Unplanned Obsolescence

By William Flewelling

My poems have helped me see things for years now. Looking back on my poems, written and now collected, I discover I see things anew—not only the remembered incidents (when that happens) but also the vision created in my mind by the poem itself. These poems, collected from parts of the life I ran past again recently, are things that offer glimpses of what is seen and what that seeing seems to mean. I find that poems best serve me in becoming the creators of insights and perspective. The poems in this book have been giving that gift to me again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546272731

William Flewelling

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. Led by a request from Mildred Corwin of Manua OH when I arrived there in 1976, I long developed and led a series of bible studies there and in LaPorte IN and New Martinsville WV. These studies proved to be very feeding to me in my pastoral work and won a certain degree of following in my congregations. My first study was on 1 Peter, chosen because I knew almost nothing about the book. I now live quietly in retirement with my wife of 54 years, a pair of dogs and several cats.

Book preview

© 2018 William Flewelling. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7274-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7273-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Also By This Author

Poetry

Time Grown Lively

From My Corner Seat

Enticing My Delight

The Arthur Poems

From Recurrent Yesterdays

In Silhouette

To Silent Disappearance

Teasing The Soul

Allowing The Heart To Contemplate

As Lace Along The Wood

To Trace Familiarity

The Matt Poems

Elaborating Life

The Buoyancy of Unsuspected Joy

To Haunt The Clever Sheer Of Grace

The Christmas Poems

Life Is Employed

Adrift On Seas Of Strangeness

Composure In Constraint

An Elegance That Dawdles

The Ash Wind Sigh

Inn-By-The-Bye Stories

vols. 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

Devotional

Some Reflective Prayers

Reflective Prayers: A Second Collection

A Third Collection Of Reflective Prayers

For Your Quiet Meditation

A Fourth Collection Of Reflective Prayers

Cantica Sacra

A Fifth Collection Of Reflective Prayers

Directions Of A Pastoral Lifetime

Part I: Pastoral Notes, Letters To Anna, Occasional Pamphlets

Part II: Psalm Meditations, Regula Vitae

Part III: Elders’ Studies

Part IV: Studies

Part V: The Song Of Songs: An Attraction

Exegetical Works

From The Catholic Epistles: Bible Studies

Paul’s Letter To The Romans: A Bible Study

The Book Of Hebrews: A Bible Study

Letters Pauline and Pastoral: Bible Studies

The First Letter Of Paul To The Corinthians: A Bible Study

The Gospel According To Luke 1:1 Through 9:50: A Bible Study

The Gospel According To Luke 9:51 Through 19:27: A Bible Study

all published by AuthorHouse.com

Contents

Foreword

1.     Postlude Abiding In The Moment

2.     A Face, And Then A Face

3.     The Stagger Doe

4.     During Communion Music

5.     Those Muses-For-A-While

6.     With Clerk Number Three

7.     Positioned On The Street

8.     While The Afternoon Is Slow

9.     As It Looks Down

10.   While Skimming Lines

11.   The Lashes In A Row

12.   Something More

13.   Looking to 4 July 2018

14.   Prelude To Insinuations Of Winter

15.   Morning Coffee

16.   Accompanying The Wind

17.   In Troubled Times

18.   Beneath The Softest Smile

19.   For The Poets Who Come Again

20.   Faux Cat Ears

21.   The Keeping Of The Gathering

22.   Greeting Exchanged

23.   Of All Those Drifted Away

24.   Choral Hymn At Communion

25.   Night Possum At The Cat’s Dish

26.   A Thought Considered

27.   Our Courageous, Gentleman Cat

28.   Delayed Diversion

29.   The Prelude Amid The Hubbub

30.   A Quiet Afternoon

31.   Seen Knelt In Public Prayer

32.   Dangling Chatter Off A Ways

33.   A Trailing Thanks

34.   Escaped From Feared Lingering

35.   After Deferral: Concentration

36.   Posed As A Proper Ghoul

37.   A Greying Image From The Past

38.   Playfully As If And Not

39.   A Stranger On The Side

40.   With Easy Confidence In Play

41.   While Work Entices By Demand

