And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography

Tuesday Poem: Published by Caprice in 1992

2012-01-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

At Woolworth's Lunch Counter

a man sits watching thewaitresses work,

his cigarette smoke spellingout

retired and regular over his head.

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

You know he comes hereoften. You watch him

smile and nod to the sweetfaced waitress,

wide as two people, whocarries her breasts

like twin babies, swaddledtight in the navy

blue uniform, and sotenderly, as she

waddles past him with emptyplates.

His smoke draws a heart inthe air, and you agree.

Clearly she’s the pulse beathere,

the cook, dishwasher, girl who covers two stations

so the rest of them can goon their breaks.

You see a heavy woman withsore feet,

inching along behind thecounter,

as if she were walking onhot coals,

trying her best to drawenergy from the pain,

and unaware that she’s beingwatched

by this man inneed of ritual,

this man with too much time onhis hands,

this man without much reason tosacrifice.

So he comes here, to sit at thisaltar,

his gaze fierce and warm asa votive light,

burning for his Madonna ofTuna Melts.

You can almost touch hisreverence,

circumscribed as it is insoft white smoke.

It lights up the emptyglasses;
it glazes the doughnuts.

The hot dogs glisten
as theyturn in their silver beds.

Tuesday Poem: published by Enright House in 1992

2012-01-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

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 timeunmolested,

are never subjected to thefork-tongued weeder,

the blade of the mower, thepoisons

that leave you twisted anddying

in the service ofcivilization.

Here is a white spirit,

my daughter said to me. Itwas evening

and she was handing me one,old and

fragile; it curled in mypalm.

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

2012-01-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

Hilda Fix

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

Each night she hoversabove
the bedon hummingbird wingscoaxing
and bleatingher 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 yourselffor having
so much to feed her:so many lies,
so many timid silences.
You make your deposit
and soonyou'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.

Tuesday Poem: Published In 1986 in The Passaic County College Poetry Anthology

2011-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Hometown Visit

They tore down the Lincoln Club.

Took a bulldozer to it, and left
an empty lot where it used to sit,
big and gray and seedy
at the end of Union Avenue
breathing teenagers in and out
like puffs from a cigarette.
All those Friday dances
and Live Band! parties.

The Lincoln Club
standing on the street corner,
talkin’ jive and bein’ cool.
I danced there.
That’s where I learned to
boogaloo in soft red light,
the wooden floor waving
up and down from the rhythm
and stomp of restless saddle
shoes and Weejun loafers,
the Nicky Newark slide
and tap of soft Italian leather.

The Lincoln Club
where white boys lined the
walls like fringe
on a go-go girl’s thighs,
dancing only with their eyes,
where black boys were the
Dukes of Earl teaching us all
to spell our dreams in movement.

That’s where I learned,
if you caught the beat just right,
and gave your whole self to the music,
you might enter Motown Heaven
for a little while, float out on
the back of night
with a pounding heart,
maybe catch a glimpse
at Love - such a beautiful thing
-- so beautiful !

The Lincoln Club
coming on to both girls and boys,
getting us hooked on the hard
stuff of rock and roll
so that even to this day
I need a regular fix.

Always there when I drove by,
with a wise guy gold-toothed
smile and wink to make my day.
They finally put you away, old friend,
locked you up for good
in the ghostly joint.

Tuesday Poem: A Meditation on Bodily Matters

2011-11-28T10:18:00.000-08:00

Theo Van Rysselbergh 1907

Life Writes

on the body,
our bodies become
a road map leading us back,

back to other bodies,
to other times we might
otherwise forget:

the constellation of pockmarks,
pulling hard toward
your mother’s hands
busy turning dotting each one,
each one with calamine
into a game,

the scar high up
on your forehead
setting in motion
the branch a brother
bent back, then suddenly
let go of all at once,
the sting, the sting of a new scratch,

follow the winding stretch marks
and end up once again holding
a little squirmer, deep in your muscles,
the memory of how solid, each baby felt,
how unpracticed your arms, then how practiced,

the curve and sag of your breasts
conjure up years of cuddling,
the pleasures of lifelong love,
a nipple’s sudden tautness,
triggering networks,
yes, networks of yearning

the tiny scars on your hands,
the cuts and burns you gave yourself
as you hurriedly prepared
the family meals, the time your hand
caught and tore on a grate, as you lunged
to slap when you shouldn’t have slapped.

Stories the body tells over and over
to its ever present audience of one.

Tuesday Poem: Looking up

2011-11-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

Heavens

Now there’s a galleon of pink,
sailing down a spilling
remnant of sunset,
burrowing into cloud belly,

sunrays burnishing
the underside of another
blue-white swell of
floating evaporation,

then the pink relaxes,
spreads out and eases
into the lavender roses of dusk,

pushing down against
the gathering gray,
all of it crowned by
upward strokes in an after-
splash of white, like hair,

while here and there
a sooty sloop tattoos it way
across the rest, moving east to west,

this mixing of air and water,
miles high, kneaded and rolled like
currents and tides by the wind,

an ever replenishing hornpipe,
a life giving fall and rise, heavy
and turbulent over our heads,

while we swim through
the fiction of bottom calm,
little fish, skulking in and out of
small caves in huge coral reefs.

Tuesday Poem: an old one that seems right for this time of year

2011-11-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

A Basket Of Chestnuts

Listen to them rolling around.

Like the sound of rain falling
soft on chestnut horses
caught grazing in the paddock,
as big drops slap their flanks,
so they feel alive alive
awake awake awake.

The simplicity of bodies
sensing air, cold water, and rising mist.
And then the rain begins to intensify,
like cellophane uncrumpling itself,
the sweet already in your mouth,
and maybe you have a cold, a cough,
as you walk through the citrus leaves,
breathing eucalyptus
and thinking, always thinking.

Walking and humming a deep tune,
warm in your woolens, wayward
and sheltered by the trees,
still yawning and stretching
their way toward dun colored sleep.

And doesn't the path wind its way
into your mother's kitchen?
Where something sweet is baking,
incubating; soon to be born?

It's morning and she's singing
setting the table. You pour
coffee for the women gathered there,
the aunts, grandmother, sisters-in-law,
cousins, nieces, all listening and telling stories,
wringing their days instead of their hands.

The sound of spoons swirling in the cups,
the patter of talk like drizzle now, like hail,
like thunder once in awhile too, the nods,
and laughter steaming up the windows.

This is what shaking the basket can do:
transmute an afternoon into kindness,
solitude, kinship, sweet memories,
freed from the burr every
autumn to keep us warm.

Here. Why not give the basket
a shake or two yourself?
See what's rolling around,
smoky rich, inside of you?

Tuesday Poem: Last Beach Poem

2011-10-31T16:17:00.000-07:00

October Kite On The Beach

A silent delicate bird
floating, serene
in the steady wind,
oblivious, detached
and out of reach,
above the tired fishermen
toting poles and empty
buckets to the car,
the line of beach-chaired women
trading stories, mouths ajar,
their laughter interweaving
with the screech and
whine of hungry gulls,
the whoops from teenage boys
riding the waves in wetsuits,
looking like happy seals
until they rise out of the surf,
and drag their boogie boards
behind them on the sand,
the wild applause as newlyweds
make their entrance at the Surf Club,
and the band kicks in so they can
begin their Mr. and Mrs. dance.

All the while, kite leans,
shimmies, then steadies above it all,
like the lives we put on hold to come here,
attached to us by invisible string.

Here is our chance to see
how beautiful they look at a distance,
how normal, even happy,
as time, like the wind, pushes hard,
how gracefully they hold.

