The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: commute

  • Cold Car

    Early still dark and the cat is up
    a cup of coffee before commute
    past a golden sun in woods lost
    to old Firestones rubber cairns.

    Commutes are like short stories
    back out, turn around, take off
    reach the corner slow stop turn
    right down the hill to the light.

    The hills loom typographically
    a bold outline of italicized firs
    at an intersection of squirrels
    and owls a tree older than any

    house on the block remembers
    not who lived where but winds
    and howls rains and scorching
    sun a few children on swings.

    Houses last longer than cars
    trees longer than houses the
    old man recalls his home his
    cars and the tree he planted

    in his front yard a year prior
    to the war and it lived to see
    the freeway come through
    odd name that, he said,

    no one on it ever seemed free
    especially if you missed your
    offramp had to go another
    mile or two get off back on.

    One picks a car like a font
    default curlicue bumpers
    and chrome strips along
    the doors inside the bowl

    cold in the counter stroke
    as one enters the aperture
    the temperature there not
    quite human in spite of the

    comfort compared to the horse
    drawn buggy or the old man
    with a staff stumbling toward
    town his rucksack full of acorns.

  • The Old Commute

    Retired from structured work
    where one comes in time
    to a sense of worthiness
    awake but dewy-eyed

    we often rode together but
    arrived to chalk and cheese
    shifts you taught me
    to go easy to go around

    and the rain fell down
    petrichor filled the hooptie
    and I long now for those days
    when we used to commute.

  • Sitting in the City

    Maple out spray maying
    ribbons of flowers
    twirl the girls
    round the pole boys
    pulling with bicycles
    festoons falling
    yards full of toys
    and fickle mud.    		 Sitting out warm summer evenings, distant wildfires raking up the dry brush, smoke seen by astronauts as far away as January, surf still rolling up the beaches all around the world, I think of those days and nights six months opposite and reflect on the perfection of earth time.

     

    We have “seen the travail”:

    “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away…That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been” (Ecclesiastes, 3:6-15, KJV).

     

    But from the time the alarm clocks call and coo across the great divide, and while some rush to it others delay with snooze, to the resetting of the alarms at night, all grow quickly and remain forever impatient with time.

     

    So time moves on: the commute doglegs left as the slow lane stops while drivers get out and pee behind the rail; cells go dead and news is lost forever; the lady in front of you in line at the coffee drive-thru is ordering lattes with lemon twists and chocolate sprinkles atop whipped cream delight – for her whole office; you stop for a jam filled doughnut, already late, and you don’t give a damn about the new diet.

     

    Walking to the front door from the parking lot you wonder if you’ve worn the right clothes for the day. You forgot your sack lunch. The café is serving mac and cheese. You promise a nice salad for dinner. Someone has tossed a cigarette butt in your path – how rude is that! By the time you leave the office, it’s dark out and you’ve forgotten the doughnut and the salad.

     
    July table in the shade
    under the apple tree:
    pickles, potato salad,
    baked beans, deviled
    eggs, bottles of beer,
    water balloon toss,
    evening of pops,
    night of dust.
    By the end of August,
    the sun slipping south
    at an alarming speed,
    the activists suggest
    a presidential decree:
    a declaration of
    a state of emergency,
    plan parades in glee.
    Winter whistles restlessly,
    inflows of wet and dry cold,
    floods and long lines
    at the flu counter,
    impeccable timing,
    seasons on earth,
    neither hurried nor harried,
    quit nor balked.