Pg. 42 — MIDDLE-AGED MAN MEETS HIS INNER FEMININE by Neall Calvert
A strange orange craft, ovoid fuselage,
triple-pontoon undercarriage, shoots
from the ocean straight up, soars high
like a rocket and lands, an hour later,
in another ocean—on another planet.
I observe its flight but, bilocated,
am journeying inside the amphibian too.
Uncertain of protocol, I stand back from
the crew; the captain, a woman, smiles
and says, “You’ll catch on . . .” (non-
authoritarian leadership: what I like).
Back on Earth, she and I stand close
in a field; soon there’s an embrace.
I realize we’ll be married! First union.
I am fifty-seven.
Don’t wake me.
Neall Calvert
Neall has 25 years of experience in journalism, book editing, and writing and 35 years of experience with midlife crisis, a crisis that only ended when he realized he was neither journalist nor editor, but poet.
An associate member of the League of Canadian Poets since 2019, he has been published in California, Florida, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia; online poems can be found at Dreamers Writing and Recovering Self. His essays on lessons learned from the lives of German-speaking poets Rilke and Hölderlin can be found at Neall Calvert.
Neall is also a photo artist and his work is beginning to appear in magazines internationally. He lives in Campbell River, BC, near the quiet and wildness of northern Vancouver Island, where he’s currently creating a prose/poetry memoir of his healing journey and assembling image collections titled Raining Glory: Campbell River by Night and Mandalas: Photographs in a Water Glass. See Flickr here and here.