Tuesday Poem: Two Ships Passing

2011-10-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Jilting

In her exuberance to impress him,
the bride wears a hat, festooned
with feathers, and flowers, and fruit,
so tall it keeps her from walking
through the door of the church.
She gazes vacantly down the cool
dusk of an aisle she cannot
negotiate, its flickering
bank of candles like little
voices urging her to go
where she cannot go.

As she tilts this way and that
in the wind she looks like
a stranded boat at the top of
the steps, sending out a mayday
to the groom, but he’s no sailor.

He’s too busy accounting
for the white carpet, the flowers,
the organist in the choir loft
waiting for his cue, all that it’s
cost him to get here, all the little
adjustments he'll have to make.

When he finally spies her,
she is hopelessly storm-tossed,
a calamity filling the doorway
with her terrible fashion sense,
a heedless grandiosity.

His heart is an iceberg.
He hopes she’ll soon grow tired ,
and sink out of sight, as he stands,
on his widow’s walk of an altar,
waving goodbye.

Tuesday Poem: Prayer

2011-10-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

Prayer

Oh, let us turn
to the mermaid girl
who luxuriates
in the roiling surf,
the bikini clad girl
who wades right in
while the rest of us
shiver in sweatshirts,
our hoods up, avoiding
the October wind.

Watching her, we yearn
for our own two girls,
enchanted like this one,
Silkies who swam right
into our lives, and out again,
for whom cold and wet were
as good as warm.

Let us turn
to the way this
new one sang
to herself, how wild
and sturdy she was,
how we drank in her
loose-limbed reverie,
as the tide dressed her up
in a white lace gown .

How sweet to watch
her cavorting at water's
edge, to imagine the splash,
the pull, the water's slap,
to grow happily salty
and weedy, riding
on waves of memory.

Tuesday Poem: From "The Grove in the Eye of Light" Poem Series

2011-09-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

Tree of Heaven ( Ailanthus )

When Uncle Joe smiled
there was always a glob of
brown tobacco on his front teeth.

When he leaned back
and scratched his beer belly
a fog of sweat and sour washcloth
billowed out and filled the room.

My father and mother
tsked and shook their heads
as the list of his offences grew.

How everyone in the neighborhood
knew he’d driven his father’s car
right through Scalvino’s fence,
and then sat there grinning
ear to ear because he was so
tanked up he couldn’t move.

How he staggered into
his mother’s bedroom,
and peed in her dresser drawer,
soaking all her neatly folded,
lavendered personals.

How he ate leftover spaghetti
off the table, grabbing it
by the handful from the icebox,
so he wouldn’t have to wash a dirty plate,
sitting and smacking his lips
in the blue glare of
the midnight kitchen.

As an infant he’d been sickly,
so his mother said, when she heard them,
but she had to agree,
that trouble lurked behind him
more often than not.

When he married he’d been
the only one to leave the Catholic Church
for the sake of his Lutheran wife,
which amused his father greatly, but nearly
killed the woman who prayed for his soul
every morning at six o’clock mass.

When the family gathered in summer
for picnics and softball, his three boys
ran wilder than the rest of us,
and he hollered at them, every
chance he got, in a voice
as sharp as a hawk’s cry.

So, even we nieces and nephews
took to rolling our eyes
whenever he came through the door.
How had such a bad apple
fallen into our bunch?

I mulled this over for years.
It scared me that a person
could get so lost, like a sheep,
in a flock that should have loved him.

Maybe he’d been sent by God as a test.
After all, didn’t He send boils to Job,
and tell Lot not to look back, no matter what?
Weren’t angels always knocking on
people’s doors, disguised as beggars?

It’s all about taking the measure of people’s hearts.
And Uncle Joe had a heart so big
it eventually killed him. He was the kindest
person I knew, and he never smiled without
a little laughter at himself. Whenever he listened
to another person’s troubles, he always cried a little bit too.

If Uncle Joe was here to test us, we were about as stiff
and stuck and brackish as Lot’s poor wife.

Tuesday Poem: A South Philadelphia Landmark

2011-09-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman Shopping Plaza
2011, Philadelphia, PA

O Walt! What would you make of this strange
memorial, your longhaired, bearded head
so homely in bronze, or is it fiberglass,
dusted with verdigris, and big as a rain barrel,
lonely on its narrow pedestal between the
sidewalk and Dunkin’ Donuts?

You look as if you’re melting in the heat,
and tired of functioning as a landmark
for this sad strip mall, with its crumbling
macadam parking lot, its patriotic Price Chopper,
its thrifty Dollar General, its Payless Shoes,
Dress Barn, and Avenue for ladies in all sizes.

They’re finally tearing down the abandoned
discount outlet sitting, sad as a waterlogged
shoebox, off to one side, blindfolded now,
like a hostage, gagged with plywood,
and awaiting execution.

There is a Pearle Vision behind you,
but it’s just a place to buy new glasses,
and there’s a KFC directly across the street,
perhaps giving you and Colonel Sanders
the opportunity to converse, so maybe
you can teach him a thing or two about
taking better care of our hearts.

Speaking of hearts, I’m sure you
would have no trouble finding a way
to love the poor people who shop here,
though their ponderous bodies would
shock you; the way they seem to
creep between the old Fords and Chevrolets
and the few stores left, on sore,
barely moving feet.

All of them, so far from being electric,
far from the visions of our early days
that you strung like pearls across our
national identity, the word melodies,
the fierce love of country and humanity,
the tapestry of ordinary life
you sang into mythic existence.

O Walt! The America that bloomed
under your gaze is withering on the vine.
Like you, I am a phantom curiously floating
in the far corners of this place, in search,
in search of its song.

Tuesday Poem: From The Grove In The Eye of Light Poem Series

2011-08-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Carl Fredrik Hill "Apple Tree in Blossom"

Apple

How I wished Uncle Charlie
would save himself for me,
his unabashed love a road
that looked so happy up ahead.

I remember being four years old,
and full of more hope than dread,
though all eyes in the church were on me,
as he waited, black-tuxedoed,
at the altar for his bride,

and dawdling down the white
carpet stretched between us,
the air alive with vigil lights,
burning a secret message to God,
watching him nod each time
I scattered a handful of petals, pink as
my cheeks, somewhere along the way.

Until my mother reached out,
and gently pulled me into the pew,
as Aunt Jean, her gown a ruffled
whipped cream cake, floated by,
her footsteps smelling of roses.

Tuesday Poem: Inspired by the film "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman"

2011-08-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

A Man Carries

a box too wide to fit through
the doorway, unless he twists
his body and tilts the box, which
is heavy and full of keepsakes
his new bride cannot bear to leave behind.

One might see such juggling
with the past as a bad omen,
another might say it is good practice
for marriage and its delicate acrobatics.

But omen or no, he finds a way
through the door that leads them
out of her father’s house.

To his bride he moves like a willow,
he shape-shifts, he closes like a jack-knife,
when he has to, all sharp edges in check.

Tilt a heavy box of love this way and that,
his little dance informs her,
until you can pass through
the portal of all resistance,
the gate each parent locks
and guards too well.

Tuesday Poem: From The Grove in the Eye of Light Poem Series

2011-08-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

Cherry

Jean Scalvino covered her round breasts
with an apron and swept the sidewalk every day.
But the store she owned with her brother
stayed dark and murky, its hardware
hung from the ceiling: coffee pots and ladles,
scrub boards and galvanized buckets, ivory cups
and dish mops, all the tools, the apparatus of housework,
waiting to be adopted and wrapped in newspaper.

I watched her hands as she smoothed it over.
Her fingers had bulbs on the ends, big as cherries
her fingers, her whole body curling this way and that,
her bones like old branches, sagging,
though the fruit had fallen away long ago.

How she lovingly criss-crossed
the whole thing with string,
and finished it off with a bow,
as if she were diapering
a newborn she’d just delivered,
so she could give it into your care.

