In Retirement Sunlight Falls / Blackbirds Hang

I.

In retirement, sunlight falls
like cherry blossom petals, floating
into drifts of pastel luminescence,
soft’ning corners in curvaceous glow,
and when I raise my arms,
corollas swarm
to form angelic wings.

Heaven’s merfolk spout
celestial dew
that trickles, gently off
my glass umbrella,
tickles near my sandaled feet.
My silken robes are lined
with thousand
puckered lips in secret

kissing and caressing
ev’ry moment of my smoothly satin skin,
and when I part my lips
to speak, emerges only
laughter, chuckles, chortles,
pausing, raptured, to inhale
sweet redolent gardenias.
Mouth forever fed with honey,
leaves of mint protrude, perennial grin.

The fruit trees overhead are flocked
with starry galaxies
rotating, each one singing
like Tibetan bowls.
Before me flows a tiding ocean
of chinchillas,
parting as I stroll
and nuzzling both my ankles
with their zephyr surf of fur.

And in my wake,
sequoias sprout
from russet loam
through sylvan mist
to cirrus sky.

II.

In retirement, blackbirds hang
like fruit rot, upside down,
inscrutable and hollow,
watching me with beady onyx eyes,
their charcoal feathers molting

onto root-entangled railroad tracks
on which I tread. I flounder past
a stalled commuter train,
its doors ajar and windows parted;
inside hang stalactites
pinning down
stalagmite-crusted passengers,
the hapless few who stayed

my friends.
Tornadic bats swarm overhead,
my shadow flickers, phantom, blurs;
my feet|feet catch on creosote crossties.
Rails conclude at wasteland’s end,
the lighthouse, toppled now,
a scree of headstones marking
vertebrae of spiral staircase
climbing up chiropteran sky.

On the dock of doldrum ocean,
mammoth pace clock faces outward to the sea;
converge the ashen swimmers, darkly goggled,
turn our backs against the shore,
and crawl-stroking away through fetid kelp,
we drag behind, each one of us,
a tow-float swim-buoy
made of block of ice,
once finely sculpted, melting now,
dissolving figures
of our dogs
or cats
or lovers.

Spare Parts Literary Magazine , Volume 10, 16 May 2025

Notes: In late January or early February of 2025, I watched an episode of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year (2021) that featured painter Ophelia Redpath and her surrealist painting, Heron at West Reservoir. I was mesmerized and was inspired to write a surrealist poem. I decided to describe the feelings of being retired, in their most extreme positive or negative valences. Notice, throughout the two-part poem, it is carefully constructed to have alternating unstessed and stressed syllables. This alternating unstessed/stressed rhythm is intended to propel the reading of the poem.

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