"Yes, You Can Say About Me" [by Stanley Moss]

"Yes, You Can Say About Me" (October 29, 2021)

Yes, you can say about me:
I loved grand opera, the blues, scat,
oratorios, gospel, hymns, standards.
I wrote American English.
One afternoon, when I could have gone
to a matinee, I went to the Bronx zoo
to hear a monkey sing a lullaby to a baby monkey.
Out of season and in season, I went to ponds
to hear frogs croak. I walked, hiked, ran
to listen to bees in hives and wild flowers.
Birds migrated in and out of my dreams.
Seagulls, albatrosses and swans felt safe,
ate from my hand in winter.
I cherished the sounds of fish breaking water.
I understood without translation
the gossip of house mice talking to sewer rats.
I eavesdropped on sugar maples
talking to bigleaf maples,
I heard granny smith apple trees soundless
winking at red delicious apple trees.
I understood what different brooks, streams, rivers
had to say to lakes and oceans, the silence and fears of
mussels and clams when they opened their mouths.
I saved a Monarch butterfly struggling
to get out of a spider’s web
so it could fly to Mexico.
I wept when we anchored at Plymouth harbor,
the first time I heard English English.

-- Stanley Moss

Comments

[Jill Newnham]

Wonderful: poetry at the service of memory, itself the source of poetry.