Tuesday Poem: From The Grove in the Eye of Light poem series

2011-07-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Crabapple

Squinting over purple
Koolaid in a gallon jug,
we climbed Sandy Hill for picnics
under what we called the monkey tree,
small bites from its hard sour fruit
for make-believe dessert.

Jeffrey Bud hung by his knees
from the best gnarled branch,
his freckled face upside down,
eyes blue and soft
as the curtain descending
on each summer day.

He never knew how the rest of us felt
about him, how when he wasn’t there
we swore that God must’ve known
how much we needed someone new,
God must’ve sent him to play with us
because we’d been so good.

Tuesday Poem: From "The Grove In The Eye Of Light" poem cycle

2011-07-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sycamore

the only other Irish girl
at St. Anthony’s was Mary Coates.

I remember her porcelain
freckled skin, like a forest floor
dappled with leaf shadows,
and eyes as blue and clear
as the sky the day she told me
what the f-word meant,
sending me out of my garden of bliss
with an earthquake of vulgar words
that spun me reeling away from her.

I wandered across the open playground
no longer at ease, groaned down dark corridors,
stood against brick walls, riddled
by that terrible knowledge.
Mary Coates, her grin a mile wide,
stalking me, a flasher
in a trench coat, detective cool.

She was out of my league.
I stayed as far away
from her as I could.

Tuesday Poem: From "The Grove In The Eye Of Light" poem cycle

2011-07-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Hazel

In senior year
I followed
Sister Marietta
down into
the well
of myself
to feast on the glistening
salmon of poetry.

She held the divining rod.

So what if I wrote about riding the bus to nowhere,
or chewed away at my own thumbs
insisting they tasted good ?

Sister Marietta helped me
weave a wishing cap
out of strings of words,
and blessed it with
with the quickening of comets:
her “A’s” crossing
the night sky of the page,
trailing little plusses
along behind them.

Tuesday Poem: Another Wild Ride

2011-05-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

Image taken
from Updownacross
Christopher Saunders'Blog

Step Outside Time

Come spit flowers out,
so petals ring everyone’s eyes.
Be the blueprint of your future self
though you can’t see beyond the horizon.

Come paint yourself
the red of arterial coursings,
oxygen rich. Then swoon into
deepest violet down acres of slaloming veins.

Come wrap the wind round your shoulders tight.
Send it flying again, a squall fanning out
as you throw up your hands to the coming night.

Stir a hurricane up to collar your face,
your face, the place that harbors
its own kind of stillness,
so your eye, your eye
is the center point,
silent lynch pin,
round which spins
the cog of the world.

Tuesday Poem: Point of View

2011-05-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Primitives
after the 15th C. Rooms in the Rijksmuseum

The whole story is contained in the paintings.

In one, your eye is drawn upward,
past the God/baby,
being recognized by three exotic men,
past their robes and gifts,
to His mother looking on,
and then beyond her,
to the routes taken
to get them all to this place,
the dangers lurking within them.

Call them kings, wise men, magi --
it makes no difference.
The journey is what matters.Prophecy at its center: a precious jewel.

Call it the deconstruction of junction.

It says, be mindful of the crossroads,
how pregnant they are
with the possibility of miscarriage.

In another, Veronica’s miracle
meeting with Christ at Calvary
isn’t singled out, but ringed instead
by the stations of the cross.
Her pale hands hold
the imprint of His face
across her veil, while behind her
He is scourged, falls, is helped up,
falls again, is crucified, buried,
arises, and staggers His way back up
to the agony in the garden.

Isn’t this how we understand our lives?
When we turn to look back,
don’t events tug and lift each other
like clothes on a line?
Isn’t it in the recounting
that we can finally see
what moves them?

So Eternity was alive once: walking in circles,
eating, and shitting, and falling asleep instantly,
just like a baby; a story telling itself
many times, without beginning or end,
experience accruing like gaps,
or scars and wrinkles
on a body, haphazard
and unpredictable --
playing for keeps.

It’s what we now call primitive:
this riding the wheel of the seasons,
this love for both the ripening and the rot.

Jan Wellens deCock

Tuesday Poem: Looking Up

2011-05-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Questions Come Spilling Out

Who wields the Milky Way
like a whip of light
across the wide
expanse of night?

Who holds the sun's
fiery belly still
in light-years-long
galactic hands?

What rhythmic
breath comes down
from the moon’s
white face to calm
the waters, and hold
their tides in place?

What great push
birthed this big
blue baby, still
gestating?

What happened to
keeping an eye on us?

We’re fleas, you know,
talking fireflies.
We've multiplied,
scattered everywhere,
a raucous pestilence
driven by pleasure, hell
bent on strife.

Who will stop us
from killing
what gives us life?

Tuesday Poem: A Meditation

2011-04-28T14:41:00.001-07:00

Caught Between Fire And Water

That’s what we are.
Minds aflame, bodies aflood.
Am lost, am lost, am lost.

Men swimming through mud, the earth
suddenly liquefied, the sun
a bloody egg in a searing sky.
Against the firmament, they are an absence,
vapor briefly forming and streaming away;
merely streaks of energy at play.

Like the hammer. the anvil, the stirrup
women curling delicate and waxen
in the city’s ear. We must let each other in,
they whisper through the din, despite our fear.
But no one want to hear what they have to say.

Whose fingers are long enough to reach for God?
Whose shoulder is soft enough to invite God’s leaning?
No need for further punishment.
We’re doing it to ourselves.

Better to dance like seaweed,
its rounds of bulby green, pale lettuce fronds,
and straight black bands in solos or in pairs,
long sweeping strands of hair
combed out by mermaids. Each one
playing its part, hiding the fish
from the birds of prey hunting them overhead,
a tapestry of survival.

Divine Geometry lit up like a neon sign
on the walls of our rooms at night,
the bliss of correspondences
everywhere in plain sight.

It’s almost, almost, almost
more than one can bear.

Tuesday Poem: Better Late Than Never

2011-04-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

My Mother Loved Rabbits

Their plump
velvety, meekness,
and quiet multiplicity.

She'd bring them home at Easter time,
say it was so peaceful
to watch them nibble away
at time's short cord.

But she could skin them
if she had to, days when
her brother showed up
fresh from the hunt.
Out of love for him,
I guess, respect she felt
for the hands-on life,
the shadow of necessity
and survival. Thankfully,
she refused to cook or eat them.

Their long bodies hung by the feet
from the cabinet knobs.
Torn from their fur
they looked pink and slender
as newborns to me,
or girls before their budding

Tuesday Poem: Spring is Here!

2011-04-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Childe Hassam

Spring Poem

O Tuesday,

in the park old men are climbing

up into the highest branches

as the squirrels sit and watch them.

O Treesday,

the sycamores are suddenly hairy

with leaf buds, the gingkos have thrown

off their winter coats, a lone cherry is shaking

her pink-blossom tresses.

O Tweetsday,

a cloud of old women pulses

and wheels overhead

as cinnamon sparrows

cackle from the hedges .

O Twizzleday,

fat with the bliss of children.

The little ones wave

like kings and queens

from red plastic daycare floats,

the big ones come galloping,

pinwheeling, ping-ponging

out of school.

O Tuesday, everyone is

warming beneath

the saffron sun,

and, like you, full of grace.

Tuesday Poem: A Little Observations Poemovie

2011-03-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Little Hooker
(click the above to activate)

The Little Hooker In All of Us

volunteers nothing.

She locks her feelings
away from the ugly world,
counts her bruises,
and begrudges every minute of what
she calls pretend-erness.

The little hooker
dreams herself
a halo of handsome johns
who names she’ll never
have to remember.

She insists on being paid
for what the rest of us do for free.

