Tuesday Poem: From The Grove In The Eye Of Light

Magnolia

The one and only time

we went to the park with Daddy,

I swung so high and long

it made me sick, and I had to

lie down on a bench to

make the world stop tilting

this way and that.

When I looked at them

sideways, the swings

heaved in and out,

like too many shallow breaths,

and Tommy became a blur,

a dream on the merry go round,

its silver handles pushed and pushed

by the big kids, until dark forces

snatched backwards so hard he had to let go,

flying, his legs and arms splayed,

landing hard, with a splat, in a

mud puddle big as a watering hole,

where he sat in shock all soaked

and mucky from head to toe.

When Daddy saw him,  he sauntered over,

told him to get up, we were leaving,

made us wade across the grass,

ankle deep through bruised pink

blossoms, all the way to the parking lot,

where Tommy had to stand still

while Daddy stripped him down

to his underwear, throwing

his wet clothes in the trunk,

to keep him from ruining

the Pontiac’s upholstry.

How hard he cried then,

leaning into my arms,

until he fell asleep,

on the long ride home,

the two of us lost

in the back seat’s

velvet gloom, 

and Daddy’s

silence.

Tuesday Poem: from The Grove In The Eye Of Light

Scrub Pine

He seemed to need so little,

his spare frame bent

on learning to play guitar,

my middle brother,

weathered and

sturdy as a pilot boat

lost in the salt mist of music.

Years I watched him,

cheered for him, trying to green

and grow while a hurricane

raged between our parents,

until he shut himself away

from all of us, taking the knob

off the door to his room,

replying to our entreaties

with bouts of silence.

Now his solos take me back

to when he was eight months old,

sitting in the high chair I carried out

to the back of the garden,

and kicking his little square feet,

as I fed him peaches,

cool and sweet,

the sky as blue

and cloudless as his eyes.

Tuesday Poem: First published in Outerbridge in 1987

                   Illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele

When The Junk Man Came Down Summer Street

We stood on the sidewalk 

across from the corner drugstore,

eyeing our own reflections in the green glass doors

behind which Doc’s Great Dane slept 

every night to scare away burglars.

We stretched and pranced 

impatient as runners, waiting for the junk man 

and his wagon to roll like a ghostly wave

across Doc’s little harbor of marble and glass,

the knobs on the soda fountain 

bobbing like white marker buoys.

We followed him down the block then:

past old D’Allessandro squinting 

through Coke bottle glasses

his white hair stiff as the brushes 

that hung from the sides of the wagon,

past Rose Quatrocchi with her 

sons in their shiny red stroller,

past Ralph Molinaro 

who kept pigeons and rabbits,

his backyard bristling with edible blossoms,

past the girls playing hopscotch 

with a hard rubber heel, begged from 

the shoemaker who never seemed busy,

who my father said was a Mafia bookie,

their game interrupted, the girls ran behind us.

The junk on the wagon   

tilted and swayed like the graceful trombones 

and French horns the old men played as they 
marched for the feast of Santa Croce Camarina.

His cowbells were strung 

like stars across our daylight.

They clanked and tinkled 

and floated a rhythm that made us 

want to start skipping.

There was Santa and Rosa

whose  mother could never 

remember their names

and called them Hey You in Italian,

Columbia who couldn’t come out 

unless Baby Jerry came with her,

Tanya and Sonia, and Hanna their sister,

their mother on the porch 

in her flowered babushka.

Then Georgie Capello 

and blonde-headed Victor,

and Sammy the Mongol 

who swore like a trooper.

Even crazy Joe, in his black leather jacket,

stopped combing his hair and came out

to call to the chestnut junk wagon  horse

who seldom looked up 

at the sound of our voices,

his hooves rocking slow 

on the hard black macadam,

inching his way to the corner on rickety legs.

Past the brick stoop where 

Gracie’s Communist tenant

sat by himself every night like a mummy,

past Father Andresani’s cranky old mama

her gray head nodding in time to the rosary,

down to Louie’s where we 

bought Daddy's cigarettes,

and lemon ice with the leftover money.

