Bottles of Beer

This is the pure limerick form of some doggerel I posted on Facebook recently. Thanks to Deanna D. and Julie F. for edits. The original follows.

Half the fun of bottles of beer
is making them each disappear.
The remaining part
is the joy in your heart
of knowing the next one is near.

Original:

Half the fun of bottles of beer
is making them disappear.
The other part
is the joy in your heart
of knowing the next one is near.

June 30 2012

The Term Broken

The term broken does occur to me.

The silence where the words once were
is evident. A dangling catch
for a hook that has fallen away
and a door bangs foolishly
in the interior image of a white and rainy day.

Among my friends I count the rushing arms of trees
whose lace embraces every coming storm.
Today they are hanging heavy, nothing more,
greenrobed in sodden velvet
much too lush to bear.

On our morning round, the sturdy sidewalk,
like the houses, trees, and sky,
yields nothing but the practicality of day.

Even the beach and the marshside shingle
are swept clean of phrases and left grey
by a tide that has combed the hair of the seaweed hillocks
in the sand like the heads of sunken giants
and is silently, damnably out.

This must be what it is like to see
the world with eyes alone.
God send an ending to this barren time;
repair the words
and let the landscape show  again
its meter and its rhyme.

June 15 2012

Contact

How else are we enabled to mow summer lawns
than by the swing of the contact hitter?
He is steady over one sixty-two
and teaches us to be steady.
He knows that the game is not
to the home run hitter alone,
but to the measured pacing of the season's train.

Injury and heartache,
catastrophe and simple strain--
they all must tell, but there's a canny balance
to be gained from an eye that finds the gap
and a stance that takes whatever pitch is given.

The contact hitter understands
the storms of spring and summer's droughts,
the soar, the fall. The through it all, the keeping on:
they are his example. We are better players since
we saw it, his old truth:
bell curves save the day for all of us
and in the longest run,
the advantage is with the average.

April 22 2012