think about it, do it

what makes a citizen a
citizen? is it a certain
blindness or a lightness? lack
of pessimism gene? a quality
of muscle (moral) fiber? a
heartfelt why, and equally, why
not? she eats impossible things
for breakfast, and then invites
immovable objects out to lunch

in voice and person she
is small but her themes
(both those of choice and
happenstance) are large and overwhelming –
just peace, the planet, tragic
loss, how we can continue
to be heard by making
signs and music even though
we are a person very
small of voice and word

blueberries wild sweet and delicious
each spring eastern Maine the
barrens alive with soft green
and white blossoms late July
they turn blue harvest begins –
a few families control them,
also known as barons – skilled
in price fixing, poison spraying,
cheap labor – ask what is
wild, what is the harvest

he contains contradictions, yes he
does – literate farmer, conservative rebel,
entrepreneurial anarchist, genius simpleton,
conditional lover, tasting bitter with the
sweet – life is never rural
enough unless it’s in the
major capitols of the world,
Paris, New York, Washington DC –
someone hard to pin down,
though he would not agree

best understood as an Armenian
princess ascending to her place
as tribal matriarch, daughter of
diaspora bearing scars of holocaust
not healed but surgically spiritually
repaired through her work and
words and will – she talked
in her sleep, her roommates
privileged to hear those secrets –
one night there were “Swans!”

first time I saw her –
black tank top and violet
drawstring pants, gardening in hot
dust outside the trailer on
the hill – later, inside, there
was a bowl of plums –
beginning of a relationship of
singular importance to me –
Cor Leonis, Queen of Amtrak, Grandma
Regula, source of shooting stars

my idealism met her and
remembered her not as a
person but as an ideal –
brown-eyed, long limbed just
like her familiar, belonged to
the savannah, but ventured into
areas of human habitation as
a helper, traveller, foreigner,
deer with not a moment’s fright –
this was my ideal (endangered)