‘With Boots On’ and Other Poetry by Lionel Willis

.

With Boots On

Soon after break of day an old man comes
Trudging along the thawing roads of Cottage
Country (the common land of day and hope)
Considering the analects of Spring.
At every unploughed drive where frozen slush
Prevents all ingress of the motored sort
He pauses, then, with an observant eye
Takes it all in with one brief sweeping glance:
Whether to climb whatever barricade
Winter has raised, or shrug, and gravely pass.

Sometimes he enters and bequeaths his prints
To rouse some cottage owner’s brief disquiet
Whether his or her privacy remains
Inviolate. He’s not the sort of fellow
Who gives a hoot for pride of ownership.
But, on the other hand, he wouldn’t break
A lock or force a jamb. Even a door
That hangs ajar he notes as evidence
Of someone else’s carelessness and closes.
He’s not trying to sneak off people’s pasts.

He’s focused more on reading future needs.
He notes the blackened stalks of Viper’s Bugloss
Sticking through drifts around one unmowed lawn
And wonders if the man was taken ill.
Elsewhere a sun-warped shingle in the yard
Suggests a meeting with the roofer might
Reward a second visit. A hanging line
Of draggled mens’ and womens’ swimwear puzzles.
A lot of driveways look like they’ll need patching.
And so his survey lengthens day by day.

He keeps his own snug shack in thick-set woods
Beside a spring-fed rill that floods a pond
Where mink frogs bask on lily pads. His ten
Acres of old growth trees provide enough
Dead wood to keep him warm. His wife’s long gone.
A still strong healthy aging handiman
Who sees the way ahead, he maps his neighbors’
Careers like watersheds and creeks and will
Go on selling cheap help until the morning
One of them finds his gaunt stiff in her drive.

.

.

A Rose

One rose had opened to the ardent sun
That smiled upon the chance that brought me where
Such prodigies of buds arched up to bare
Their hearts to the warm light, that this first one
Persuaded me that if, my day’s work done,
I came again, like clouds that mount the air
East as the sun sets west, massed blossoms there
Would crowd.

At dusk returning, I find none.
The morning’s bloom droops black. Its shivering kin
Await a more auspicious breeze than this
That underscores a leaden sky. They’ll freeze
Tonight, I fear. Tomorrow they’ll begin
Again, of course, raised for another kiss.
Meanwhile hearts must survive on memories.

.

.

Lionel Willis was born in Toronto in 1932. He has been a mosaic designer, portrait painter, watercolorist, biological illustrator, field entomologist and professor of English Literature as well as a poet. His verse has appeared in A Miscellany of Prints and Poems, The Canadian Forum,  Candelabrum Poetry Magazine, Descant, Dream International Quarterly, Harp Strings Poetry Journal, Hrafnhoh, Iambs & Trochees, Light, Romantics Quarterly, The Classical Outlook, The Society of Classical Poets, The Deronda Review,  The Eclectic Muse, The Fiddlehead, The Formalist, The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, Troubadour and White Wall Review, and in two books, The Dreamstone and Other Rhymes (The Plowman, 2003) and Heartscape, a Book of Bucolic Verse (EIDOLON, 2019).