Celebrations of the Small of an Elderly Gent

Once a sturdy shitkicker he now listens to a slow steady

inward breath grateful to awaken, another day to witness

the sanity of the small, feeling aching joints staggering

down well-worn wooden steps balancing a nocturnal

collection in a piss-pot. Slowly stirring a steaming cup  

of coffee, tendrils of morning sunshine stream through

a kitchen window. A ruby-throated humming bird does

crazed loopty loops, a sudden Kamikaze dive swooping

down for a quick sip of nectar from a glass feeder glazed

with morning wetness.

Sanity is picking sun -warmed swollen

blueberries and tiny wild strawberries to plop into his

favorite white ironstone bowl with sliced Costa-Rican

bananas, crawling back to bed narcotized by a full belly

nodding off to a dreamless sleep.

Sanity is bowels moving along in rapid transit reliably

as El Duce s railway before he held Adolph’s hand and

got himself hung upside down like a splayed pig.

Sanity is weeding the garden, harvesting radicchio and

romaine lettuce for a Mesclun salad, picking plump

big-boy tomatoes,  pulling ripe radishes and carrots

bursting at the seams.

Sanity is drenched in sweat on a high U-V day, thirst

quenched with a cold beer or water as pristine as a

potation once drawn from a farm’s fathomless well.

Sanity is sharing stillness with one’s mate savoring

moments of body to quivering body, stolidity of bone

to bone, offering foot massage tugging each toe, shiatsu

for the metatarsal and muscle-bound Achilles tendon

sending heebie-jeebie twangs shooting up meridians

from toes to the top of the head.

 Sanity is passing time with grand-kids, singing songs

on a mandolin, dancing to a tambourine, building

a tree -house, teaching them how to fly-cast for speckled

trout and make a rubber-band rifle.

This old gent hopes he got great grandma’s genes who

lived to 96 with all her teeth and brain synapses still

snapping away. For now he’d prefer to remain at the

party delaying the catastrophic adventure of the anesthetic

from which none come around as long as possible.

M.P. Ehrlich 199 Christie St. N.J.