Jed Feffer returns this summer.

Jed Feffer

 It's All Good, Father
 
The irritant is your absence,
but your ashes feed this white birch,
and the ground,
where an ant drags a moth over twigs.
You are gone,
but here are tall lilies,
Autumn Joy,
bee balm,
bright phlox,
and a glass petaled
blue ornamental flower,
that when tapped
with a pen
produces an icy tone
like clear steel drums.

You and mom packed up
most summers
to drive
to this Vermont farmhouse


where you continued                                               
your quest
for the perfect book.                                         
How odd now
to be ash;
your glasses ash,
your legs ash,
your heart ash,
your hands ash
your brain ash,
your tongue ash.

Ash,
good soil food;
something you'd appreciate;
ground up for flowers.
This bench a place
to recollect you
and talk to you.

But memory is no substitute
for substance;
your voice;
your body
dressed in old jeans
and a flannel shirt,
sitting at the breakfast table
leaning over coffee.

You picking blueberries
in a too small beach hat;
plastic bucket strapped
to your belt buckle
slowly plucking berries.




Joanne Giannino sent us away, Wednesday before last, with the following prompt:

Name That Poem

Poetry Prompt from Poets&Writers Magazine 3.20.18

In a 2013 interview for the National Book Foundation, poet Lucie Brock-Broido, who passed away earlier this month, spoke of a leather-bound journal she kept with lists of names and titles. “Sometimes, I just place a title at the top of the undisturbed, blank page and that name becomes something like a piece of sand that happened into the delicate flesh of an oyster, blank itself and closed off from the world…. The result, eventually, is a pearl.” Spend several days jotting down phrases and combinations of words you come across, either out in the world or from your imagination, that seem particularly imagistic, evocative, or disquieting. Select one to use as a poem title, and then let a poem build intuitively, layer by layer, around the “disturbance.”

For Jed, the phrase was "It's all good."  Some of us have never liked that expression, but we very much like what Jed did with it.  A pearl.