Natalie Canavor

A pun-gent love story

He dawned on me aglitter
like a pigment of my imagination,
a radiant new dimension.
A magnificent still life, stoned.
Let’s follow the Golden Fool, he said.
Drink a cup of mindfulness
and absorb my yellow mellowness.
Just don’t complicate the reckoning,
I’m only here on loan.

A frivolous riff on language

Aubergine, say the French.
ever slick and crisp of language.
Eggplant, we more prosaic English speakers
call the vegetable
or purple if it's a dress.
What's in a word?
A thing...an idea...an emotional flicker.
Language bounces into our ears
and trickles deep into the brain stem
to shape our reality.
Does it matter whether we call her
Venus or Aphrodite?
Probably not, because we don't pray to her.

But consider our word  butterfly,
deriving from the medieval notion
that witches transform themselves
into butterflies
to steal our milk and butter.
A bit paranoid?
An  Italian butterfly is a farfalla--
a word of obscure origin,
but no surprise that the Italians
named a pasta after it.
The Porguese say borboleta--
beautiful little thing--
melodic and picturesque.
The Celtic cultures,
which are into exaltation,
push this concept further:
tykki Duw: God's pretty thing.

Then there is the German schmetterling,
a militaristic sort of word that like the English,
accuses the wispy creature of stealing cream.
Calliope in her music-muse role
must dislike a word so unfriendly to the ear.
Yet Germany gave us Bach and Beethoven and Mozart--
who maybe chose to evade their linguistic heritage
by embodying beauty through transcendant sound,
delegating harsh wordage to the background.
No wonder.

Quandary

An elephant will flounder in the ocean,
a whale can't prowl the beach if tossed.
Every creature learns its law of motion:                        
step outside your galaxy -- and you're lost.

Know if you're a hunter or a runner
a flyer, crawler, climber, swimmer.
To contradict our primal nature
insures a premature erasure.

We are doomed to know the world
through the narrow window of our kind.
But feel intangible regret
in defaulting to those rigid lines.

Should There Be Time

Where do memories go
When our meter runs out?
And what ARE memories:
A mental reservoir of film clips
set on random replay…
Or maybe morsels of frozen time
that just melt away…
Or maybe it’s a mirage
to think memories are
personal and unique.
Maybe we borrow them
from some vast collection,
a library of memories
common to all humans.
Or all mammals.
And when our time is up,
we must give them back,
like books we borrow.

I’m happy enough to return
the minefield of memories
that make me miserable at 4 a.m.
All those sins of mission and omission,
mishaps, misunderstandings.
But how to maintain as my own
the miracle moments?
Baby’s first smile,
the smell of a lilac,
The taste of fresh bread,
the magic of romance,
the mystery of a Beethoven quartet…

Now the meter ticks louder.
I’ve already returned a host of memories,
along with many of the words
I spent a lifetime mastering.
Yet I feel driven to marshal and maintain
some of the memories that remain to me.
And maybe I still have time:
Time to make—or take—
some new ones for myself.

How Tempus Fugits

This is how I know cosmic time is speeding up.
I browse my morning paper and it’s time for lunch.
After lunch I huddle over my computer,
I write a few sentences, and suddenly it’s dark.
Can’t take that walk in the dark, I tell myself
and myself says you’re right, it’s time to make dinner.
After dinner I read a book for a while
but it’s a little while: Overcome by the day’s rigors
I fall asleep, pledging to do more with the time to come.
In this fashion six more days go by and become a week.
The weeks turn to months, the months to years
and WHOOSH! My turn is over.

Poems © 2024 Natalie Canavor, all rights reserved.