I texted my writer friend, “I’m going on a poem walk.”
“Interesting,” she texted back.
I found a little notebook, put it in my back pocket, and a pen in my right jacket pocket.
“I do my most radical writing in my paper notebook with a pen,” a friend told me yesterday.
Here are my notes from the poem walk.
The leaves are brown but the moss is bright green.
A green Vermont license plate dangles sideways from a front bumper.
A corner yellow curb is black from car tires rubbing against it.
One hummingbird sings in a thin, brown-leaved oak tree.
Bushtits lift off to toward the sky and land in the next tree.
One hoe leans toward the fence from a bucket, head first.
At the same time I walk under a birdhouse and two new bat houses, high up.
The model plane flyer carries his new plane, he tells me, “by the way, I never bother the geese.”
Met Earl, a Berger Picard shepard. Two people were standing by while the police slowly drove up the path. They thought a man on the ground was dead. “He doesn’t seem to be breathing,” the man with Earl told the police.
The officer pulled up to check if the man was not dead. He wasn’t dead. He had been in a deep sleep in the cold grass just off the path.
I returned to walking to the calls of a flicker.
I felt Earl’s fur in my fingers for a long time.
A sparrow chirped a sermon in the blackberry patch.
A biker in bright yellow passed on my left and paused to say good morning over his right shoulder.
One green pepper rested in the middle of the concrete path.
Near Albertsons a man walked behind me, coughing while carrying bags of cans.
I got a handlebar wave from a man on a bike with a handlebar mustache.
One frog croaked from the marsh.
An acorn squash sat on the ground near a bench with trash and the word, “FUCK” was spray painted in silver across the walkway.
Almost home was a sign stuck in the leaves under a tree covered in lichen which said: CHOOSE KINDNESS.
Happy Solstice!
