Painted Toes and Other Mistakes

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>These two groups of poems represent opposite ends of a life. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Painted Toes and Other Mistakes</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> was begun with the arrival of Covid in the spring of 2020 my seventy-eighth year. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>So You Bend Silk</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> was completed in the national bicentennial year of 1976 the same year I finished </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>So Glad I'm Glad I'm Glad</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> my first novel and abandoned words for carpentry then jazz. Forty-three years later camped in an RV parked near Goliad Texas I began the rewrite of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>So Glad</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> that had eluded me for decades. I also reverted to my old habit of fiddling with poetry as a warm-up exercise for writing sessions and thus were born the thirty-eight poems that constitute </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Painted Toes</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. Looking back on the earlier poems I see a young man with his eyes on eternity and his heart wrapped in delusions. I am too close to the later collection for such a perspective but I'd like to think that what I've lost in virility I've gained in humor and empathy for the everyday that I've managed to conjoin the divine and the obscene in homage to my imminent appointment with the big nothing forever.  </span></p><p></p>