Glorious sci-fi futures of slave robots

Three poems by Rick Hill

Author

Publish Date

June 22, 2016

True Love at Seventy

is passion honed by
anticipation

of coming despair
and a certain prayer

one of us will bid
for one day more or

one warm morning or
just one shared moment

of this sharpening gift
this serrated now

Return to Big Sur

Redwoods creaking in the wind same as then
on Ventana trail rewound with ladybug clouds
and fresh poison oak but from where came
all these sunflecks on my hand backs?

Forty-six more summers did it but where went all those
city hippies on hiatus? Their souls gurgle koans
in the wide swimming spot of this once-packed stream
in this impossibly quiet lotus afternoon

as their abandoned blankets rice and wheatstraw
dragon notebooks and hip-pocket paperbacks
Electric Kool Aid Tin Drum Abbie Hellofit decompose
beneath leaf mold beside Monarch beach

where flutterby thousands lounge delicately sipping
wings opening slowly closing opening closing
till the ancient observer jettisons time but not longing
and the abyss comes yawning like a coastal fog

at sunset as the five millionth generation of mosquitos
come buzzing for this only face and mottled hands left
as flames flare from this same rock pit and this dead wood
that was new green shoots in that 1970 summer

sparks reach for the star ceiling glowing
up and up twinkling gone ones him and her and him
and hymns for them all whisper in the warm night wind
hymns with a beat for that gone jubilee.

Smart Fellows with Time to Spare

When fevers fade and hearts heal pretty much
we can still work up a certain longing,
a damp sigh for our inability
to step outside this present moment

Physicists fix spacetime continuums,
so why can’t we grab a theory and some dames
and take in the game — when was that now? —
where Babe Ruth stepped up and called his homer?

Or homestead us some La Jolla beachfront
before it got so highpriced and crowded?
Oh 1910 — now that was an epoch!
Men were men and women likewise!

But we can’t go back. Nor fastforward, either.
Glorious sci-fi futures of slave robots,
antigrav shoes, galactic vacations,
sixarmed, passionate Martian princesses —
we won’t live long enough to meet them.

Oh, the pity, boys, the slow anniversaries
this life on track, this shelfawareness.
We can’t wait for something bad to happen,
something to take our minds off our troubles.

Rick Hill has published poetry, fiction and essays in numerous journals over the past 30 years, along with books on Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis. His memoir We’re All From Somewhere Else: A Southern California Childhood won a San Diego Book Award and is available on Amazon.com. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he directs the writing program at Point Loma Nazarene University.