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Rod in “The Best is Yet to Come” 11/6/04
Photo by Shira Greenburg ©2004 by Broadway.com. Used by Permission
A Thought for Today
Never use age as an excuse for not
thinking young.
FROM the¨BOOKS
Two Poems from The Sound of Solitude.
THE FRONT-YARD SQUIRREL
The front-yard squirrel
is stealing oranges.
He crabs and chitchats
to himself,
then threading through and
into leaves and branches
he spies an orange
three times his head size.
Arching like an acrobat
and somersaulting like a tumbler,
his back toes wound around a limb,
he swings out toward
the would-be catch
as graceful as a gymnast in a tournament.
Aha! He grasps his heavy beachball
and steadies in a perfect arch.
Hanging for a moment
with his underside exposed
to street and sky,
then with a quick decisive snap
he twists the sphere from off the branch.
Dangling like deadfall
with his early morning catch,
he bends back up
with strain but no uncertainty
till finally he's walking on two legs
back through the green to safer limbs.
Thud. His morning feast
has fallen
and splashed upon the driveway,
it rocks a moment
then lies still.
Such a chattering
pervades the morning air--
a friend begins to chatter back.
The front-yard squirrel
does not engage in conversation.
Back to work.
He settles on a golden globe
much higher
up
and with a new determination
begins his high-wire act again.
An orange for breakfast
before the noon sun signals luncheon.
LIONS LOSS
Bingo blinks
and then rolls on his back
flat out,
paws stretch up
to meet the air
as if to push aside
great blocks of firmament.
A lazy dandy lion,
pausing in his prowl,
he senses something gone
(you used to carry him about
from room to room,
he misses that).
I miss your breasts against me,
the arguments our eyes had after dark.
Every day a new void opens,
the old ones never close.
-from "The Sound of Solitude," 1983
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