Louie made it himself 

in a big silver bowl 

at the back of the store

and he told us he made it 

with snow shipped from Italy.

Then the junk man waved 

as he got to the corner,

taking his jingle and clip-clop 

toward 21st Ave. His hat sat so straight 

on his head in the gold and the shadows,

it sent sparks up our spines 

as we stopped at the corner 

to wave him goodbye,

made us suddenly jump Double Dutch

or play Tag in a wild stampede over fences,

and through the network of yards 

and alleyways behind our houses.

On those days we were never glad 

to be called in to supper.

The rust and the clutter, 

the feathers, the moving machine parts,

the slack leather reins in the junkman’s

powerful big knuckled hands,

the spots on the horse’s back 

where the hair had rubbed off,

the plod and the footfall 

lingered in our heads, so we 

laughed out loud in our beds 

before falling asleep.

There was so little junk in our lives.

Tuesday Poem: Theosophically Speaking

TerraDeus

What if we’ve been riding

the back of God, all this time,
like fleas on a dog?

What if Eden were just the earth

being itself  – a gift that kept on giving,

until Adam and Eve walked away
from right relationship,

began to collect things,
specialize, complicate their lives,
idolize themselves, take control

of both the growing and the harvest,

bending the land to a terrible scarification? 

The fall from grace being also a fall from place,
losing our place in the living fabric,
tipping the balance too far in one direction.
And haven't we been created in Earth’s image?

After all, we’re carbon-based,

and two thirds water,

our fluids taste like the oceans,

our rounded hills and valleys,

supporting colonies of creatures; prairies of hair.

We absorb heat and minerals.

We're electrically charged,
and subject to forces:

magnetic and gravitational.

We're made up of cell networks: complex

and symbiotic interconnections,
like the ecosystems we’ve just begun
to understand and sustain.

A butterfly flaps its wings; 

a typhoon is born,

a single cell goes rogue, 
and infiltrates others;

then they make war 
on the body’s defenses;

soon they’re sending out satellites, 
whole systems are crashing and burning, 
a constellation of madness

blights the body’s universe. 
It’s called metastasis.

Look, our veins are roots and branches,

our arteries like rivers, inlets, creeks.

Here, trace the leaf lines under your skin,

feel the magma in your belly,

how it reverberates.

Tune in to the pulsing at your temples.
It’s no accident we call them temples.

In them, we feel the life force

doing its work, the busy

humming origins of worship.

What if there’s no Heaven --

nothing but what we can see:

the oceans we’ve filled with plastic,

the clouds hiding holes in the ozone,

the glaciers our emissions are melting away?

Tuesday Poem: Published in Kalliope in 1986

 photo by Rick Ruggles
 (color adjusted)

  

Let's Invite Autumn

into bed with us,

our legs rustling the sheets,

like wind sighs through fallen leaves,

a hint of dryness in the murmuring

that passes between us,

our mouths cool,

insistent as morning,

on the edge of desperation.

Let's start school tonight,

open each other like brand new books,

tangle ourselves in curiosity,

take a recess from innocence.

I'll show you my September apples.

We can press cider together,

drink to the gathering darkness.

Dance with me -- a last fandango

as we go ablaze, as we come

down to sweet sleep,

bright sails along the golden,

rim of sunset, the giddy

contours of what’s

about to pass away.

Tuesday Poem: Published in The Passaic County Community College Anthology in 1989

Black Dress Poem

  Isn't it a bitter thing to think of him floating that way...

  and no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying

  on the sea.                         

                                                J. M. Synge

                                               Riders To The Sea

Daddy, I used to smell your T-shirts

lying so white in the drawer,

as I put the laundry away,

long thoughtful breaths,

leafing nervously

through the old photographs,

you kept hidden under the socks,

looking for clues.

It was my secret ritual,

leaning against the foot board

of the pineapple-poster marriage bed

that had always been too small for you.

Pictures of you as a young Marine

in bar after bar surrounded by friends,

their faces so many smiling moons

held close by your gravity, some Rita

Hayworth woman on your arm.

