November 30: New Poem, Holy Grail, Turkey Pot Pie

I don't have a lot of time this evening.  I just ate a late lunch of turkey pot pie, and pretty soon I have to get to choir practice.  It's going to be a long evening.

However, I think I have a new poem for you.  Actually, I have a new poem for you, but I'm not sure how good it is.  You will have to judge whether it was worth the wait or not.  It's sort of about my difficulties in the last couple weeks with finding the words for a new poem.

Saint Marty is on a quest for...

The Holy Grail

I've been looking for it three weeks.  In closet and cupboard.  I climbed attic stairs, rifled boxes of Christmas decorations.  Hand-made by my wife's dead mother, delicate lace and painted wood.  I sifted through piles of journals.  Found the formula for the blond girl in sophomore chemistry, her atomic number heavy in the periodic table of my teenage body.  I reviewed video tapes, saw my daughter sprout fast-forward from bulb to shoot to bud to blossom, white and full of apple and cherry.  I didn't find it in my dresser among socks and boxers and the garter of my senior prom date, pink and soft as thigh.  I never found it.  The cup.  Cracked and worn smooth by so many lips.  Whitman and Blake.  Plath and Wordsworth, too.  They all sipped, tasted blood on their tongues, opened their mouths.  Spoke in line and word.  Daffodils dancing in a field.  Horse breath in a snowy wood.  A fly at death's window.  I'm Perceval this November night, searching for eternity.  Perhaps I'll find it in the headlights of a car on the way home, in the fog on a winter lake.  Or maybe I'll find it in the icicle on the eave outside my son's bedroom window.  The way it holds the light in its cold finger.  As if it will shine until rapture.

The holy grail