Sunset at the North Rim ©2014 Bo Mackison
A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.” ~ Dennis Waitley
Twilight View of North Rim’s Grand Canyon Lodge and Beyond
June 17, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Marriage Quartet – on the Occasion of Our 38th Anniversary
June 12, 2014 by 3 Comments
MARRIAGE QUARTET
SOMETHING OLD
Look behind the chair – the yellow one.
Or check under the Wall Street Journal on the coffee table,
or look on the ledge above the kitchen sink.
If only you would leave it on your finger,
Twirling and spinning it, tossing it into the air
or worse, clunking it on the floor.
You’d think after 38 years
you wouldn’t fuss with that ring.
I barely notice mine,
but yours is alive, dancing on and off your finger.
SOMETHING NEW
I. First Anniversary
Gino’s deep dish pizzeria, heart of Chicago’s Rush Street.
Double cheese, double sausage, extra sauce. No garlic.
Jukebox sweet sings Seals and Croft’s Summer Breeze
Later, a six-pack of Old Style for you and tequila for me,
Oak Street beach, the surf of Lake Michigan, background music.
“Be careful crossing Lake Shore Drive.”
II. The Fourteenth
Macaroni and cheese from that blue cardboard box
Single carrot sticks, whines of protest, ranch dressing.
Dripping candles, globs of wax on chocolate cupcakes,
burnt and lop-sided, smeared thick with frosting.
Raffi thumping out This Little Light of Mine.
“You kids stop kicking each other this minute and I mean it.”
III. The Thirty-First
White Riesling from organic growers in California
Eight grain bread warm, drizzled with Porcini Olive Oil and Parmesan
Smoked salmon and fresh dill, Asian pears.
George Winston playing Sweet Soul on the keys.
Something new – the house quiet, the children in college and beyond.
“Let’s call it an early evening.”
IV. The Thirty Eighth
Steak and pineapples on the grill.
A twilight walk around Sticker’s Pond, the rain passed through.
You study remodeling plans for your wish list kitchen;
I process photographs from my adventure in Escalante.
If you think after 38 years, we know the secrets of a long, happy marriage,
you’d be both wrong and right.
“Full moon tonight. Wish upon a moon?”
SOMETHING BORROWED
Ma said I was borrowing trouble
when I married poor –
“can’t buy bread with love”
and married young –
“not old enough to keep your nose clean”
when I married the wrong guy –
“what will the neighbors say?”
got married by the wrong preacher –
“what will God in heaven say?”
I went on ahead, paid her no mind, said my “I do’s” proud,
and the money I saved by borrowing trouble
— and not buying it outright –
paid for my dress and the band and his white dancing shoes.
SOMETHING BLUE
Our first Christmas we spent the last money on rent and
kerosene for the space heater, and took the last dollars
from the envelope marked Savings.
Skipped lunch the day before Christmas Eve, and
rode the el into the Loop, squeezed through the Marshall Fields shopping frenzy,
searched, fumbling and fretting,
finally chose a tiny comb in tortoiseshell,
so you might groom your mustache –
a fad that year, mustache combs.
You, the number cruncher,
fashioned a love sonnet in awkward meter,
rolled the cheap typing paper like precious parchment,
and tied it with ribbon from Woolworth’s.
The comb’s now jumbled in your jewelry box
with antique silver cuff-links
and your grandfather’s gold watch fob.
I keep that worn sheet of fresh promise
with birth certificates and old mortgage papers
tied with a faded deep blue ribbon,
now the color of a desert sky.
————-
I wrote this poem quite a few years ago, and updated it for today in honor of our 38th wedding Anniversary – a testament to the strength of commitment and love, in good times and in bad, in flow and in transition. Honoring our anniversary, Sherpa.
Note: Please let it be known that this is memoir poetry, and as such, it is not 100% accurate. (Pretty close though!)
A Walk with Grace – While Struggling with Patience
June 11, 2014 by 2 Comments
A Walk through the Woods © Bo Mackison
I am in wait mode, struggling with patience.
I walk through a wooded area heading towards Strickers Pond,
cross a street, a prairie grass restoration spreads before me,
the glacial pond is just beyond.
Strickers Pond © 2014 Bo Mackison
I imagine walking with Grace around this pond.
I love the sound of that, the double meaning.
For I have an application in for a rescue dog,
a sweet four-year-old labrador/pointer mix.
Her name is Grace.
Prairie Grasses © 2014 Bo Mackison
The process is excruciatingly long, understandable enough,
the rescue group wants to find the perfect home for Grace.
She was rescued from a Missouri shelter on what would have been her last day alive,
and transferred to a foster home in Wisconsin with only hours to spare.
(“She loved the car ride, by the way!)
But she’s been there since November,
and she needs a home of her own and I need a companion.
Stickers Pond and American Lotus © 2104 Bo Mackison
We met, Grace and I, at her foster mom’s place.
Such a sweet girl, and still waiting for a home because, though she is a large breed dog,
she is small for her size, just forty pounds.
I find that a simply perfect quality. I find her quite perfect, too.
The questions in my head start.
Am I good enough? Will she be happy with me?
Will she like the desert as much as I do? Will she love to travel and hike and camp?
Am I good enough?
Purple Martin Colony © 2014 Bo Mackison
She has the sweetest eyes, her look says I want to please.
Her foster mom gives her glowing reports. She sits and shakes hands, and looks at me.
Bright eyed, tail in perpetual wag.
I struggle with patience — on so many issues —
and I’m impatient with the wait for Grace as the adoption process slugs along.
Application, in and acknowleged. Now the papers are sent to “the board”
the vet is called, three references checked, and last, a home visit.