The eight by ten

Mommy talked about

through gritted teeth:

Lola with the long red nails

who was crazy for you

but wouldn't have suited the family.

My father the Admiral's Orderly,

with a mustache and a forty five,

dressed in your battle tuxedo:

an open pack of Camels

your boutonniere.

It would have been impossible then

to imagine that you stood

on the rim of a bottomless well

that would eventually swallow you,

or that your children would have to turn

their backs on you to save themselves.

Daddy, all the years you kept from sinking,

by pouring a sea of beer down your throat,

I searched for you everywhere,

despite the shadows. I want to tell you,

I saw you, I saw you, even though

a curtain hung between us:
too heavy for me to lift.

Tiesday Poem: published in Kalliope in 1986

love at twenty

might as well be

thick white fog

clinging like sweat 

to everything,

burning off

as soon as the sun comes up,

or a ten second 

golden waterfall,

white hot with rapturous light,

and dry as a narrow stream bed;

for all its permanence

why not roll in the shallows

with a cold eyed swan

whose midnight caress

leaves you all by yourself

with a bruise of a memory

as morning pours over

the stony face of Olympus?

Tuesday Poem: Published by Caprice in 1992

At Woolworth's Lunch Counter

a man sits watching the waitresses work,

his cigarette smoke spelling out

retired and regular over his head.

Every once in awhile he lifts some 
apple pie to his mouth in slow motion, 
and regular changes to rapture.

You know he comes here often. You watch him

smile and nod to the sweet faced waitress,

wide as two people, who carries her breasts

like twin babies, swaddled tight in the navy

blue uniform, and so tenderly, as she

waddles past him with empty plates.

His smoke draws a heart in the air, and you agree.

Clearly she’s the pulse beat here,

the cook, dishwasher, girl who covers two stations

so the rest of them can go on their breaks.

You see a heavy woman with sore feet,

inching along behind the counter,

as if she were walking on hot coals,

trying her best to draw energy from the pain,

and unaware that she’s being watched

by this man in need of ritual,

this man with too much time on his hands,

this man without much reason to sacrifice.

So he comes here, to sit at this altar,

his gaze fierce and warm as a votive light,

burning for his Madonna of Tuna Melts.

You can almost touch his reverence,

circumscribed as it is in soft white smoke.

It lights up the empty glasses; 
it glazes the doughnuts.

The hot dogs glisten 
as they turn in their silver beds.

Tuesday Poem: published by Enright House in 1992

Emily's Gift

was the metaphor,

there all along at our feet,

their small petaled heads

poking out of the grass

like yellow lights

that say: Slow down.

Stop, and think awhile.

Look at them all,

how they lean for the sun

just like us.

If they're lucky, I thought,

they do their sweet time unmolested,

are never subjected to the fork-tongued weeder,

the blade of the mower, the poisons

that leave you twisted and dying

in the service of civilization.

Here is a white spirit,

my daughter said to me. It was evening

and she was handing me one, old and

fragile; it curled in my palm.

Don't let it blow away just yet, she whispered.

Let's make it last as long as we can.

Tuesday Poem: an old cartoon figure comes back: published in Caprice 1992

     
Hilda Fix          

Each night you dream a woman: Hilda,
round breasted, bottle hollow,
who comes to collect all the self betrayals
that fill your days, coins you put through
the slot in Hilda's high knot of hair,
the thirty pieces of silver you owe
to the Judas living inside you.

Each night she hovers above
the bed on hummingbird wings coaxing
and bleating her promises: to do
your dirty laundry, ja, and scrub
away the darkness, if only you'll
give her something.

Hilda will fix, don't worry.
Just look at how strong her arms are.

Each night she flexes and bows
and you hate yourself for having
so much to feed her: so many lies,
so many timid silences.
You make your deposit
and soon you've stopped
tossing and twisting the sheets.

Ja, Hilda fixes everything  --
just close your eyes.
See? She gives you
blindness, she gives you
the sleep of mountains.