42.   At The Rattle-Gurgle Sound

43.   Lost In The Trees

44.   Within A Quiet Pause

45.   Gangly Memento In The Wind

46.   For An Afternoon Snack

47.   I Like Mine

48.   At Her Enthusiasm

49.   Whimsical And Lively

50.   Three Does

51.   While Mother Stands In Line

52.   The School Break Completed

53.   In Simple Red

54.   At Apt Retirement

55.   Composure After All

56.   With Movement

57.   The Crow Tree Was There

58.   Talk At Close Range

59.   Then Cradled In Her Hands

60.   Intact

61.   But Surely She Should Instigate A Line

62.   And Christmas Came

63.   As Evening Ends Early

64.   Overrun Quiet Moments

65.   Belatedly Compete

66.   A Stuttered Confidence

67.   John McCain Has Died

68.   On A Rain-Filled Night

69.   A Young Communicant

70.   Morning Feeding Flurry

71.   Sharing The Shreds Of Grief

72.   Task-Attentive

73.   Greeting’s Distant Warmth

74.   The Loop In Beaded White

75.   Seen Along The Wood Lot Edge

76.   On An Over-Quiet Afternoon In Grey

77.   A Poise Upon The Brink Of Nothing Much At All

78.   Hearing The Chichester Psalms

79.   Reminders Of St. Valentine’s

80.   In Russian Style

81.   Pearl At Eighty Years And Some

82.   Almost Unnoticed

83.   Inaugural: An Uncommissioned Glance

84.   Sharp Thermal Cracks Announce The Cold

85.   A Casual Lunch Together

86.   Their Interrupted Climb

87.   Living Through The Forecast

88.   One Rare Arrival

89.   Mid Afternoon, As Forecast

90.   Discovery Of Tree

91.   The Deer Chain

92.   One Surveyor-Cook and Polyglot

93.   As All Unspoken

94.   For Dreams And Sprites

95.   As Shadow Manifests

96.   For Stretching Legs

97.   Practiced Hands

98.   Two Women Banter

99.   With Concentrated Gaze

100.   At The Schumann Sketch In F Major

101.   Distracted Departure

102.   By Communion Motet

103.   Breathless Behind The Pane

104.   Hurry Embodied

105.   About The Talk Of Walls

106.   Leading To A Tacit Request

107.   In Place Of Chuckled Poise

108.   Heirs Of A Public Rogue

109.   Arranging For The Temporary Aviary

110.   That Hunting Hawk

111.   Preparation

112.   Woodpecker Sighting

113.   Reparation

114.   Considering Disillusion

115.   On a Snowy Sunday Afternoon

116.   With Due Efficiency At Work

117.   Before The Proper Beginning

118.   Red’s Dark Enticement

119.   The Day Comes Round

120.   We Are Not Here

121.   One Sunny Day

122.   Bluebird And Friends

123.   Laugher Exposè

124.   Unoverheard Discussion

125.   Instructrix

126.   The Leaving Tone

127.   Mudslinger

128.   Contained In Task … Almost

129.   Innuendo Suggested

130.   As The Dishwasher Opens

131.   Snow Squall: St. Valentine’s Day

132.   A Going And Coming

133.   A Waiting Invitation

134.   So Recently Noted

135.   At The Oncologist’s Clinic

136.   Declared

137.   Seen With A Prancing Lilt

138.   Having Surrendered Already

139.   Young Friends, And One

140.   At Least She Wears A Smile

141.   As Veterans’ Day Draws Near Once More

142.   Slow Coming To The Rail

143.   A Messy Day

144.   Preferred Conveyance

145.   Old Wary Friend

146.   Brought For Communion’s Weal

147.   Prospect For Tuesday

148.   Composed Alone

149.   Upon A Memory

150.   Decease The Interrupting Poetry!

About the Author

Foreword

Discovering a poem in the echo to an event, a pure happenstance occasion that bounces into awareness and captivates in fleeting fashion an eye is a joyous event entices the imagination of a poet such as I. An acquaintance flashes into sight, seeing someone else entirely, and radiates a smile, generates deep crevices in her cheeks that serve as massive dimples flushing beneath radiant eyes that dance in the lights of the grocery while greeting an older woman, a friend of some time – and suddenly the first line appears – The dimples: irrepressible! and then to go on – which has not happened yet. That is a flourish and a delight, a beginning play on the words that come in rhythm and assonance, play on sound and mold a vision of delight. The poem on the dimples is yet to imagine itself into reality at the time of this writing. But it represents one facet of the joy of being a poet.

