Happy Birthday Emma!

The only real task for the poet laureate in England was to write poems to commemorate state occasions. I suppose over the years a great many very bad poems were composed because in all of my study (that is a boast) I recall very few anthologized works that had had their beginning on assignment.

Art Garfunkel sings, “Everything waits to be noticed.” When I walked out the back door of my house, I saw the black cat sitting in front of my cabin door. We are friends, the cat and I; he speaks to me and I pretend to understand. He watches as I set out his food and before I am done he has moved toward the dishes and my serving hand. I leave him to eat in peace and enter the cabin and shut the door. When his meal is done, he sits before the cabin on the wooden entrance path—it is summer and for the most part warm—but he never seeks entrance.  I think he appreciates the close proximity of another, and when I look towards the door, he notices me noticing him.

Perhaps too many wait to be noticed. I’ve had a discussion with my friend concerning the royalties we earn from our books. As for me, they rarely buy a good dinner and a bottle of wine. We joke, but we wait to be noticed. Of course, we each have our definitions of notice. As for me, I want to once walk onto an airplane and discover someone reading one of my books. I will have been noticed. I wonder what notice David awaits. 

The sun has risen. No, the sun rises every day, but for the past several mornings it has been covered either by clouds and/or heavy rains. The sky outside the window is a pale blue, a tinctured white almost (called ‘Alice blue’), but soon it will turn a rich ‘deep sky blue’—a meaningless description. Slowly the temperature will rise, and the black cat will seek shade under the trees outside the cabin. Tomorrow morning I won’t be here to feed him: today is Emma’s birthday and we will be with her to celebrate.

 I am no poet laureate and have no poem to sing, but I can wish her a simple Happy Birthday. I could not be me without her.