bottles cornering a phone set on a burner plate of labyrinthine form. I’m sure there is a deity for winter (generally, Persephone, though I’m thinking there’s one for winter only), and have I not built a small, strange contemporary altar to her. A narrow receiver (wireless) offered up inside four plastic monoliths keeping in their stillness their own kind of sentinel watching. Is this supplication? I want my friend to be well. I want her husband to enjoy retirement and her daughter have success at school. I want the cold to move on, over there, though for a Midwest winter season, I guess what is endured is rather normal. (Still too cold.) My temps in southern Pennsylvania still have two digits. But we are called to be ourselves storm-ready against a coming, miles-wide soon-arriving gale. It smacks the South and later rounds out to sea—on the way releasing slivering ice and snow and the season’s other dangers onto our regional metropoles: D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. And in my small town? I pray for navigable roads. In my small place, I pray for electricity’s constancy—that it might faithfully provide sufficient heat in rapport with the thermostat. And now I guess I wait. We wait. I clear the stove and leave on the burner now a single cup, ready for coffee. The empty ceramic vessel a suburban symbol of encouragement and also, I think, of supplication.

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a poem to say t.t.f.n. to Writing 201 and friends

Our Way, Friend and Friends

(“My Way” is a song written by Jacques Revaux, Claude Francois, Gilles Thibaut, Paul Anka—popularly recorded by Elvis Presley and by Frank Sinatra)

“And now, the end is near
So I face the final curtain”

A melancholy song about endings
Though it’s kind of a conceit

Not based on final assessment
Or judgment in life

But an expression, a claim
A kind of righteous claim on life

“Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention”

Yes, we have regrets, and I don’t know
About too few

I would change things; so, I
Think, might you

We don’t act, we don’t choose
In a vacuum of discretion, since

What we enact, from inner to outer
Performance, affects others, too

It does—we might think, one by
One, we have no power

And what we do does not matter
But we do, and it does

“The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way”

Well, the blows fall all around
And others are affected, too

The song is a cheat—though I like
The tune—for there is good

In the reality of knowing we are not
Isolate, even in responsibility

We work together, however
Unconsciously

So let’s do it consciously
And so we have: we have worked

Together, and for what we’ve made
I’m thankful

Thank you, thank you, each and all, for
Making it, not one

But more than one
For doing it our way

Our way, better
Our way, real

Our way, our way

C L Couch

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