Tuesday Poem: Another From The Post-deluvian Water Series

Naiads

Twice a year are the rememberings.

Each Naiad stepping up and doing her part

as spirit anchor, holding on to what was,

and what could come again of water’s blessing.

It’s a conjuring: first, faucet water,

sweet as wild grasses, with no

after taste of the barrel,

then showers falling inside the house,

all unctuous warm, softening

muscles, pinking our bodies cleanly,

mist and drizzle dancing in the air,

bringing earth smell to its full musk, neither 
drench, nor hammer, nor sodden destroyer,

streams brisk on the face, sweet and

cooling on the tongue, a gurgling

tune played on downed logs, twigs, and rocks,

heavy buckets of bounty rising

up the well shaft for all to share in

every manner of sacred ablution,

fountains shooting crystal arcs into

the heat of day, glazing graceful iron babies

and birds, sending the rest of us blessed spray,

rivers benign and lazy, that never once raged or

spilt over their banks, engulfing houses and 
towns, leaving mold tentacles to 
fester behind the recede.

The clear debris-free pond, the rocky cove,

the waterfall, and moss grown creek,

the benevolent silence of the snow flurry.

Luna’s remembering is the lake’s

cool silk, the way it held a body afloat

without you going all rashy and burning.

Each Naiad leading the rest back to

Paradise, water as it was 
when we were innocent: free and clear.

Previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Fall of 2008

 

 

At The Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities

It’s a miracle we survive at all,

I say, as we walk the cases,

wincing at a colon as big as a stove pipe,

scowling at ribs deformed

by corsets, and spines collapsed

into little broken heaps, the horns

and warts and tumors

jutting out of waxen faces,

carbuncles and gouty toes,

a lady whose fat has turned her into soap.

But my brother, being a man, jokes on.

He sees a petrified penis and gasps,

I’ll never look at beef jerky the same way again,

as I giggle and cringe.

Until a whole wall of bloodless

babies in jars breaks over us like a wave,

all stages of fetal development,

followed by the terrible web of maladies;

so many damaged dolls,

each one a lesson in fragility.

He points to the anencephalic ones,

saying they look like trolls,

but then a lonely floater

in its little sea of tears

sends him into silence,

for we could be at the grave

of the little ghost he’s been

tethered to for seventeen years:

his first girl, all tangled in her cord,

born still and cold as snow.

I can’t bring myself

to tell him about the tiny

pearl of a zygote my heart tows.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Umbrella in 2010

Frida Holds A White Rabbit

like a baby. She doesn't 

smile for the camera, 

as she cradles 

el conejo blanco,

como un bebe, in her arms,

the white rabbit of her longing

like the infant she never carried to term,

the fat white conejo of infidelity,

little effigy of Diego, its flat contented face

so much like his: the barren 

moonscape of his apology.

She looks tired.

She rests her head on her hand,

her mouth a small horizon in the shadows

She is thinking about the engorged 

conejo of his politics,

the fuzzy impersonality of his vision,

the little female comrades in his murals.

Where is her anger? 

Does it leap through the agave now

swift as the jackrabbit of Tehuantepec? 

Does it burn in the desert?

No because el fuego de Frida’s

resentment is gone for good.

No more galloping around here,

keeping up with the horses.

No more bites on the cheek

for you, you selfish rider!

Frida’s just plain worn out.

She’s taken el conejo back,

and she’s holding him like the baby he is.

Frida squeezes him so close

he’s short of breath. Come on,

smile for the camera, Frida. Smile,

as two crows fly above your eyes.

After the photograph: “Frida Kahlo With A White Rabbit,

Blue House, Coyoacan, Mexico City”

1949 by Hector Garcia

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 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 in Footwork in 1987

Barn Fire

vomits flames and smoke into yellow day,

about a mile ahead down the Thruway,

leaves us breathless in the car,

searching through the trees

for a glimpse of the fire’s

hot mouth, as we draw near,

barn skeleton like a

child's drawing in black crayon

vibrating over a floor of solid flame,

walls gone; everything going to charcoal.

I think about hay –

how sweet it is, fresh from the fields,

how it chafes and generates

heat when it’s shut away,

sparks and goes asmolder in the dark.

I was sixteen when my father begged

Uncle Dick to put him in the hospital.

He was terrified, he told me,

that he’d kill himself.

Our mother and he were separated

a couple of years already,

but she drove the two hours it took

to get us up there, soon after he called.

The plastic bracelet hung on his wrist

as he asked me for a light, as we

sat in Rockland State Hospital’s ]
dayroom, a poisonous fog around us, as he

chain-smoked Pall Malls, letting them 
burn down to little cylinders of ash.

He coughed as he talked, a fire 
slowly rising in my chest as he ranted.

Did we know they took the mattresses

off the beds, forced him to pace

back and forth down the hall,

like a moving target?

His hands were shaking, his long 
tobacco fingers pinching the cigarettes 
flat, as his voice cut the air, my throat 
going so raw, I could barely swallow.

Did we know they were starving him?

His supper last night was a 
slice of bologna, and a handful of dry 
spaghetti, with a packet of ketchup.

He cried so hard at the thought of it, 
he couldn’t even choke it down.

We’d bought him another carton of Pall Malls, 
a Life Magazine, a Look. The blister around 
my heart was getting bigger; I could hardly breathe.

It’s only temporary, Tom, try to 
hold on, my mother said. Then she 
told us to say goodbye to him, it was 
time to get going. He asked us for hugs.

I remember my hands beating the air 
around his shoulders, like homeless swallows.

The closest I could come to any comfort.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published in The Passaic County Community College Anthology in 1992

We Learn About Love 

from the stories our parents 
tell at the supper table,

like sober news commentators,
creating history, they always begin 
with an axiom: It doesn’t pay 
to be grabby, they say.  
Take Minnie around the corner.

Minnie ran the local grocery for her parents.

She was what we all called homely:

short and brown and thick as a little fireplug.

But Minnie had a beautiful husband,

her father had imported for her from Italy.

And she glowed when she had to talk for him

to the rest of us, which she did 
because he didn't speak English.

Day after day he went off to 
who knows what job or where,

with his black wavy hair, 
white teeth, and permanent tan.

But, let’s face it: what he 
said and did wasn't important.

What was, was that he was Minnie's, 
and that the women

said three Hail Mary’s 
whenever he passed them.

Until one summer this angel 
went up on the roof to fix it,

and in a grab at a sliding hammer 
plunged to the sidewalk 
and broke his neck.

Just like that! My mother 
snapped her fingers,

her whole life gone in a heartbeat!

Minnie must have been shattered,

but two days after the funeral 
she was back, shuffling around 
the store in her mules and peds,

using the claw to grab the heavy 
cans off the shelves, dropping them 
down and catching them in one hand,

like she’d always done. But it 
wasn’t the same. It used to be fun 
to go in there, to watch her dance

with the mop, or sing to 
the baskets of fava beans.

Now the store seemed more
like Pompeii,  what with 
Minnie buried alive 

every night in its ashes.

It's a shame, my mother sighed, 
as she got up to clear the table.

You go after too much, and you’re 
in for nothing but heartache.

Yeah, my father said, as he lit a cigarette,  
it doesn’t pay to kid yourself.

My brother and I swallowed, eyeing each

other through a growing cloud of smoke.