Tuesday Poem: After a Long Hiatus, Luna Returns

Luna’s Trues

Hide your potables, put ups,

self-growns, and happy tools

whenever they’re not in hand.

Whatever home you make must be

up high on a hill, or stilt built, or tree

supported to withstand the waters’ comings.

Always carry a knife and a bag for forage

you stumble upon. Pass it by, it will surely

end up in the bag of who’s behind you.

Barter as much as you can,

for trade is a two handed benefit.

Be wary of poison places. Even a tread-by

can leave you weakened and sickly.

Take to a cave or a dug out place, if there’s to be

spiral winds and or close in lightning.

Never eat what grows near the engulfments.

Learn everything you can from the animal folk.

The ones, that are left, be little survivors.

A body only needs one bit of food a day.

Eat what can’t be salted or dried up first.

Waste nil. Eat what’s there even if

it makes your belly hurt

Most things got a repurpose. Our job to find it.

Trade what you can’t use. Discard nought.

Salvage what you can from every wreck.

It’s a gift from the hand of the dead.

Grow what you can, when you can, where you can.

Greenhouse an old car, or chicken coop it.

Dirt-full planters make good insulation.

Grasses love a roof, and so do edible mosses.

Rainwater is a gift and it must be treasured.

Fouling the water is poisoning yourself.

Bug bread tastes best with salty 
seaweed soup or juicy mushrooms.

Feed a stranger just enough to give them 
the strength to move on.

Do not allow strangers into your nest.

In the conurbations, 
you’re no more than a field mouse.

Beware. Traps been set for you everywhere.

Most of what’s people-made will 
degrade the air if you burn it.

What weather delivers comes straight 
from the heart of the earth.

 

Tuesday Poem: Part of the Post-deluvian Water Series

Drones

Many’s the time, Luna’s spied those

hovering metal hummingbirds overhead,

or buzzing by the windows over and over,

till Sol made an ugly face and gave them

the finger. Many’s the time the two of them

were moved to head into the thickest woods,

so as not to be watched any more, pretending to

heed the hunter’s call to enter the letup of leaf cover.

When they heard, at Kin Gather, about
the young ones squatting in Hill Wagon,
all three of them nullified, where they stood,
for smuggling, and it being the same
kind of drone, Sam shook, and Luna sobbed
until she fainted. From that day on, when the
buzz come, Luna had to lie down, and Sol
made an effort to smile and flash the peace sign.

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series (Post-deluvian)

The Comb And The Mirror

The comb for our failure to honor chaos,

the way we try to untangle the world,

the furrows we cut, and other ills.

The mirror for our over love of ourselves,

the way we think dominion over other creatures,

for shackles and blades and all demonic devices.

Too many times, Luna spies
one or the other at Barter, though
nowadays, no one will touch them.

That’s when her whole body
fills with dread of the tempest,

for comb and mirror stir up
the old woman’s anger. She tosses
in her sleep, and soon come a whirl

and a hideous pelting, the spinning
edges of wind heavy with water,
soon the rise of white mares

in the waves, the sky’s dark keening,

the punishing hand of Marina smashing

everything we make into matchsticks.

When it’s over, survivors try to

make amends by letting go

pairs of sparrows, into the wreckage.

And Luna has learned much from

watching these little survivors

as they glean what they can

from nature’s fury

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

Mermaid/Man

Luna and Sol take turns

diving into the engulfments.

Buildings listing this way and that,

barnacled shipwrecks, most of their

window glass broken, or already salvaged.

Big wooden houses like temples adrift on the tides.

She sees others like them,

brightening near the surface,

darkening as they go under, trolling for

the souls of the drowned, caged as they

came to be, in boughten goods, in pretties,

usefuls, things you can hold in your hands.

Luna finds a plastic bucket, a sand etched

green glass bottle, a box of sodden

paper she can pulp and dry anew,

a camera filled with water

and tiny jellyboys.

Best is a jug unblemished,

she can plug with one

from the box of stoppers.

Sol saves his vigor for tools.

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

Snowdrop Soup

is what Luna serves him.

She forages and all she can

find is these, with their little

white heads and greeny secrets.

Months of being cooped up

in their too tiny space,

inundated with snow, after

heavy wet ice, after hailstone

and rain, wind whipping

beneath the floorboards, stilts

rattling a rough tattoo.

There were shriveled carrots

and mildewed beets left,

to throw in with a brackish

draw from the well, her

put-ups all but decimated.

She spies them at her feet,

clusters of early March milk maids,

a first flowering, stoop-shouldered

and shy above the sooty patches of melt.

A gift, she thinks, from the angels,

for ain’t she like Eve almost? Needing

a little swig of the hope, after

losing so much that was good?

Too late she remembers their other name:

death’s flower, so beautiful were they,

once she clipped them, like mermaid’s

hair drifting across the bowl.

He gobbled them fast, and she did too,

so craving of green were they, and then

the cramps and the stomach flips set in,

the two of them dizzy as love sick fools.

Giddy, he says, with spring just round the bend.

Their guts will mend, since at least she

remembered to leave bulb in the ground.

She doesn’t tell him the story. Maybe

next year. Pictures how hard their

empty bellies will shake when they laugh.

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

 

Drawing By Sally Rendel

Old Woman’s Aria

What a boon, what a boon, what a boon!

to live in an empty honey crock tucked into

the long brown bones of a hedge.

O bee hieroglyphics!

O nectar and reverie!

O to row out in half a walnut,

to meet this drowned world,

with its blessings of barter and trade,

its mud that spits out stones for ballast

and jars, those glass beatitudes,

that rise up singing out of the muck,

jars, clear and intact, no matter to me

how small they be, or what they held once,

jars I catch the rain in, the best ones

begging to be filled with potables,

to be sealed with caps I make

out of crayons and candle scraps.

O to be washed sweet again by the rain,

to savor the taste of a memory, though

the poor bees, themselves, are gone!

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: 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 The National Library of Poetry in 1992

The Biggest Apple

grew far from Eden,

the tree that bore it

stunted from too many prunings.

No one watered or fed the soil around it

and yet this one fruit ballooned out

big as a baby's head

and tenacious enough

to cling to its stem through a hurricane.

The tree held it out like a lantern,

this single ridiculous pippin

brilliant as Einstein.

The tree said, Here,

here are all my dreams

enclosed in one glowing skin.

May this opus that no one

expected from me

light your way.

Forgive me if it’s not sweet enough.

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.