Tuesday Poem: previously published online by Fox Chase Review in 2009

 
City Just Before Dusk  

In the turning down of the day

the light folds like clean white sheets,

swagging across whole groups of buildings,

so great sections of the city glow,

bright as a Pre-Raphaelite angel’s face,

as he announces another coming of twilight.

Then stringy clouds pull everything horizontal,

fill the sky, as if the atmosphere’s

stretching itself after a cat nap,

so whole neighborhoods rub their eyes in half
tones of charcoal blue, as Vincent’s views of rain,

through the window of a Saint Rémy asylum, do.

In all of this we see night awakening

like the baby newly baptized,

and called for the first time by name.

Close by, his parents watch him

wriggle in the arms of the priest,

both of their hearts aflame.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2009

First The Heart Goes 

Then the head.
The way it was  
with the ruffed grouse

you found in the backyard,

knocked out of the sky,

windfall for some night hawk.

And Nana too --

caught mid-flight

by too much loss and sorrow.

Of course, you bent to study it,
poor thing, filled, as you are, 
with reverence for beauty 
that never lets you 
close enough 
to see more than 
a quiver and blur.

Wasn’t she like that too --

quicksilver;  couldn’t sit still?

Overnight its chest came up empty,

hollow and dry as a cave;

the tribe that once lived there

fleeing, feathers left blowing.

Her heart, torn apart early on: 
a piece for each of her husbands,

the rest shredded the day your mother died.

How she wept, and asked God,
why hadn't he taken her first?

When they said she couldn't
drive any more, she told you she 

felt cavernous as an empty house.

And just one more day

for the body to abruptly

stop at the neck, mindless

as you were, lured by the long 
tail feathers, the golden ruffs,

bending over this bloodless thing

to pull them out. How easily 
the body lets them go.

In the tiny senior citizen’s 

apartment, she began to pace

and couldn’t stop crying,

burned her dinners,  forgot

how to take her pills.

Listen to you: making crow sounds,

as you spread desire’s shadow

across these relics of a 
radiance you yearn for.

Until you've taken
all you can, fetching
shovel and rake to

bring the leavings back

to the clean-up crew

in the woods.

So little left, by the time she died

in the nursing home. Just the scalloped

gold wedding band, that fits on

the end of your pinky,

and a little pile of pictures,

you keep in a drawer by your bed.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

 Sculpture by Paul Villinski

Death Called To My Mother

butterfly silent.

Butterflies she loved

and talked about:

their delicacy and color,

their brevity through golden air;

as if the blossoms themselves

had taken flight,

their pollen-rich leaps

from flower to flower,

their nectar-driven reveries.

It was death,

hovering in the garden,

she opened her heart to,

weary as she was of struggling,

and loss after loss, never getting

past the caterpillar's hunger,

over-filling her plate

as if searching for

herself in all that weight.

She didn't know

the word for soul, in Greek,

is the word for butterfly too.

She only knew,

in dreams, they covered her,

like a quilt of shivering wings:

Adonis Blue, Pearly Eye,

Swallowtail, Roadside Skipper.

Come, they whispered.

the chrysalis is waiting.

It’s finally time

for bliss.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by Writing Women in 1997

The Year of the Plum-Colored Bathing Suit

her breasts were blue-veined

porcelain and full of milk

for the baby.

She waited for him to notice

them spilling, a soft waterfall,

wished he would ask her

to put marmalade on them at tea-time.

All summer she offered him sweet rolls,

hoped he would cup her lightly

in long china fingers.

Instead he stayed out of the water, reading,

or changing the baby's diapers,

or teasing their oldest boy

unmercifully.