'Tasting Eternity' and Other Poems by Nolo Segundo

Tasting Eternity

My old friend and I went to a restaurant for lunch,
a ramshackle little place, but my friend told me
the food was great—and it was! Three different
chicken curries, a lovely lamb curry, and a half-
dozen veggies, and mango drinks to wash it down.

I suppose we visited the buffet more times than we
should have but we were talking philosophy as we
always did when we got together and speaking of
God and the soul and the meaning of life really
can make you hungry—then my friend said he
believed in God but had trouble with Eternity—
it seemed scary, terrifying even to think of time
going on forever, endlessly, a road never ending.

I laughed a little, then smiled at my old friend—
‘THIS is eternity! ‘ I told him, ‘Right now, this
moment as we eat this delicious curry and try
to figure out the meaning of our existence’.
I swallowed a mouthful of lamb korma and
laughed again— ‘wherever we exist is eternity,
and we always exist somewhere, and time is
an illusion, time does not exist, except as a
moment’— And the next moment, I asked him
if he had room for the rice pudding….

A Morning’s Walk

My wife and I walk every morning,
a mile or so—
it’s good for us old to walk in the cold,
or in the misty rain, it makes less the pain
that old age is wont to bring to bodies
which once burned bright with youth,
though now I wear braces on ankles,
braces on knees, and I walk slowly
with 2 canes, like an old skier,
sans snow, sans mountain.

We passed a tree whose leaves had
left behind summer’s green and now
fall slowly, carefully one by one
in their autumnal splendor.

My wife stopped me—
listen she said— but
I heard nothing—hush!,
stand still, she said,
and I tried hard to
hear the mystery….

Finally I asked her, knowing my hearing
less than my wife’s (too many rock concerts
in my heedless youth), what we listen for?
She looked up at my old head, and smiled—
only she could hear the sound each leaf made
as it rippled the air in falling to the ground.

The Old Wedding Album

The young couple who bought the old house
were left having to get rid of all the left-overs,
as the husband called them—the realtor
had told them this was usual with estate sales:
the owner was usually old, usually a widow,
— so all the stuff the now dead couple had
gathered over 40 or 50 or 60 years would have
to collected and taken away. Once Goodwill
might have come for it but it costs too much
nowadays to send out the big trucks— so now
you must pay somebody to come and get it,
the realtor told the young people— but, hey,
you got the place pretty cheap, right?

So they went room by room, this pair of
love birds barely off their honeymoon.
At first it was a game—look at this, one
would say! What crap! the other would
exclaim, or what the heck is that, if
the thing seemed old, pre-cyber age.
Don’t know, toss it, was the usual reply,
and happily they threw away old dishes
and clothes and broken lamps and a whole
lot of furniture: tables and chairs and
something called a dresser, all carried
to a large trash container waiting
patiently like a visiting sarcophagus
to swallow a once lived life….

And atop the heap of unwanted things
lay an unopened wedding album,
with a professional’s photos of
a handsome young man and his
beautiful young bride, resplendent
in white, each smiling as though
it were the happiest day of their
still fresh lives….

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.j. Carber 76, has in his 8th decade had poems and essays published in over 150 literary journals/anthologies in 12 countries and a trade publisher, Cyberwit.net, has released 3 poetry books: The Enormity of Existence [2020; Of Ether and Earth[2021]; and Soul Sings [2022].  A retired English/ESL teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia], he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.