I LIVE



I Live

 



Andrew Wyeth- Christina's World

I live to smell new mown grass;

a bountiful buffet for a blanket of feeding birds.

I live for winter’s storms,

beauty in bleakness.

I live for hugs

friends warmth affirming me.

I live for  memories;

sustaining reminders of travels taken.

I live for parades;

celebrating what doesn’t matter.

I live for times alone

to ponder upon myself.

I live for writing

giving others my gift of feeling.

I live for compliments

recognition of my singular place on this planet

I live for seasons

never ending changes to all around me

I live for routine

reassuring matrix to facing change.

I live for a good book

transporting me away from the everyday.

I live for you

because every vessel needs filling.

 I live for me

for every life needs living.

 

-jerry wendt 2013

Fall

Fall

 

On The Trail-Winslow Homer- watercolor
 

Rustling poplars bracket lapping lakes,

afterschool Girl Scout cookies and Hershey frosted cakes.

Hosing away paper wasp nests,

smelling sweet purple mimeograph tests.

 

On the field running track,

with Football team center going wide and back.

Watching Hot dogs steaming frost clouds at games

while home team scoreboard posts zeros in frames.

 

Passing notes in study hall class,

Failing to remember molecular mass.

Painting sets for ambitious plays,

holding studyhall book, daydreaming for days.

 

The last of tomatoes ripened in sun,

fruits of summer all jarred up and done.

Ginghamed windows greet smells of burning leaves

while  crunchy ones gather in gutters and eaves.

  

Store windows painted with goblins and ghouls,

Getting lectured on smart ants and grasshopper fools.

Fields filled lumpy with orange ripened spheres,

delighted at delivery of Christmas wishbook Sears.

 

Leaving porchlight on to help costumed feet,

hoping against popcorn balls for a real candy treat.

Some ritzy one gave us real dimes,

As we falter, mask-blinded some of the times

 

Slippy slidey into winters grasp,

soon snow will come blinding and fast.

Streets clog with tempers aflair.

Kids whoop in play and elders just stare.

 

Fall is more than just transition

Halloween, not just superstition

Blocks here build strong wall,

stalwart forever; memories of Fall.

-Jerry Wendt 2013



Kitestrings

Kitestrings

 

The kite soars as string unravels to oblivion.  

Winds sometime steal the soar. 

Where does the string go?

Like so many jets watched sitting

in the departure lounge?

untied stories that just disappear

with a lingering smell of kerosene

 vanishing into the clouds.

 

I can’t ever look at clouds long

because they never stay long enough to

 know them.

Plump pliants ever changing

with lofty winds unfelt by stoic trees

 down here.

 

Here is worthy consideration,

rooted yet in another unknown,

Trees feel constant.

Steady like friends I made as a kid.

 

I’ve watched them as a kite string

spinning their life out reaching toward furthest heavens

grounded to me only until winds make claim

 

and with a clean getaway

clouds shapeshift

into new disorder

while reality

over a loudspeaker

calls me to boarding

flight 451 to San Jose.

-        Jerry Wendt 2013

 

Fat

Fat

When I float in a pool, aircraft circle looking for a place to land.

I have more pounds than the Bank of England.

My shadow is too winded to keep up.

I went to a costume party as a hot air balloon.

It isn’t working hiding hating being fat.

 

 

-Jerry Wendt 2013

a Toe Ditty

The End

The End

If I can think something, I’ll talk about it.                              

Like my penis or bed farts

or that man I saw jump out a window

splatting  his head on the roof he hit in the end.

That makes some uneasy.

I’m instead tied with the label

“Plain-spoken folks,”

because I’ll discuss most anything.

I think it’s anything but plain speaking;

more profound is what I think.

But I like being a “folks.”

It’s a word that doesn’t address geography

or size or religion.

It’s a word without judgement

so I can be just a part of all; a someone in everyone.

Talking about “the end”

is  one of my plain-spoken thoughts.

As a kid it was a far-off thing.

Something for which I had

To dress up in itchy clothes and sit

fidgety-silent in the church basement

while older folks cried

and ate store-bought cookies and drank yukky coffee.

Then I went out in the cold

and sat some more while they put a box

with somebody inside into the ground.

I had to kiss my Grandpa one time at “the end”

but he wasn’t my real grandpa and he was cold.

After, I didn’t like going to those endings

so I put up a fuss so bad they stopped making me go.

In school I was told this girl in my class got sick and died.

It was only somebody telling me something

like the feed store burned down

but I remembered it even if I never saw her again.

Later there was this disease called AIDS.

I had many friends who got it.

 In spring someone would finally tell me and I’d go visit.

Each time they got thinner and more frail but we didn’t talk much ending

 because it made them uneasy

so we just drank wine and got silly.