Another test of patience.
Purple Martin and Colony © 2014 Bo Mackison
I’ve been searching for a companion dog since January,
and now that Grace and I have found each other,
I want her to be in a place she can call her own.
I’m seeking that same place – my place to call home.
The Resting Place © 2014 Bo Mackison
Settling in is always a struggle after I have been in Arizona.
I know this. I expect it. I plan for it.
And still, I do the transition with many requests for the gift of grace.
For acceptance of what is, acceptance of what isn’t,
and the courage to embrace each day just as it is, just as I am.
Fits and starts, and ups and downs,
this practice of sitting with patience.
Of fitting in, of finding my place again.
I wait, and learn to wait with more ease as I practice.
All shall be well, I whisper. Yes, all shall be well.
An Interlude in Travel; Expounding on Spring in Wisconsin
June 3, 2014 by 1 Comment
Silver Drift Crabapple © 2013 Bo Mackison
There are bugs, no-see-ums, in Wisconsin.
There are crab apple trees so heavy with white blossoms you know they are really
floral bouquets gently swaying on the earth, in Wisconsin.
There are skies dense with clouds, white, gray, pink, puffy, dense, beribboned, in Wisconsin.
The red maple stands tall, branches widespread, deep in greening leaves, sturdy, in Wisconsin.
There are tiny bugs that buzz about my ears, in Wisconsin.
The rain pounds the earth, sheets of water, and thunder snap crackles,
The rain barrel is overflowing, in Wisconsin.
Gnats swarm in my eyes, follow me in a haze of flight as I dodge and swat, in Wisconsin.
The yard is green, abundantly so, not cultivated,
we chuck the hang tags from the pesticide companies,
greens of clover, purple and white violets, and wildly growing,
rampant spreads of escape-artist mint.
I pick the mint sometimes, the runners squirm loose from the earth with a tug, in Wisconsin.
The paper birch is pregnant with leaves, they drag upon the grassy understory, hide the neighbor’s yard from view, in Wisconsin.
Its bark once pale and baby skin smooth those many years ago
when we dug a hole and set it in the black earth,
the bark’s now rough and deeply textured, full of character like its caretakers, in Wisconsin.
The moss creeps between the flagstone, a tiny community for ants and beetles,
littered with maple spinners and bits of dried purple scent
from the overhanging lilac, in Wisconsin.
Two ashes we planted a quarter century ago began as sticks,
each with a lesser god’s headdress of leaf, and now
they rise taller than our two-story home, in Wisconsin.
The hummingbird feeder has fresh nectar, but the sighting of a hummer
is a rare treat, in Wisconsin.
The perennial garden we planned, painstakingly mapping color and height,
bloom time and sequence, it weathered the harsh winter with fair results, in Wisconsin.
The pink spikes of the coral bells wave two feet above its fluff of purple leaves,
but nothing else is yet in bud. There are spaces now for three or four new sets of plants.
The ornamental grasses and lavender were lost to winter’s brutal cold, in Wisconsin.
I dawdled this year,
unwilling to leave Arizona for the greener spaces, of Wisconsin.
There was work to finish, meetings to attend, and the lure of the desert remained strong.
I watched the saguaros bloom. I lingered.
I wasn’t ready to depart, and then I was.
Fate had other plans. A disabled car 300 miles down the road
and an engine overhaul, delayed parts,
led to weeks of side adventures into red rock wilderness and the Grand Canyon.
When I return to get my car,
I’m told there is another week’s delay, it is the same day Slide Fire begins
scorching beloved Oak Canyon, and a pyrotechnic smoke show hovers over Flagstaff for days.
Fire, twenty miles distant, throws up orange walls of smoke to the south of town,
obliterates the San Francisco Peaks to the north. They stand, shrouded in gray.
And then a black looming cloud, reminiscent of sci-fi saucers, settles on this city of 70,000, and blots out the sun. We breathe through makeshift masks, in Arizona.
The blooms are late-coming this year as was I, to Wisconsin.
Respite from my travel, the lilacs and crab apples, the dogwoods and magnolias in flower.
The sandhill crane, squawking its rattly ka-roo-roo, flies over my home, in Wisconsin.
Lookout Views from Cape Royal Road – North Rim of Grand Canyon
June 1, 2014 by 6 Comments
Point Imperial © 2014 Bo Mackison
We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation. ~ Theodore Roosevelt (1906)
Point Imperial, 8803 feet in elevation,
Overlooking Grand Canyon to the east, and beyond, the Painted Desert.
Vista Encantada © 2014 Bo Mackison
The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books. ~ Theodore Roosevelt (1906)
Cape Royal © 2014 Bo Mackison
When your spirit cries for peace, come to a world of canyons deep in the old land, feel the exultation of high plateaus, the strength of moving waters, the simplicity of sand and grass, the silence of growth. ~ August Frugé
Cape Royal, the point, the southernmost view on the North Rim,
the widest panorama of any Grand Canyon overlook
the gorge has a view of about 270° of the horizon.
Look to Marble Canyon in the north, gaze south towards the Palisades of the Desert.
Angel’s Window from Walhalla Point © 2014 Bo Mackison
How the striking of the great clock, whose hours are millions of years, reverberates out of the abyss of the past!
~ John Burroughs
Angel’s Window, North Rim of Grand Canyon © 2014 Bo Mackison
. . . each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon – each one makes his own Canyon before he comes, each one brings and carries away his own Canyon. ~ Carl Sandburg
Grand Canyon Rock Formations © 2014 Bo Mackison
We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. ~ Theodore Roosevelt (1906)
