Tuesday Poem: Off schedge, originally published in the anthology The Best Cure For A Broken Heart in 2005

 

Incident 1973

tachycardia

He was a boy I saw from a distance:

always sitting against the wall, no one

ever talking to him, his face like

a Russian priest’s face, full of blessings.

He was the boy a nervy girl I knew

talked to one day for me. She got us

together, and it was synergy

from then on. We were floating.

murmur

He was a boy who wrote poetry.

He was the boy I would live with

on and off for two years:

a summer at 1 Atlantic Avenue, where the breeze

caressed our bodies, as we lay atop 

the quilt I’d taken to Woodstock;

in the flat on East 26th Street 

where Barbara pitched a fit at me

for doing some of her dishes;

on the first floor of North 10th Street,

oh the light in our yellow

kitchen, its blue woodwork humming.

I felt like we were living in a Van Gogh painting.

He cooked, and did our laundry.

We had an ice-cold purple bathroom.

The kitchen stove, our only source of heat.

prolapse

He was the boy who wanted 

separate bedrooms:

his, the color of mustard, its bed,

a hard little soldier’s pallet that said keep out.

Mine, red as a womb; inviting as ripe fruit.

He said the mattress was too soft.

It hurt his back to stay with me all night.

Then, out of the blue one day, 

he hitched a ride to his old girlfriend’s

and didn’t come back for a week.

In the picture, he showed me, 

she looked like a Playboy Bunny.

He said he couldn’t forget her. 

I moved back in with my mother.

thrombus

He was a boy to whom women said yes.

Even the men, who knew him,

couldn’t keep themselves from 

remarking on his body.

I tried to stay away, but he 

turned up at all the same places.

His fingers did a dance in the air, 

and I dreamed of the way

they used to graze my thighs, 

the ways he said he wanted me. 

The silver pinky ring he wore,

the stag on it always leaping away.

Soon it was a night here 

at his place, a night there,

good as it ever had been. 

Some little door in me opened,

and it happened. He became 

the boy who said no, definitely not.

fibrillation

It’s why I wouldn’t let him come to the city.

The women all spoke so softly there. 

They touched my arm, my shoulders, 

asked if I was sure, and I said I was.

Asked if he knew and I said, oh yes he did.

Was there any possibility? No, I said,

no possibility. It wasn’t terrible, though I bled

for a long time after. He held me afterwards.

He was a boy who had two sisters 

who’d had to drop out of high school 

to take care of babies. His parents 

fought every day. He was the boy 

who had to be vacuumed out 

with part of my heart.

angina pectoris

I want you to know I survived this.

Everything seized up for awhile, 

but then one day I turned around

and someone else looked 

back at me from the mirror.

Broken's not the right word for it.

Torn maybe, scarred, marked:

a tattoo you wish you’d never gotten.

In time even broken mends, unless you

aim to be permanent mayor of grief town.

There are some kinds of pain that go away,

and some that settle in so you never shake them.

You live. Wounded. You’re careful

with yourself. So it doesn’t.

Ever happen again.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in 1997 by Poetry London Newsletter, and The Nerve: A Writing Women's Poetry Anthology

Vincent Loves Lucy

It would've gone this way:

him taking her to his little room at Arles,

after ditching Ricky in Paris,

the Cuban left scratching his head at the station,

trying to figure out which train his dizzy 

wife had boarded by mistake.

It would start out like a dream,

guileless as the gleaners in the fields:

Her speaking her cartoon French to make him laugh.

Him whispering that her rosebud mouth

was the keyhole to unlocking them both.

But it wouldn't take long for him 

to start throwing the knives,

for the two of them to reach 

combustion you might say,

what with all that flaming 

improbable hair.

Picture the two of them:

so fair, sailing over wheat 

colored grass, the lift of her 

parasol, him coaxing her up

like a kite in the wind,

onto the Langlois bridge's 

delicate scaffolding.

Then all of a sudden 

her skirt gets caught,

the stubborn tilt of her hat 

as she yanks and yanks,

the boats crowding in 

unable to go through

and Vincent making 

no move to help,

only trying to paint 

her refusal, only blotting out 

her reflection with thick blue strokes.

Of course she'd spill 

unwanted into every painting:

the orange doorways, the frantic 

slashes of sunlight, the crows

singing badly in the fields.

Alas, these brushes 

with immortality 

don't last, no matter

how well imagined.

The whole thing, 

for Lucy, too much

like being locked inside

a steamer trunk, for Vincent, 

a mouth overfull of chocolates.

Before you know it, there's a telegram 

waiting for Ricky at the Hotel desk.

Help stop, it says. 

I tried to buy a painting stop

But the guy misunderstood me stop

Can you and Fred and Ethel pick me up?