Then, before next spring they ended, and I wrote beautiful things about them, and cried,

and went back to work on Monday.

But I did really try to understand the end.

 My Mother had a stroke and went to the nursing home

and my days were working and seeing her

for too long a time in my thinking but short for life.

 

She couldn’t talk, but through her eyes I knew she didn’t want to go on

so I signed the paper and in three weeks she met her end.

That ending was the hardest one for me ever

because I couldn’t imagine life without My Mother

but blasé life went on.

My dear friend Annie taught me most about the end

Annie had fought cancer for years.

Her priest gave her last rites 3 times.

 She lived in a hospital bed in her living room

so she could look out her big window at her beloved Colorado mountains.

She called me at work one day and told me she was done. 

Her patience, her resolve, her determination were finished.

 She sought her own end. 

On her terms.

Annie stopped eating.

 I made the plane reservations that day

and was amazed that she ended even before my flight two days later.

Experiences open the door to thinking about my own end,

 so I should talk about it like plain spoken folks do.

In my bad car accident or my several times of hospital anesthesiology,

I really didn’t mull about my end.

Because I just believed I wasn’t ending then.

When I got told of my cancer

ending was a far-off thing again.

I guess I just can’t get my mind to accept something beyond sleeping

which is only a suspension to me.

I think a lot about Mama Cass ending choking on a chicken salad sandwich she was eating in bed. 

But I still eat in bed.

Endings of friends hit me more often now.

They are more than folks.

They are my age or sometimes even less.

I’ve been a lifelong part of them,

and I miss them but can’t think of them being around anymore.

Except in my head,

just wishing that they could be but knowing they can’t.

So why can’t I think of myself being around no more?

I don’t think about life going on,

I just vex about it going on without me.

And that’s the hardest part of my living.

Not being able to think of a time without me.

My Death escapes me.

even as I won’t escape it.

Sometimes I guess even plain spoken folks

have nothing to say.

-Jerry Wendt 2013

Sometimes things come to me in my sleep and if I arise right then and write them down, they stick. This was one of those.  It needs a couple of edits, and I'm not even sure if it's a poem- but it is one of my more honest things.  Like when I talk to myself, this is the kind of dialogue that goes on.   I hope you find something in it for yourself. -JPW

 



Christmas Poem

La Momma Morta

La Momma Morta

I am transported back to 1993; attending frequent memorials, seeing partners bereft in grief concurrently dealing with legal robbery of their property because law doesn’t exist.  Still reeling from the oppression of Reagan who gave no money for research or clinic, and cast isolation and persecution on the afflicted.  I help manning a hotline where familial rejection and ostracism drive many to despair and a few to suicidal leanings.

My work is in a bad period.  I am sad and adrift.

The movie “Philadelphia” is released.

This is a watershed in my community.  Music by Bruce Springstream becomes my anthem in a film that is the first major effort to address the reality of HIV/AIDS.  Tom Hanks portrays a dying lawyer fired from his job because of his disease. Suing for his rights and dignity, he is having a pre-testimony huddle with his lawyer Denzel Washington, who is in a transition from being homophobic. Hanks puts on a recording of the aria “La Momma Morta” from the opera “Andrea Chénier” by Umberto Giordano. It is about death. Hanks narrates the libretto for an astounded Washington. Sung by Maria Callas, the music swells. Callas grabs my heart as her voice soars like that of a gull over waves in the ocean.  I think I am hearing an angel.

“A voice full of harmony says,
You must live, I am life itself!
Your heaven is in my eyes!
You are not alone.
I shall collect all your tears
I will walk with you and support you!
Smile and hope! I am Love!
Are you surrounded by blood and mire?
I am Divine! I am Oblivion!
I am the God who saves the World
I descend from Heaven and make this Earth
A heaven! Ah!
I am love, love, love." *

Musical ecstasy. I am drained.  The shock after walking into the bright daylight outside after is nothing compared to the impact to my soul.  With new lifelong understanding, I know love binds me to life. 

-Jerry Wendt 2013 329 words

*excerpt from the aria  “La Momma Morta” from the opera “Andrea Chénier” by Umberto Giordano

If you would like to see this scene which won Hanks an Academy Award, you may revisit it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b0p9mTJOJI

"The Stud That Changed The World"

 

Serves me right- Seeing a blurb about a book "Wanganella, the stud that changed the world" .

 

 

 

Wang? Stud? OF COURSE I was interested in seeing more. I find it is an obscure Australian story about a strain of Merino sheep developed for, blah blah blah.     I'm going back to "Hunk of the Day " right now !

 

This link has the full story...