The little hooker, you see,
can squeal for love
loud as a newborn piglet.
Then settle for slops instead.

Tuesday Poem: On the Road Again

2011-03-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

A Woman Sees

Her own face

in the car’s side view mirror,

small as a child’s face

behind the seatbelt’s

diagonal, her face

with its sharp boned

beak of a nose

that traces the lines of her

father’s nose,

but on her face,

with its halo of gray

streaked hair, its side part

that echoes her

grandmother’s part,

above a forehead

and cheeks freckled

with age spots like the ones

that mottled her Nana’s face,

but now on her face, with

its small bow mouth

so much like her mother’s mouth,

without the coral lipstick,

her pursed lips

surrounded by puppet lines,

and pucker lines like the ones

her mother shared with her aunt,

the two of them always

drawing hard on a cigarette,

but on her these lines

are worry lines

offsetting the Buddha

serenity of soft jowl and double chin.

Where do I begin, she thinks,

and where do the rest of them end?

Though this is moot because

all of them are gone now,

except for these small remnants

she carries forward: a nose, a mouth,

a hairline, skin, wrinkles that map a life

on a face and mark, with certainty, its aging.

On the other hand: how merciful

to be linked to an immortal

chain of tiny selves from the past,

to bear them toward the future

instead of floating alone in the present

without an anchor. She sees the road ahead

for what it is, the way it beckons,

shifts her body in the seat and disappears.

Tuesday Poem: Three Reels From The Word Nest

2011-03-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Pretty Woman
A dolly, sturdy and patient,
domestic, doubtless.
A dangerous doorkeeper.
The double whammy of
domination directed against
a part, or into a cavity of the body,
dangling to deliver,
in small portions,
something that may cause
bodily harm.
A human being
filled, over time, with dolor:
a dolorous danseuse.

A State of Perplexity
Qualms.
Restraint on the movements of persons,
to prevent the spread of pestilence, disease.
Delirium. Mad calls
for quinine and quince.
To make or become five times
as great or as many.

A quarter horse galloping away
from the bridge of the lower saltings,
quitting the cattle that gather and blare.
Quixotic -- with a startle,
a constant trembling motion.

Evacuee
A bright planet’s energy
enervated, erosion espousal,
degrees of disorder, the fact of suffering.
One of a series of prescribed
movements, tongue and teeth.
O weasel with Winter fur,
house sparrow, green beryl,
brightly rich, endogenous
encrustation. O to disappear quickly,
to pass off in vapor.

Tuesday Poem: Post Surgery

2011-01-30T08:48:00.000-08:00

In The Operating Room

I am an old elk

lying snout down

in the snow.

Each breath sends a cloud up,

as above me

blue-masked beings

hammer at a body

I cannot feel.

I want to tell their story

in icicle words

as I watch it unfold

behind a thin sheet of water.

Someone hands me a baby raven

and I cradle her in the hollow beneath my chin.

I am merely a nest made of feather and bone,

I think, as I try to nurture her through this,

in this strange room, which feels like a forest,

its inhabitants chased away by too much light.

Yet small quivering bodies of love cling

like songs to all the lower branches.

Tuesday Poem: Here's to a Little Rebirth

2011-01-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

from a photo by Steve Schwartz

The Prayers of the Body

dance like a tiny man
around and around
an elliptical halo above her head.

Two times a daughter came to her,
a little ark, over waters.
Two times a solid wiggly baby
to nurse and send full sail
into personhood.

But now her last red words
already sputtered out
in chunks of flesh
bouncing down
porcelain cliffs,
fibrous, decaying, saying
no more deliverance.

She’s made herself an amulet,
hung it between her breasts,
to ward off the aches
and pains, to help her
wield the crone’s ax.

So what if she grows
hollow after a while,
fills up with ghost towns,
milkweed pods, and wasp nests.

For now, prayers fly
from her fingertips
like seeds on the wind.

The universe is contained
in a finite number of heartbeats,
and knowing this is what spins
her, dervish beautiful, as she sings.
Welcome to the museum of cells.
More than sixty years of artifacts on display.

She pictures God nodding
in her direction, hopes He’s about
to write a new prescription.

Tuesday Poem: Dipping into the Wild

2011-01-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

"Old Woman" by Kelli Coghlin

O Glistering Pearls

That drip from me,
as I lean down
to touch the sea,

O spools of hair stirred up
by too many sleepless hours,

Let’s conjure from the air
a shower of saffron fish
to cleave the Winter sky,

A ladder rising out of here,
a silken loaf of glass to eye,

an aperture clear,
through which to freeze
the Divine’s slow passage.

O Buttonhole me to a sparrow, please,
And I’ll lift off like a kite.

O make me a cloak of yarrow stalks,
and a scratchy briar necklace.

I’ll coat my skin with jailbird’s coal,
and string up a line of gaskets to catch the light.

O give me your hand, your hand, your hand.
Let's do chthonic dances half the night.

Tuesday Poem: Encountering Vincent at the Barnes Collection

2010-12-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

Pink Sky
after House and Figure by Van Gogh

Night shape-shifts into day
as a blue man heads to work,
past cottages like hunks of bread
and cheese one minute, like tight buds
another, holding the flowers back, so they dry
on the stalk, never seeing the light.
All night they huddled close
as cattle do in the field.

Now darkness yields
and they’re busy
speaking smoky wisdoms
to the sun, as it roils concentrically,
each seething blade of grass
grabbing at the blue
man as he passes.

Pray for me, he seems to say –
pray for all blue men and
the children they beat
under sharply-pitched
green rooves.

Tuesday Poem: For the Winter Solstice

2010-12-21T14:15:00.000-08:00

Little Bird Returning

O my soul,
have you come
back bearing an olive branch?

Flimsy scout,
have your flights
brought us any closer to light?

I’ve been too long adrift
in this indigo dance
between moon and water,
heavy and hollow without you.

Ah, feathery flame,
finally come home,

the mice are trilling love songs
in the great homely dark.
There’s romance afoot
in the ark!

Restless pilgrim, my angel,
this body offers you mystery.
Let go of your fear of gravity,
and give me back some spark.

Tuesday Poem: Childhood Memory Stirred by December's Wind

2010-12-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

Sugar Maple

My grandfather shaved
at the kitchen table,
a grumbling soap ritual,
bright sun caught
in a magnifying mirror
and quick lather sweep
that had me glued to my seat
in the quiet that he required
until with a last harrumph
he rinsed in the basin
and combed a few long hairs
across his bald spot.

Some days he’d let me feel,
with a growl,
his soft
newly velvet
cheeks.

Tuesday Poem: A Bit of Yearning

2010-12-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

Photo by Katherine Collett

December Poem

O tell me some stories about the snow.
For it's coming on Winter, and all that I have
is the rain and the damp,
removed as I am,
from the cold of the North,
and I feel like a child,
who’s gotten too close to a lamp.
My snowball has melted,
and all that is left is its sad afterglow.

Tuesday Poem: Holland Park, London

2010-11-30T12:57:00.001-08:00

As I Perch on a Park Bench

a pigeon wobbles close,
pecking the air,
eyeing me, charcoal
tail feathers fluffed,
body puffing out

behind a tiny head,
which looks even smaller,
against the ruff of lavender,
descending to a cape of dusty teal,

an ancient hard-beaked head
that could belong
to a mythic monster
rising out of the roiling sea,

but these are feathers,
not scales, and she
is the one looking shocked
at my empty-handed casualness,
the space I take up, the unfamiliar
cadences of my speech.

She tilts and leans, lady-like,
incredulous, a little Dickensian,
each small orange orb
a window in the side of her head,
through which I spy,
beyond the fleeting dread,
what she wants desperately,
like all of us: to be fed.

