Burnet Woods: A Love Song

The number one thing about where we live

We’re three blocks from Burnet Woods park

The museum, the lake, the civil war cannons

And the bandstand's a Clifton landmark

 

Burnet’s been there for a century and a half

The lake, Eighteen Seventy-Five

There’s a pink granite monument at the southern edge

And a trapeze on MLK Drive

The woods have a network of hiking trails

We forget that we’re still in the city 

One hikes up and down in the hills and ravines

Each view that we see, still more pretty

Our park also has an old-time playground

With its swings and a tall concrete slide

Built in the thirties by the WPA 

Cardboard speeds up each little kid’s ride 

The bandstand has concerts each Wednesday eve 

Maybe folk or classical or rock 

Fantastic fireworks on the Fourth of July

People watch from the lakside sidewalk

A hippy built a labyrinth in the park

It was hidden far off in the trees

The authorities forced him to take it all down

The labyrinth man said they were sleaze

 

Fishermen hang out at Burnet Woods lake

Hunting catfish and bass and brown trout

A guy once showed me his three-foot catch

The size of it made me freak out

  

One winter I gathered some kindling from the woods

And filled up the rack on my car

The cops were watching, said put it all back

I still think their policy bizarre

When J was a kid we would sled at Burnet

The best spot, right near Skyline Chili 

You have to watch for the trees at the end

The sleds almost fly, it’s so hilly 

To me Burnet Woods is a slice of heaven

It’s freedom and beauty and rest

Most of all, it’s escape from the trials of life

Pay a visit, you'll soon be de-stressed

Kitchen Horrors

“Wake up, wake up

We caught the mouse

But he is still alive

Please please go down to the kitchen”

“Stop poking me

I’m sound asleep

The mouse will die soon

This can wait until morning”

Then it was morning

I made my way downstairs

The mousetrap, empty, upside down

The mouse a foot away

Lying on his  back

Kicking, jerking

Squirming, writhing

Unable to right himself 

I slid a New Yorker under the helpless body

Laid an AARP magazine on the top

Rolled the bundle in a coffin-like cylinder

And carried the package to the driveway

What does one do when the mousetrap fails?  

I tossed the crippled body into my neighbor’s garden

Watched as the leaves shook about

What now?  How long?  

I walked away, stoop-shouldered, head down 

The demeanor of a guilt-ridden murderer    

My Hearing Aid Chronicle

My father-in-law hated his hearing aids

Once a week the batteries went dead 

They made screechy sounds at the opera

Which filled his poor wife with such dread 

I myself never thought about hearing aids

Because I never planned to grow old

But at fifty my ears became dodgy

An unpleasant truth, when all’s told 

I noticed this first as a teacher

Mishearing what students would say

This mean girl spoke softer and softer

A fiendish prank some students play 

I checked with my chums about hearing aids

Morris leaves his at home in the box

Catherine still doesn’t hear her hubby

Though she rarely seems to listen when he talks 

My spouse had a more upbeat vision

Her friend Martha’s hearing aids changed her life 

Martha said she became more outgoing 

A prospect that appealed to my wife 

She sent me to the audiologist and I got a test 

He said he could definitely help

But he charged twice as much as the Big Box

And the Big Box got smiles on Yelp 

 

So I shelled out a fortune for hearing aids

Then I only had worn them one week

When I lost one while camping in Michigan 

All the squirrels were distressed by my shriek

I still don’t hear well at the movies

I struggle to follow the story 

Monsters and car bombs are what I like best

Less talk and more images gory 

In the past my hearing was terrible

But now I would say it’s just bad 

“Just bad’s” an improvement after all

For small things one ought to be glad 

Lizard Observations

About eighty million lizards

live in California's Mojave Desert

I know this to be true 

because I found it on Google

although they failed to report   

the total lizard population of North America

My final guess, 1.2 billion

which would mean more lizards 

than human beings and dogs combined

One of these colonies

is located outside our house

on our steps

the sidewalk 

the patio deck

in the driveway

next to the garage 

under the recycling bin 

here and there in the flower beds 

Our little guests love to relax in the sunshine

where they slumber with their eyes shut tight

then retreat to their lizard dens at sunset 

Cincinnati lizards are neither angry nor obstreperous

They never bare their tiny sharp teeth

or make unpleasant growling noises 

Quite the reverse, they are exceedingly shy

and flee at the first sign of human intruders

You would not believe how speedy these lizards can be

though they are only four or five inches long

The dog has never been able to catch one 

despite trying so many times 

They zoom straight up walls

scurry into minuscule holes

vanish in the tall grass or the rock pile  

Five years ago not a single lizard lived on our block 

but now dozens of them 

maybe hundreds 

share our space 

I am pleased they have joined our family 

We are lonely and bored during the pandemic 

and, thanks to our lizard friends 

we live in a more lively and exotic place

This Is A Poem I Wrote In My Sleep Last Night

  

D e t e r m i n e D    D e l i g h t e D    D e m e n t e D    D e c e a s e D

e                 e    e               e    e             e    e             e

t                 t    l               l    m             m    c             c

e                 e    i               i    e             e    e             e

r                 r    g               g    n             n    a             a

m                 m    h               h    t             t    s             s

i                 i    t               t    e             e    e             e

n                 n    e               e    D e m e n t e D    D e c e a s e D

e                 e    D e l i g h t e D

D e t e r m i n e D

The Best of Times

When I was just a kid in forty-nine

The world was a much more hopeful place 

The automat — the finest place to dine

Bob Hope and Jane starred in “The Paleface”

Our town had yet to see a TV set

Our telephone was on a party line

One penny, you could buy a cigarette

We viewed the House and Senate as benign

We rode our bikes to school every day

And milk arrived in bottles made of glass

We whiled away the hours at croquet

Latin was the language used for mass

Those times now seem the best of all and yet

How did we live without the Internet?

Twelve Years Ago This Autumn (An Ode to Retirement)

Half past six, our alarm screams out 

My spouse lays out my jacket and tie

Rush hour, gridlock, stops and starts  

My daily commute, a chance to die 

Who needs this? 

I scan yellowed notes, get primed for class 

One hundred deadpan undergrad faces  

My deepest fear, they’ll find me boring

No way I can gain the crowd’s good graces   

I feel a migraine coming on 

Tuna salad, I lunch at my desk  

Then off to the weekly faculty meeting

We pick at the rules for the umpteenth time 

Searching for an answer to stop student cheating  

Beating a dead horse

I meet with a grad student about her thesis

No way I can think of a workable topic 

Failing to give even subpar advice

I fear that my brain is becoming myopic

Anxiety and shame, doldrums

Back to my office, an hour of my own

I work on an obtuse research paper 

The findings are bland, the conclusions obscure 

Time ill-spent on a dead-end caper 

What is the point exactly? 

Postscript (Twelve years later, here and now) 

My biggest worry when I retired 

How will I ever survive without work?  

It took two days to make my transition  

Surprise, surprise, I’m no longer berserk  

Life is gentle, life is kind