November When The Light Changes
The news today is not so bad. Our chipmunks have left the harvest alone (some other gardeners must be catering). The early sunsets remain glorious, and leaves descend like tired soldiers to remind us most wars end.
Will they bother with our street, she wonders, imagining pickups emblazoned with flags and white men wielding weaponry as savage as their opinions. No, the danger is over, I say. Our dogs snore in peace as if it were true.
If we could read the future would we open the book? I think I wouldn’t, there’s much too many possible outcomes and corrosive truths. You’d think it wouldn’t be too much to ask for a dog’s dream for everyone — each though alone snoring safe in the pack.
A Bite To Eat In Hardeeville, South Carolina
Big white guy in Waffle House with prison tats frying my eggs sings with the radio as it plays Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” while a wizened waitress and waif of a cashier join him singing lala lala la with the chorus — like God and His angels I’d say.
You’re not in your other life here working, not scratching up rent from sock drawers and the couch after a weekend bender or bar fight but doing the ethereal Thing You’re Good At with your laboring comrades in song.
Pity the fool who thinks he’ll do better than feeding passing travelers’ souls on sugar and fat and random banter, the record and the promise all in the past. But you can’t do better you find at last than that Thing you got with your Brown Eyed Girl.
What I Saw Of Saint George
But I had other ideas today, warding off fascists with trips to libraries and immigrant delis and smiles at all the neighbors walking dogs, surprisingly few of whom would look away. Victory will come to those who still can say this is not, after all, a terrible day.
M.A. Schaffner had a novel and a collection of poetry published sometime in the last century and quite a lot of poems too, many if not most in journals that have since disappeared. They are currently seven chapters into a projected twenty on the history of the Second United States Colored Infantry, raised in Arlington in 1863, after which they have solemnly sworn they ain’t gonna study war no more. Life is short and the pugs need to get out more.