Tuesday Poem: Dancer

2010-11-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

And We Go Boom, Boom, Boom.
That’s The Way We Live. Talking Heads

I knew a man
who danced his grief.

All of life’s sad events
steeped in his body like bitter tea.

Oh, how he could pour it out,
in a living room, with the stereo blasting!

I knew a man
who danced his dread,

his body jerking in rhythmic fits,
sparks flying from his eyes, haloing his head

so shocked he seemed to be,
at his own peculiar prospect.

I knew a man
who danced his desperation

to find whatever kindness remained
inside him, to give it away,

to hear someone say that he,
oh surely, he was a wide-winged angel.

I knew a man who saw a wolf
every time he looked in the mirror,

who gnawed on the bones of his family,
teaching them to bite back when they had the chance,

to steal the meat off his plate if he turned his head,
to bury the box of his ashes, once he's dead,

and cover it over with leaves,
so no one will ever find it.

All this and more came spilling out,
tainting whatever party he went to.

I knew a man who tried to hide
in the shadows made by wild music,

and I've carried the wound of watching him
all this way, to lay it down at your feet.

Tuesday Poem: On Winter's Approach

2010-11-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

image from The Garden's Eden: An Online Journal

In the Supermarket Parking Lot: November

A willow, gone Autumn pale,
swoons over the back wall,
one of Winter’s auguries,
along with the holly
its brittle dark
leaves festooned
with berries like tiny
Christmas balls,
and even the ivy,
interrupting
the cabernet -colored
bricks with its
insistent evergreen.

Five sparrows
cling to the topmost,
curling branch,
sleek feathered,
flat-tailed commas
in a sentence of fading light.

Tuesday Poem: Baryshnikov's Feet

2010-11-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

Baryshnikov’s Feet

Look up and you see
a green man, a faun, ageless,
graceful as a silver birch,
a delicate fool about to embark
on the first of many Spring journeys.

Look down, and you spy
the feet that twist beneath him,
thick as the roots that anchor an oak,
feet that could support the world, Atlas feet
spreading out below rock hard legs,
feet that are old women, with cigarettes
hanging from their lips, as they read
Pushkin aloud to an empty room,
feet that are heroes, old and crazy
as Baba Yaga’s house, dancing
across the forest, each toe
a chicken foot digging in,
feet that have rivering veins in them,
muscles as big as a lion’s haunches,
feet with the iron grab of an old man
on a bread line, desperate to tell you
a story about hard knocks, solidity,
risk taking, great leaps that bring
painful landings, a man
who puts himself to hard use
in order to lift the rest of us up.

Tueday Poem: Outside IKEA

2010-10-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

Outside IKEA on Delaware Avenue
It’s a good thing to be fond of thorns…
Vincent

In the parking lot I watch
a woman load her trunk
with bag after bag
and when she’s done I see
she has fingernails that curl
away from her hands
like golden flames,
long as a man’s I saw once
in The Guinness Book of World Records,
and I wonder how she does anything
with those brittle twigs
that push away every
one she tries to touch.

They remind me of the yellow bones
in my mother’s long line bra
as I watched her dress for work,
the smoke from her cigarette,
sitting so long in the ashtray,
that stung my eyes,
and the bitter taste
her hairspray left in my mouth
as it froze every curl into place.

I smile though, like I always did,
as she gets behind the wheel,
so she'll have to take
my face along for the ride
when she pulls away.

Tuesday Poem: "I Dreamt The Green Hands..."

2010-10-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

I Dreamt the Green Hands of the Clock

rolling backwards, merciful in their pull
toward the deep green days of our marriage,
of being luminous as a new shoot in your arms,
the puddle green of your kisses, the green tree-belly
moonlight over our bed, as the damp green song of peepers
frizzled the air, you on your knees above me, the Spanish
moss of your hair swaying as we rose in the soft growing
dance of love, those greenest moments of our conviction.

How sweet then, to awaken
fresh from a night like this, still beside you,
to stand rubbing our eyes in disbelief
as we look out the window at this fog,
thick and pale hydrangea green,
turning the buildings, everything, alien,
this lightning raging across the city on long white legs,
how sweet to feel as if we were just born yesterday,
the green hands of the clock rolling
backwards, merciful in their pull.

Tuesday Poem: A Woman Enters Her Body

2010-10-04T13:29:00.001-07:00

Nude By Alexej Jawlenski

A woman enters her body
reluctantly,
as if it were the old house
she grew up in --
intimate, familiar,
the artifacts of a life
piled up in dusty heaps.

and yet she only half-remembers
the events that marked those other selves,
the ones she walked away from
long ago, abandoned in this place
she never fully could enjoy, or love.

She enters her body,
and it seems so much shabbier
than the little icon she’s carried
for years inside her heart.

How she used to fill its rooms with reverie!

Her body speaks to her
so clearly about the past,
gets her ruminating about the present,
since the future is bearing down
hard on them both.

This soft and beautiful place,
she cannot seem to stay in for very long,
moves her to penitent tenderness.
Yes, she must come back more often –
how could she have waited so long?

Tuesday Poem: Dutch Interior

2010-09-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

after A Mother’s Duties by Pieter De Hooch

The world is ochre as a mustard seed,
all flavor contained in a small golden bead,
and you yearn to be contained like that,
to crawl into that nook of a bed,
to kneel like that girl with her head
in her mother’s lap.

I remember my mother calling me over
so she could perform this little office,
her fingers slowly parting and parting
my long brown silk to reveal the milky
skullcap of my scalp, where she searched
and searched for signs of eggy invasion.

Time lay on its back like a cat then,
waiting to have its belly rubbed,
or did it sleep like the little fine-toothed
comb we thankfully never needed,
during those precious minutes
when I was the world?

How carefully she tended me,
so I felt myself to be a little garden.

Tuesday Poem: Sheep of God

2010-09-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

Abraham and Sarah by Marc Chagall. 1956

1.
There was no blood.
Just a hard little chestnut
in my belly growing.
I told him I was too old.

Sarah, he said,
the fire god has given
us a miracle.

The fire god he talked to,
every day, the one who burned
in the bushes, so hot
it scorched the hair on his arms,
though it left the leaves untouched.

My Abraham, who
out of the blue one day,
started talking to bushes.
I thought he was going senile.

Then there was the fact of our son,
who lights the way through old age for me,
who came to term despite my incredulity,
our bodies: two hollow seed pods
uttering one last reverie,
spitting him out.

2.
There was no blood,
other than the lamb’s.
That’s what Isaac told me.
No blood on the hillside,
only the ice of the blade
against his throat,
and his father’s wild eyes
lit by God’s fire.

No ire,
just the quick business of sacrifice,
his father’s iron grip
leaning him onto the stone,
both of them trembling.

Then the just as sudden
release, the sweet relief,
his father weeping,
Isaac’s swift forgiveness.

3.
And here I sit,
left out of all of it,
God’s ewe, forgotten
and bleating after the fact;
anger a blaze in my head.

Just a vessel, abandoned,
broken open by the wind
and howling.

I want to race away
from the two of them,
the gleam of the knife blade
nipping hard at my heels
like the teeth of the wolf,
until it bursts my heart.

But they will think me
only a wanderer,
this ram,
this lamb,
now lost to me.

They will follow,
in their ignorance,
calling my name,
nudging me back home
with their crooked sticks,
until I am in the fold again,
caught in the margins of a page
I had no hand in inscribing.

Tuesday Poem: Gretel at Sixty

2010-08-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

Gretel at Sixty

This is not a joke.
Forgive me for being
five times my size,
bloated, a good
cushion, a bad gazelle.

The kitchen refuses
to keep its silence,
the forks refuse to turn
their tines away
from my lips and teeth.