A second facet of that joy arises in looking back over several years and discovering in the poems the remembrance or the new-creation of awareness that had disappeared from sight. Sometimes the means that some flicker of the original event returns to mind – a mysterious gift of memory for some occasion … the place, the company, the excitement all come fresh and lively to mind. At other times, the event is lost entirely; yet, the poem itself becomes an event, erecting a plausible arena, a haunting aura, a toying example of an unlikely source event … becomes an image of what may never have been but is now by the poem’s action in my mind.

Whereas the first facet impels the effort to scribble off some scrap of a poem just for the fun of it, for the delight in how the worlds play with me, the second speaks for the assembling of these collections, taken mostly seriatim from dated archives of prior work. Certainly, a few contemporary pieces insist my impatience consider itself and intrude in the otherwise steady progress I have come to enjoy making. In fact, this second facet brings another tone of delight into the process of poetry, for me, and allows me to dally over revisitation of things on the mind that had been forgotten entirely … or discovery from a prior delight of an etching in the imagination of a new exemplar.

I suppose this foreword is about the genesis of these collections – and this one in particular. But it speaks also to the reading of poetry done by someone else. There, the glee of a poet’s own play is subject to eavesdropping and subtle play, approximating what might have been a possibility or not. I does not really matter at that point, for the poem is doing its work in the inuendoes and shy suggestive shadows of a reader’s mind so as to create in the reading the resonance of the words and their creative instinct to invade another consciousness. Perhaps these poems can begin not do that for you, too.

Happy reading!

William Flewelling

Postlude Abiding In The Moment

                                    With jostle in the mood

                                    the organ chorale assumes

                                    In Dulci Jubilo

                                    as toying means to tease

                                    an ear attentive now

                                    and then – and draw again

                                    into the fling of joy,

                                    enticing everything

                                    into surrender when

                                    a rapt exhaustion sets

                                    the hearing in the midst

                                    of sundry cares – the end

                                    of settlement turned live

                                    by those remaining jolts

                                    of rhythmic hoes upon

                                    these finally fallow hopes.

WCF

4 January 2015

A Face, And Then A Face

                          The light plays delicately fine

                          upon the pensive face; she thinks,

                          remembering with distant eyes

                          surveying unseen qualities.

                          The face lines, drawn along the cheeks,

                          stretch – fine lines, eloquent of care

                          and time, of flagrant smiles and soft

                          eroding worries, cares incised

                          with careful innuendo, life

                          become the daughter, wife, the friend,

                          the ambiance that, pensive, pauses –

                          reflection of a tenderness

                          not easily disclosed. A while

                          and, mustering the usual

                          aplomb, almost in kind, the eyes

                          revert; yet gentle liens betray

                          this supple influence – a dare

                          corrosive of the facia

                          contrived for less contusive days.

WCF

24 October 2008

The Stagger Doe

                                A hundred yards ahead,

                                the young doe staggers lone

                                about the middle of

                                the road, a listless pace

                                as time and time again

                                she pauses, gazes toward

                                the grass along the road.

                                She watches as the vulture

                                flies from the rough and flaps

                                to take a fence post perch

                                across the road. We come

                                the dogs and I, adjust

                                to the happenstance array.

                                The doe slinks off and up

                                into the brush beyond

                                the ditch. The vulture takes

                                to flight and leaves us space

                                to pass the stillborn fawn

                                still glossy in its death,

                                stretched tiny in the grass,

                                this doe’s reluctant grief.

WCF

19 June 2018

During Communion Music