by Jack Myers

I’d like to leave
a lighter imprint
on the world
than I’d formerly
meant.  Just a scent,
not the thud of the thing
steaming on a plate.

Instead of “I told you so!”
let my epitaph be
the glance, the edge,
the mist.  The delicately
attenuated swirl
of an innuendo
instead of a thunderhead.

The rain that fell
when I was ambitious
seemed conspiringly rushed
in my way.  But the same rain
today tastes of here and now
because of where it’s been.

I’d like to be gentle
with small, great things.
They are larger
than what we think
we came here for.
I’d like to be an eye of light
that opens the air
and burns beyond ambition,
like the sun that can’t see us
and is beyond our reach
yet is in us a trillion times over.

by Jack Myers

What’ll I do with my body when I’m dead?
The best times I ever had were spent sailing
in place so I vote for being buried.
But I’ve lived such a nomadic life
my children have drifted out like a smoke plume
coast to coast which’d make me hard to visit.
Maybe I should be shoveled from a crematorium
and sleep like a magic genie inside an urn
next to the trophy boasting of one thing I did well.
But wait! How about being scattered from a bridge
spanning this life to the next?  It’d be the perfect symbol
of crossing over and my constant indecision.  I think that,
my dear executor, makes the vote unanimous.

by Jack Myers

In a program called Survivor Man,
the host, after drifting five days at sea,
washes up in paradise: there’s your coral reef,
the blue lagoon, and exotic colored birds
bouncing on palms in the balmy wind.

Later that day, he finds himself
under a pan –frying sun
among humongous cockroaches,
flesh – eating crabs, and fins
scissoring the island as if it were a cutout.

This paradise looks familiar, he thinks:
the woman he gave up everything for;
the career that turned into paperwork;
the crazy family life that left him hoping
for a quiet retirement.

So what is paradise?  The longing to leave?
The leaving itself?  In the end, Survivor Man
tosses a message in a bottle out to sea.
It floats for years, then washes up in a place like this.

by Jack Myers

6 a.m. March.  Snow flurries.
I’m stepping into the Atlantic,
gulping fast, get –ready breaths
so I can swim furiously, numb
and red all over, to get out to my boat.

I practice my Zen training
which says if I utterly give in
to the cold, I won’t feel how cold it is.

At dusk, I see a cloud backlit
so brilliantly it looks black
while the earth’s atmosphere bathes it
in a perfume of pastel sherbet colors.

If my better half were here,
I would take this in without feeling
the need to tell about it
and making it all about myself.

This is the work I have to do, I tell myself.
Go ahead, I say, swim in it.
Force yourself if you have to.