I’m the good girl
who can’t help asking
demons to dance
around the table.

I’ve lived in the
house of cake and candy,
invoked ten flocks of ravens
to join in our deadly feast.

I can still feel
the ache of pleasure
as we ground to powder
the fingers that reach out
to touch a food-filled cheek,
the jaw that gets hooked
on its own desperation.

And I tell you,
you cannot ask
to repent for
someone else’s
appetite.

At eight,
I was abandoned,
left to the corpulent cook
with too many hams,
a harpy, with a body
in its beak, the
shape of my childhood.

My heart has been a starving
mouse ever since.
I sometimes remember.

Don't talk to me
about practicality.
And I refuse to discuss the
the eternities hidden
beneath my fingernails,
or the last time I made love.

I find my bliss these days
in attic trunks,
letting my cells
drink their wonders in again
and again. Oh yes, I remember bliss.

So many of my jokes are embarrassing.

Tuesday Poem: Summer Philadelphia

2010-08-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

Summer Philadelphia

1.
The city is Walt Whitman
sitting like an old
junkie in Starbucks,
happy to be cool
and alive and basking
in flaxen light,
reveling in his life force,
so relaxed that, now and again,
he falls into a nod, throwing
curlicues of shadow
across the glossy
pages of wall and floor.

The city dreams
in stanza and verse.
He breathes people
in and out, burnishing
them so they’re lustrous
and flawed as angels.
He toys with
the timbre of their voices.
Soon he’ll awaken and
send them on their way.

2.
The city is a lonely dog
dragging its owner
along on a leash,
toward every other
animal it can find,
all scamper and lunge
at the other dogs,
all stalk and bait
with the squirrels, and lost,
always lost to
the bliss of the scent,
the ecstasy of the random
encounter, until the owner
tires, and tugs toward home.

So social! I hear an old man say.
City dogs. A woman,
passing, replies
before they head
their opposite ways

3.
The city is a sparrow
bathing in the horse
fountain’s overflow,
as water gushes out
to the gutter below,
every time one stops
its carriage to drop
its head and guzzle
what it can.

The city spreads
its wings and dips
its tiny feet, its feathers,
and belly into excess,
then it shakes itself clean,
lighting on a brick wall
to preen in the sun:
one of many
commonplace
roses on the move.

Tuesday Poem: Portobello Musings: A Little Observations Poemovie

2010-08-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

Click on the Link Below:
Portobello Musings

Portobello Musings

On the island of the self,
there is bread rising
like hope, expansive
and russet as a jewel
dug up from the earth,

there is nourishment,
and a grabbing at roots,
a sneaking satisfaction,
no philosopher can correct.

Experiences hang
like mushrooms drying
in long expectant garlands,
grab at the wrist of recognition,
as memory forms a bowl
in which to pound them down.

Tuesday Poem: Ocean

2010-07-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

Ocean

The great gray-
green trickster,
acrobat god
we make pilgrimages to,
laying ourselves
out like pink
infant mice
on the beach
at his salty feet,

as sky curves
its blue shell
above us,
and a pearl
of a moon
pulls the tides
with her silken threads.

Ocean spills away,
then flips back,
writing his name in
great hollows of sand,
and erasing it
with the swirl
and the thrash
of surf crash.

Surely, most of our days
are mixed like this:
the push
and the pull of
a yes and a no,
a used to be,
but no longer am,
a want to,
but can’t,
or shouldn’t,
the fears
that tug so
hard at desire,
which yanks us
forward nevertheless:
inch by inch by eddy.

So much
irritation
at the glistening
core of what’s beautiful.

Ocean says,
let me soothe you,
lull you, fill you
with wonder,
carry you
far away
from your
worries.

But answer his call
with too open a heart,
and you'll suddenly
tumble, tail slapped,
caught in
the ankle grab
of the undertow.

Tuesday Poem: "We're Not Just Wings"

2010-07-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

We’re Not Just Wings

In this strip mall you can
eat in, get Chinese take-out,
or order pizza and wings to go,
you can have your taxes done,
get keys made, or take your clothes
to the cleaners, you can get
your hair and your nails done
at Tommy’s Salon, or bring
your old stereo in for repair,
and while you wait, take
the Oreck challenge.
But watch it, you
might get talked into
buying a vacuum.

Better to sit in the car
and watch people go back
and forth, the glass doors
swinging and catching the light:
girls in matching school uniforms,
men wearing sweat pants, or jeans
so big they have to hold them
up. Each person is full of a private music,
their ears often plugged by headphones,
each wears a disguise: sunglasses,
wild makeup, hoods, baseball caps
worn backwards. Each is wearing
sneakers, in order to make
a quick getaway.

You blink and go suddenly hazy.
You see they embody a hunger, fatigue,
dishevelment, none of us can seem to
rise above. All of us un or under
employed, in need of repair and love.
Where, you think, o where
is the shop for that?

Tuesday Poem: Prayer

2010-07-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

Prayer

O black
hawk of despair,
you've taken to
the air again,
doubly mad.

O black angus,
harbinger of La Muerte,
I am the dun cow
sidling away from you.

I have pears to ponder,
aprons to rend,
beetles to let
wander across the
valleys of my hand.

Leave me. Go.

I’m a busy
monk
reciting
the hours,
there’s nectar,
awaiting
harvest,
deep in the flower,
a fire in me
that won’t sputter out,
despite the heavy snow.

Tuesday Poem: "Woman At Her Diary"

2010-06-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

Woman At Her Diary

A small brown book embossed with gold
and her hand moving across it like a dove,
lit from above by her face: a pearlescent moon
lost in the outer reaches of thought.

This gives her a Pre-Raphaelite look
which, combined with the coarse woven
beekeeper's shirt, and long honeyed hair,
makes me think of a painting I saw,

only I’m in it too now, peering over her shoulder,
as her luminous hand scratches out
its two dimensional filigree on the page:
Today I saw a little brown bird and it made me think
that even the sunniest days have darkness waiting inside them.

This woman, I’ve never met before,
sits writing in a little book as I watch.
and I am compelled to hatch
an elaborate fiction
because she is beautiful,
and seems to me
content with her lot
in ways that I never am.

Thus envy sits,
like a somber wren
on the end of my pen.

Tuesday Poem: A Pastoral

2010-06-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

Chincoteague, VA

I wake early
to a bay-wide madrigal
sung by the muttering ducks,
some thrumming pigeons,

raspy knowing crows,
high twittering swifts,
sharp scratching gulls
as they dive and swoop,

sound rising from every stand of
marsh grass, dock post, fish-rich ripple,
salty low tide mud swirl,
even the frogs, singing the sun,

the morning wind,
the blessed stillnesses
that hold us all, like infants,
safely born of the womb of night.

A white heron sweeps the air
overhead, momentarily erasing
sound, replacing it with
a haunting wide-winged rest,

then the madrigal resumes,
in praise, this time, of a wild rain
that sails in blue and silver as
a long-awaited bounty from the sea.

Tuesday Poem: "Crow Face"

2010-06-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

drawing by BoostPlus

Crow Face

She decided it was high time
to have a beak made;
a filigree gun metal thing,
fitted smoothly around her jaw
and resting above the thin
bridge of her nose.

That way, with gritted teeth,
she could lean into the peck,
feeling the pain of it,
every time she nodded.

And we all know
how good women are
at nodding, especially
during middle-age.

Oh, the irony
would be something:
this thin iron span
over which she could cross
into bitter and gall country,
where the old women sit
on their empty nests, waiting.

How sweet to have wrought iron
where your smile used to be.
How beautiful to sharpen it,
how keen for putting eyes out,
or hacking at the bones
and tendons of kindness,
nurture, female artifice.

