I'm a noun and a verb

(and sometimes a pun)

It was one of those days of everything and nothing. I fumbled on my phone for a good spring poem, and the dementia ward waited. I blame the delay and not the famous words, but one way or another, it didn’t get what I was trying to say. Let’s see if this works instead.

I’m a Noun and a Verb and Sometimes A Pun

I feel like I’m driving through a wedding

What with the redbuds and dogwoods and half-glimpsed glades of bluebells blurring by the window and spring says I Do

(with a shout and a whisper and a thousand greens to get lost in)

I’m out on the road all the time and standing in the grass in the mornings and watching the moon at night and talking with miracles daylong, and they talk back.

This isn’t very good she said

The clouds of Alzheimer’s breaking for an instant

One piercing beam

That illuminated fully

“What, me, or the Bach, or the story I’m telling?” I asked, startled at how right she was, not sure if she could hear in her afternoon living room

(the Truth always knocks me off kilter because a lie is squishy–no footing, like those Wal-mart shoes for ten dollars, and after walking in them all day suddenly you realize you’ve betrayed your feet, or a piece of gum an hour past its expiration, choking in an instant)

I wobbled and tried some more and then gave up and told them about what really mattered: spring, the Wood duck on the pond.

“Do you know that sometimes they call them Wedding Ducks?”

That morning a sort of friend that I know from my shows was so dressed up in a pink chemo hat that I didn’t see her until I did and then I didn’t know what to do until she called me over, then I did.

“Want to see a good looking lady?” she fumbled and mumbled and tried to laugh a short spiky stubble of a laugh taking off her hat. “Going through it now.”

“They cut you here?” I asked, suddenly touching the near-stranger’s head and tracing the scar.

”No, that’s where they operated for the aneurism”

But when things aren’t hidden anymore, there’s a light that flashes between everyone’s eyes and the laughter somehow returns.

“Hey, wish they could give me a brain transplant one of these days” I Joshed.

(I’m a noun and a verb, and sometimes a pun.)

“Keep the hat off, you look good.”

I always thought I’d be a good preacher save that I didn’t believe. But now I do, except my eyes don’t work right anymore. After the James Brown snapped to a close and disco ran itself out, I played them a hymn and told the true story (but got the songs mixed up).

You know, the man with everything. Then his son died, then everything burned down in the great Chicago fire, then his daughters drowned on the way to England. All he had left to do was drag himself across the water to meet his grieving wife. Passing the spot where the ocean ate his little girls, he wrote “It is well with my soul.”

It seemed a good thing to play

So we did, and somebody cried (it was almost me) and then the national anthem and then I left.

“The wood duck even looks like he has his hair slicked back.” I told them later.

“It looks like he’s going to a wedding.”

Aren’t we all?

–Josh