(TRIP)TYCH PL(US) (ON)E
John G. Young, M.D.
Freddie and the Buck
Though two feet away
You, my five pound Yorkie,
Faced him off,
His five points
Pointing to y(our face.
You stood there
Barking,
While Death
Seemed amused,
And the fence gave protection.
But there is no fence
Around the corner.
Looking at the Abyss
Past time
When time waits
For no one,
(And) t(I'm)e is (passed).
Looking for hope
When all says "nope."
No hindsight, foresight, insight--
No light at all,
Looking for little wholes
And a l(It)tle light,
D(is)pite the gravity
Of the m(a)tter,
In the (big) b(lack) hole.
Buck Buckling
You push through the gate
Into our front yard.
And Freddie comes
Up to you,
And I wonder with no fence
Between you
Just what will happen--
You greet him
Nose to nose
But Freddie backs off
And barks
As is his wont
When he gets afraid.
Death comes
Not as terror
But as sickness
To our Krankenhaus
On the hill.
You must have known,
With patients every afternoon,
My daughter, Amy, quite deaf,
Freddie mostly blind,
And my wife, Diane, with M. S.
Dying piece by piece.
You look so gentle,
Not Death but dying.
But I should have known
With magpies,
Those black and white birds,
On your back
And you just lay there
In the sun.
Then when I tried
To take your picture
You got scared
And jumped
But halfway
Over the fence
In a single bound
When in the past
You would have
Cleared it easily.
Later Diane
Saw twenty magpies
Dive-bombing your back,
Pecking mercelessly at you
And you never lifted
An antler to protect yourself.
What once was proud
Now buckles within.
To my Darling D
It’s nothing
But everything
To hallow
Every moment,
Far from the
Space-time continuum.
It’s nothing
But everything
To savor
Every meeting,
And so easy
To get lost
Light-years from now,
What a little thing
To know the gentle
Beauty of a flower
Emerging from winter
Into spring,
And my little Butterfly
Who loved it all
Into being.