She would become,
in her dotage,
the scarecrow
that suddenly sprouts wings
and stops the plow.

Tuesday Poem: How Cut Off We've Allowed Ourselves To Become

2010-05-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

Some Day

Women will gather in temples
built atop mountains of leg hair.

They’ll wear amulets
that hold the down
from their upper lips.

We thought that Nair
dissolved it. We were wrong.

They’ll carry torches
fed by the shavings
from our armpits,
the harvests of bikini wax,
so abundant, the flames
will never go out.

The air will fill
with the bad egg smell
of thwarted passion.

Women will settle into pews
stuffed with what we
left behind at haircuts.
All of those sweepings?
We thought the beauticians
were just being neat.
We were wrong.

Wildness is not that easily
done away with. The earth
has been saving it all, even
the eyebrow pluckings.

These will be pressed
into dinner plates for the repast,
which will be horribly al dente,
but must and will be consumed.

The fur we deny is insistent.
It calls from beyond,
and someone will have to answer.

Tuesday Poem: The Ending I Would Give Her...

2010-05-23T10:57:00.001-07:00

The Ending I Would Give Her If I Could

My grandmother cared so little
about money. She knew her husband
kept it hidden somewhere in the house
but she never searched for it, so respectful
was she of his privacy. She knew it bought
cheap crockery, the occasional pound cake,
or flowered housedress from the stores
she could see out her windows. She knew
it was what eventually sent him off on his binges.
She knew she could make do with whatever they had.

But now he was gone for good. She'd never taken a train
without him all these years, but she went ahead
and bought a ticket, never handled the revolver
she’d found in his sock drawer, next to a roll of eight
hundred dollar bills, until this very different day
when it sat like a weight at the bottom of her purse,
heavy as the summer haze she rode through,
all the way to the Hamptons. Then she stepped
out onto the platform she'd last seen forty years ago,
when she’d turned from an English governess into that
poor young wife heading into thirty-seven
years of heating kettles of dish and bath water on the stove.

She stood in the wind, one gloved hand smoothing back
her bobbed white hair. Then she pulled out the gun
and fired it into the side of the locomotive six times:
one for each child, he had given her, and one to disburse his ghost.
This made the bullets ricochet, which might have killed her on the spot,
but she didn’t care. The engine’s thrumming was so loud, no one
even noticed what she was up to. When it was over, she dabbed
at her eyes and bought a cup of tea and a cinnamon scone
for the long ride home, during which she would sit eating it,
spent, relieved, and blissfully alone, except for the former self
she’d kidnapped and taken hostage, the one that would help
stop this nonsense about breaking up housekeeping
and going to live with Mary. She’d tell them all, thanks for
thinking of me, but I’ll be happier on my own.

Tuesday Poem: from "House Series"

2010-05-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

Book House by Tom Bendtsen

I
To live in the house of Tolstoy
is to look through a peasant
as one would through a window,
to listen to the wind
as it wails question after question
loud as a freight train racing
through fields of wheat.
One must wear boots and Cossack shirts
to bed at night. One must raise
the soul up like a lantern
to ward off eternal night.

II
In the house of Toni Morrison
you cannot always trust in
what you see. There is much
to flee from, and your days
are tied by a leash to the blue
eyes of cruelty. Each room
is a different carnival ride
and no mirror shows you
just the way you are.

III
In the house of Mickey Spillane
novels are bricks stacked high
and suspense is the mortar
that seals them tight.
You keep suspects in the cupboard,
stacking them like cups
until you’re ready
to entertain an interrogation.
Then you take them down
one by one, fill them
full of questions,
and drink their answers.

IV
To live in the newspapers
is to turn gray from your own fingerprints,
to tint your eyes with printer’s ink,
and flirt with the kind of dangers
you never could imagine on your own.
You embrace the black and white of it,
the awful facts of human frailty,
your arms open wide,
then you fold them up
as neatly as you can,
like you must your heart.

Tuesday Poem: "Me"-ness

2010-05-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Just click on the link below to view this poemovie.
"Me- ness"

"Me-ness"

I want to be able
to do a reading
dressed in my nightgown,
hair askew, with that vague
goofy housewife look,
my husband says I get
on my face sometimes,
standing bathed
in fridge light
and forgetting why
I opened the door.

I want to stand
with a sheaf of poems
in my hand, oblivious to
what I look like,
their insistent me-ness
like a dream upon my tongue.

Where Would I Be Without Them?

2010-04-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Crows

1.
All business,
they line the roadways,
the way the ushers used to
darken the back of the church
in their shiny black suits,
shifting from foot to foot
until the organ’s raucous voice
announced it was time
to swoop in and catch
our meager generosities
in their soggy envelopes,
which we dropped like bits
of day old bread
into the long necked
baskets they slid
in front of us.

2.
When they lift all at once
their wings fill our heads
with the dark snap and billow
of the young priest’s cassock,
as we stood at the classroom
window watching the wind
catch and whip it against
his legs like a sail,
holding him back with
invisible hands
as he hurried across
the playground
on his way to
give some poor
soul Extreme Unction.

3.
They waited in night’s big silence,
like so many folded signal flags,
to cast a veil of shadows
across our play.

Tuesday Poem: Vernal

2010-04-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

painting by Karla Gerard

Vernal

Trees like clouds,
like feathers, white and luminous,
like deep pink puffs of smoke,
like green eyelashes, always moving.

Trees with mottled skin
bending and swaying over the park,
like old women being urged to dance
by the old men watching.

Trees scratching the air
like the claws of the hawk,
like gnarled arthritic fingers
trying to unclench
and catch the light.

Trees like minds
etching a tangled path
through the past,
like shepherds herding
a flock blossom drunk
and about to go astray.

Trees like explosions of hope
after famine, like pillars of patience
leaning into the spring wind.

2010-03-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

When My Mother Finally Met Frankie
for Donna

It was late in his career
so she didn't swoon
like the bobby soxer
she used to be,

she started singing
Mack The Knife
to him instead,
I don't know why.
It never worked
when she tried it
with my father.

She must have been thinking
about Frankie's
power just then,
how he grew
in a room,
from nothing more
than a skinny
Hoboken kid
to a giant,
a shark in a white shirt,
a dreamboat,
an ark you could board,
and be rescued in,
from God’s wrath.

She probably wanted
to let him know
she was a fighter.

Forget the Dean Martin
husband, the rat pack
bunch of ungrateful kids,
the years of working
her fingers to the bone
while he’s out
spending like a sailor.

For what?
Tumor schmoomer.
She, like Macky,
was back in town.

But Frankie didn't get it.
He just turned to his bodyguards,
and said through gritted teeth:
Somebody tell Bobby Darin
there’s an old broad here to see him.

A Toast: for St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-17T11:06:00.001-07:00

Stag Horned Cernunnos,
O boar's back, O
Salmon of Knowledge,
the twist of a tail,
the sweep of the white
wave, the Water horse.

Here we are drifting along
in the earth's heavy pull.

Spiral, O lover's knot,
Water of Miracles
from St. Brigid's Well,
O shamrock, O wheel
spin of Mananan's legs.

Caught in life's sensitive
balance scale, on this day
and always, may our cauldrons,
our cauldrons be full.

From Our Trip To Curacao

2010-03-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

In Lizard Town

It is always high noon.
Everyone grows a set of spurs,
and size matters.

In the hottest part of the day
the sun will compel you to crawl
out from beneath the bushes,
to strut your big self, to bask,
bask, bask, becoming all color,
a piece of walking jewelry:
in bronzy brown dotted with turquoise,
the green of the lime, green of the sun-
bleached leaf, or if you’re tiny, the olive under
tones, and sandy tan of the stones themselves.

