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Gordon's Notes

~ January 2010

                 Last fall (to my surprise) I stepped out of my 70th year. Carol, Nick Apollonio and some others conspired to throw a a wonderful party at the Sail, Power, & Steam Museum in Rockland. With help from many friends, Nick had built me a new twelve-string guitar - very different from his others. I'm just figuring out the strings it wants and will have many happy months learning how to play it - it is so responsive that I need to develop a whole new 'touch' to play it.
                 The party was lovely, friends and family from 8 to 90 years old, singing or listening together all afternoon. While I can't share that with you, I can share a poem that Megaera Vittum-Fitch wrote and read, that day.

On Not Writing a Poem for Your Birthday

Maybe God's just another name for the Muse.
Certainly they both have their own ideas
about when to show up -- and where.

And when one or the other does amble in
just when you were wanting to go to bed
you'd swear
that's beer on her breath -- and smoke.

And after all this waiting --
doodles all over pages,
pages all over the floor,
prayers shriveled up and mixed
in with the dust puppies,
Does she have anything to say
worth writing down or waiting for?

No, she does not.
She says, "I never was very good
on the subject of love.
And as for occasional poems," she sneers,
"Give me a break."

At which point she twists her head,
coughs hard in her elbow,
then wipes her mouth and sniffs.
She kicks at the mess of papers on the floor.

"What's that? Fire starters?"
"No," I grumble gathering it up.
"Or -- yes. It wasn't meant to be."

"It was meant to be a fine poem
For an old friend's fine life
But you couldn't be bothered."

"Oh. Well, I'm here now," she says.
"Yes, but you don't care about love
or occasional poems."
"I never said I didn't care" she protests,
"I just..."
A long moment of silence
"Yes?" I snap impatiently.

She stands up and I know she's leaving again.
Idly she brushes dust off my prayer table
"It's just... some people...
words don't... oh hell!" she says,
snaps her fingers and the candles light.
"Bye," she says,
"Give him my love, will you?"

        (c) 2009 Megaera Vittum-Fitch
           read November 1, 2009

pictures by Art Krause

* I've set a few of her poems to music - last summer members of the Down East Singers (singing as the Rachmaninoff Chorus) sang our collaboration: "Oh I Am Calling" in Greece.

"Oh I Am Calling" is on on the album Dear To Our Island