Hero of the Practicalities

for Kirby, in loving memory

What can I tell you?
She loved the guy …
She even loved the
scent of whiskey and cigarettes
She took due note of the clues
warning of devises and vices
that she’d never acquired
She didn’t care
He was charming

Coupled in delicate balance
a yin and yang of extremes
a second marriage of differences
Fog being the common denominator ~
though his drink didn’t mix well
with her off-in-the-clouds-somewhere being
The accountant of just-the-facts ma’am
and the dreamer of unlikely dreams
She was a trial

The bear who liked to escape to the woods
nonetheless some comfort, a decent person,
a hero of the practicalities,
a maker of omelets and fixer of things,
a reader, a gardener, an angry man

Anger . . .
. . . read pain
but you probably knew that
a pain that waltzed with Jack Daniels
lent itself to long diatribes
and Pilsner-invented pontifications
it skied through the veins
built road-blocks to his heart
and in the end,
in the end,
in the end
the pain did him in
that lost man
that well-meaning, decent
distant, funny, lost man

©2012,2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Illustration ~ Petr Kratochvil, Public Domain Pictures.net

JAMIE DEDES ~ My worldly tags are poet and writer. For the past five years I’ve blogged at The Poet by Day,the journey in poem, formerly titled Musing by Moonlight.  Through the gift of poetry (mine and that of others), I enter sacred space.