The breeze could compel you
to stop and eat a white flower or two,
or to pick up a seed in your mouth
and carry it into the shadows.
You will set your branchy feet askew,
as you go, like a bow-legged cowboy.
You will drag your ponderous belly through the heat.

If you’re king of the baskers, you will want to
saunter back and forth, like a bad-ass
gunslinger, who isn’t afraid of the Marshall.
You will poop and pee all over the place,
lending an eau d’ownership, a who’s-your-
-daddy aura to your ampleness,
stopping every now and then to do
the little nodding dance that makes your
skin beard wobble like a warning flag,
a semaphore of gloating that spells
Git out of town.

If you’re a little guy, you will hug the ground,
and develop enormous patience, waiting
for the behemoths to belly their way toward sleep.
Then, the world will seem empty and enormous;
the promenade all yours. At least for a while.

2010-02-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Weathercast

Apple snag
wind strand
leaf snag
tree hand

dream beetles search for warmth underground.

splatter window
snow blaze
blind window
grief haze

dogs of survival snuffle through the park.

Whistle mouth
loam rich
barrow mouth
seed pitch

bliss turtles paddle and lurch toward the sea.

sun flute
lightning eye
green flute
flower sigh

gulls of forgetting torch the sky with their wings.

2010-02-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Elegy for Elaine Matt
d. February 9, 2010

My aunt wrestled with death
as Jacob did with the angel long ago,
incredulous at this unexpected visitation
that wouldn’t release her. Though she
knew it, she wouldn’t say its name aloud.

The city was filled with thick fog
that lingered, and I thought how like her soul,
holding, holding close to the earth, clinging
to the life she worked so hard to make,
to the husband who she’d taken care of
for over sixty years, his mind stuck
in past tense, thick and murky
as the streets below my window.

The strong have a hard time dying.
They’re so used to fighting, it takes them
longer to accept the wounding that never heals,
the fall back into Paradise little remembered.

I think of her selfhood now going thin and wispy,
of Heaven lowering itself to meet her, to make her welcome.
The sidewalks were wet. Who could say for sure it wasn't tears?
Someone left four tiny bales of hay at the horse
fountain outside the park: a thanksgiving gift.
I am thankful for the years I’ve had with my aunt,
the many I love yous that passed between us.

There were only a few leaves left on the trees, shining
yellow and russet out of the gray. How hard they cling,
some of them, right into Winter, though the world
has turn inhospitable, though they face nothing
but battering by the coming wind and snow.

2010-01-25T14:47:00.000-08:00

They Enter Us

How else explain
the predator’s sudden benevolence?

A man with an endless hunger
that makes him wolf-like,
and rapacious,
feels his heart flare up
and burn bright with a kindness
that shocks him even more
than it does the one he helps.
So he must entreat her
to bear witness to his humanity,
to prove it wasn’t a fantasy.

How else explain
the absent mind’s unexpected return?

Lost to the currents of dementia,
which are pulling at the present
so it whirls away from him
one minute at a time,
your uncle suddenly
rises from the murk,
intact as an old salmon,
as the doctor is telling him
that his wife of sixty years
may slip away any time.
He calmly asks for a priest.

They enter us,
and you can spy them
if you’re careful,
spilling out
like too much
stuffing, so traces of them
seep around the body, are mistaken
for shafts of sunlight, so close are they
to the borders of what we can see
and what we imagine.

They enter us, and for a moment,
we’re larger, more numinous, caught
in the dapples of a love
we can’t comprehend,
slowly pulling each other
toward it, in spite of ourselves.

2010-01-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

Window: Twenty-Third Floor

Small dark leaf
riding an updraft
past the glass,
wobbles and quickens,
suddenly flutters
black butterfly wings
as you blink
in disbelief,
then watch it
continue skyward,
vanishing.

Like the soul,
you think
loosing its hold
on the body,
leaving behind
its husk, its
open chrysalis,
heading steadily
for the wide open
maw of death

Is this how
it will happen?
You ask no one
in particular.
One moment
earthbound,
then swept
heavenward
on a great
torrent of wind,
a tiny echo of angels?

Each breath
after that
holds its own
epiphany.

A "Little Observations" Poemovie for 2010

2010-01-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

Just click on the link below:

Global Warming Poem

Global Warming Poem

What if winter
once fell in love
with the earth,
with her snowy hills,
her upturned windy face?

What if they held their embrace
and wouldn’t let go
until all life iced over?

What if after kissing her
for eons, for epochs,
he grew tired
and walked away?

What if one day
he dissolved
like a dream, a glacier,
a coastline?

Would we too melt
beneath the sun’s
impartial face,
until we’re gone
without a trace?

2009-12-30T12:30:00.001-08:00

Eros In Two Voices
(from the same word hoard)

When you touch me
I think star loom, salt gallop,
so many tongue carnations,
hair’s warm translation.

Pry me open, goat foot.
Bridge my tongue,
knock, knock, knock,
on my ruby, gallop inside.
Oh, and bring your thorn.

Look, the stars have
begun to translate this
salty talk, this milky prying,
this worm slither bridge of holding,
this knotted rocking.

Rock the stars till they
form a bridge, I say,
seed my hair with mint and salt.
Don’t be afraid to milk
the loom of learning.

Hold the ruby folds of the rooster,
and a worm becomes a thorn:
a quick translation.
Invite my milky seed to salt the air,
tonguing you as you dance.

Moving slow as molten rock,
we’ll translate salt from skin to skin.
Come in, come in,
a bridge thin as a goat’s tongue
between us.

Here's The Latest "Little Confessions" Poemovie

2009-12-30T11:22:00.000-08:00

Just click on the link below:

Lovebots

Love

Like moonfish
darting across
the dim pool of my chest,

a unison of fragments
schooling in me,
twisting this way and that,

they swoop and sway,
a shimmer, a transformation,
a silver glimmer of hope,

Time to stop
being shy, they say,
as I try to catch your eye.

2009-12-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

Painting by Shalinee Kumari

Muse

Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens

Your daughter’s face is as golden
as ripe wheat asway in the fields.
Freckles dapple her nose and cheeks.
It’s as if she’s been sprinkled with sun dust.

And her glow is made all the more surprising
by the blue jay blue of her eyes, which are
open and round and fringed by the thickest
thicket of lashes. She’s losing her baby fat.

And now at twenty-six, her cheeks
are a sheer cliff leading down
to an outcropping of shapely chin.
She is thin and has some wisdom lines.

When she smiles at you, her teeth
are ivory, and just crooked enough
to assure the world that she
has more character then vanity.

She is so beautiful, you're alight for her,
on fire, in fact, like a burning car
you saw once on a summer night
many years ago. You were her age then,

and beautiful yourself, though you would have
laughed if anyone said so, swatting at such notions
like you would an over-sized fly
that doesn’t belong in the house.

Ah, but those days have slipped away
and now you sit ablaze like a torch
that must be passed, your days race by fast
as that car must have before it jumped the divider.

And this memory makes you ponder
that moment, not as far off as it used to be,
when your driver will walk away from you
as your fire flares until little remains but an ashy husk.

I see, you say, what Stevens meant, at least
I think I do: one little glimpse of death
is all anyone can take. So we turn away as soon as we can,
distract ourselves with what started all this in the first place:

A daughter’s beautiful face, the bliss of it
looking at you, quizzical now, with a furrowed brow
as you try to fasten her, with your string of words,
to the page, her freedom, the way she lives in the now.

2009-12-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Like Souls

The white-wisp
dandelion seeds
shatter and lift
in search of new life.

That bit of sky
above the grass
looks just as busy
as Heaven must:

ethereal Grand Central,
we pass through,
on the big commute,

all our heavy baggage,
looking foolish
as those empty stalks,
abandoned
down below.