 

http://www.fsfalkiner.com.au/history.html

 

 

 

  

It is a colorful word, though.  "Wanganella" sounds like one of those sticks with streamers attached that young girl fairy princess wannabe's or old queens at gay pride parades wave around to increase the festivity quotient. Henceforth, we should call those wands, "Wanganellas"  The relation to sheep must have some relevance or irony somewhere.

 (I was talking about "Bo-Peep, you low-life's)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, for those that can really get into this ,  at great effort I have procured a photograph of the famous Wanganella bronze Merino sheep tribute statue at Wanganella Station, Australia, and have pictured it along with a map of just where the hell all these sheep are. For the life of me I can find nothing beyond a campground ( that has hot water for a $1au coin for 4 minutes) and a general Store on Lot 9, Cobb Street ( you won't get lost- there are only 235 people and a bunch of sheep living there) where undoubtedly you can pick up a Kirk's cola and some chips)  The campground doesn't look like you'd have much of an adventure staying at it- tho it is in the habitat of the common brown snake, the world's second most venomous snake .

 

 

My photos showing most everything of interest there will save you a bundle in not having to fly forever, hire a car and guide, and drive all that way for a 10 minute viewing... and no cold beers. 

 

Get a chair and a libation of choice and enjoy the day where you are .  I'll be out soon as I finish with "Hunk of the Day !"

 

 

 

Board

Soft Spot

 

 

Soft Spot

 

Let me feel your kitten paw

against my neck                                                       
 

Let me see the peach blush

radiate from your cheeks
 
Let me hear your oak leaf rustle
tickle my eardrums
 

Let me taste your oven-fresh bread

melting  in my mouth
 

And let me join you

so we float
through a haze
of  dancing candle shadows
in jasmine scented nights
 

I will tell you stories

of castles built on mountains

 I will show you winter nights

wrapped warm in pouffy spun clouds
 

I will touch your soul

with caress of a fledgling feather

I will feed you unending morsels of laughter

to nourish your being

 And if all these things happen

even in the sweet flicker of an instant
I will open that deepest part of me
and allow you to hold it in your hand

 

-Jerry Wendt 2013

 

Touch

Touch

 

Words cannot fit inside brackets     

anymore than a smile

can hide behind staunch facade.

There are so many ways to radiate

seasons of feeling,

but academic expressions

always place a

distant second

to a simple touch.

 

 

-jerry wendt 2013

Winetasting in verse

Tasting Some Wine

 

First comes appearance

I  judge cloudy or clear.

Is the color as should be

Or is there something to fear

 

Next comes aroma

With nose deep in the bowl
 

I was a part of serious winetasting weekends at Dr. John Rippon's
 summer home in Sawyer Michigan for decades.
 Our group would gather and each contribute to gourmet repasts
after tasting a myriad of wines in flights.
 It was a Baccanal that I retain fond memories of.
 At this table is Dr Margaret Dougles, myself, Dr John Rippon
 

I savor bouquet,

Ah, smells for the soul

 

I raise up my glass

Anticipate the wine

Drink deeply and rejoice

This fruit of the vine

 

The first sip is best

My palate is fresh

I savor the flavor

Bad, better, or best

 

Now swirling around

Inside my mouth

I draw in some air

Before gulping south

 

I  raise up my glass

Anticipate the wine

We scored every flight wine tasted blind using a 100 point scoring
 system involving appearance color smell aroma
 and bouquet and taste acid balance body flavor.
 It was an intensive but enjoyable experience
 

Drink deeply and rejoice

The fruit of the vine

 

With one final slurp

I rinse and chew bread

And fill out my score sheet

Before the wine goes to my head.

 

And that’s what I do

To properly taste

But I’ll tell you a truth

I never spit and let waste

 

I  raise up my glass

All bottles brought by group members
were wrapped in paper bags so every tasting was "blind"

Anticipate the wine

Drink deeply and rejoice

This fruit of the vine

 

This is my passion

To taste many all year

And perhaps find one bottle

That I can hold dear

 

And so should you find me

With just one glass of some Rhone

Just keep on a walking

And leave me alone

 

I  raise up my glass

Anticipate the wine

Tastings were always held in the Belvedre Cottage, a screened room
 in the midst of  forested gardens on the
 Rippon  Michigan  Warren Dunes property

Drink deeply and rejoice

The fruit of the vine

 

But if at my table

There’s another empty glass at my station

Then come and sit down,

Pour yourself a libation

 

Because in tasting a wine

There’s one truth at end

Nothing goes better

Than sharing with friends

 

So,  I  raise up my glass

And toast with my wine

With these grapes I pay tribute

To all friends that are mine.

                                                                           -Jerry Wendt 2010



The Belvedre, our gathering spot every summer. Idyllic !