Earth Day and I Hit the Garden Running / Poem: Meditations on a Scary Movie

 

Our peach tree hath pink blooms from which tiny peaches will grow. Last year the deer got every single one of them. Scott hammered in four tall plastic posts and put screening all around and on the top.

Since neither birds nor deer can read signs that say "No feeding" we thot this would be best.

My big task on Earth Day was to trim the Rose Bush on the left so the mailman can get up the steps to the mail box. My whole body shook as I wielded the clippers.

Close up of Rose Bush.

 I have a monster groundcover, which I dug up with a knife, and then planted herbs where the monsters were. This is fast-growing mint.

Here's basil. Hey, the wagon wheel I got a couple years ago from John Leonard has sprouted again.

Dreadful photo. Well, you see the bleeding hearts in the background. In the foreground is a darling pot Judy Diaz gave me before she moved to her final resting place, near her kids, in Boulder. 

Now, this is fairly sickening, so I'm sure you'll wanna keep reading. Every spring I get ants on the living room window sill. I spritz them with ammonia to kill em.

Where were they going? I could never figger it out. However, I did have a plant on the window sill, a succulent, that Helene gave me when she went into the old lady's home and decided to become an old lady, and I wondered if perhaps they were residing in there.

I'm not a scientist so I had no desire to find out, but I carried the succulent outside and plopped it into Judy's pot. 

MEDITATION ON AN OLD SCARY MOVIE

Julie Adams - then and


Julie Adams today

PS - Wouldn't you know it? I go to bed and watch Perry Mason reruns. Guess who's on trial for murder? A beautiful young woman played by Julie Adams. Filled with twists n turns, it ended that she was correctly found not guilty.



Ricou Browning

it’s only a movie
but still i jumped when
the humanlike creature
half man, half frog
swam under the daring girl
backstroking across
the black lagoon
her bathing suit glowed
white beneath the
blistering florida sun

she dazzled the creature
and i feared Kay’s bathing suit
would soon be bloodied and torn

this is what movies do
you hover near
yell softly but she’ll
never hear
of course the creature will die in the end
it matters not as our heart beats faster
and Kay will live
the only woman on an
expedition that will change
the language of science
as the eons-old monster
is birthed anew
in the black lagoon

suppose it’s true
and scary monsters
might arrive from anywhere
I look out the window now and
from a fissure in the grass
a huge webbed hand
made of latex and rubber
crawls his way out
half as big as the tree
beside him
limping toward my house

though movies are dreams made real
they bear the central role in lives like
spielberg, thalberg, polanski
Fancy! a life of play
serious business
what i am getting to
is that Kay, the bathing beauty, is still alive
and so is Ricou Browning, the “gill-man”
as he is sometimes called
unforgotten in their aging years
Julie Adams has her soft brown hair
thick and beauty-salon styled
her cheeks bear crevices of wrinkles
when she smiles for the man who's
interviewing her
I touch my own cheek
with my own style of creases
my face droops
trying to meet the grass
that some day will cover me
hers goes in
remarkable runnels
Van Gogh waterways

Ricou Browning is younger
newly entering the
demarcation line of
eighty, his hair full
eyes watching the camera
they liked the way he swam
in the suit, no one could
match him the way the weight
pressed on his chest, so the part was his
just one of the trophys on the
mantelpiece of his many careers

Will I watch it again?
Classics must be watched every
five years.
I will have entered my seventies
of the relentless escalator of life
and my heroes?
More runnels and creases
but very much alive.