Posts for June 2, 2017 (page 3)

Will There Be A Risin’

2.

Leaving Sunshine

That old rattlesnake curled
Itself up into a right old puddle
Restin’ in the kicked up place
Under the seat of my swing.
Ma said it was the last straw.

The last straw must mean moving
Down off Sunshine Mountain.
We’s scrounged down between
A river and a gaggle of houses.
Sun comes up late and leaves early.

But not a hide nor hair of Pat.
With him gone bet the Germans
Can grab you quicker. Heard tell
About Pearl Harbor, wonder if he lives
In one of these houses nearby?

From what them men whispered
He’s a mighty fierce fighting man.
Strange he’d let himself be pulled
Off’n the mountains and the sunshine.
Wonder if rattlesnakes come to town?

K. Bruce Florence
June 2, 2017

you look so small
standing on chapel stage
repeating words
from pastor
you’ve only just met
in church 
you have never attended

I want to tell you
you will regret this 

cake your godmother
baked in shape of 
record player

dress your aunt
sewed without measurements-
purely from memory
of your child body
that has not changed
so much

you will wish 
you had not met 
the man
handing you glass
of champagne

ray charles song
you’ll always
be quick to change 
as soon as the first
chords play 
from your radio 

I want to beg you
let him go
so you never know
what he will do to you

but even from here
years from now
it is clear
how much
you wanted him
to love you

This woman sleeps next to me,
and I can’t remember the last time
I looked in her eyes,
or thought of her as something other than
an orbiting planet to me, the sun
The extraordinary veiled in ordinary

My amnesia grows

If this life was my own, these dust-bones would have blown away
Thank God I’m not in control
Her heart would be ground zero, devastated by a senseless man

My amnesia grows

Sleeping next to the daughter of the King 
I forget who This Woman is
This woman
Not
That woman
And if you know the story you’d understand the difference
between this and that-
a caress on the face, or a knife in the back

This woman sleeps next to me
And I wonder, what kind of man will I be
when she wakes up

cricket homes in the burbs
bee city traffic
the Queen Anne’s Lace district
is some PRIME real estate

put some kind
of knife in the darkness

I want to hold
the hand that slaps me

any reaction works
jangly guitar & slow
bass desertscapes

my cupped hands
out of holding

piano tuned &
railroad track waifs  

sip music
wild horses
regret

Sly tide    released
from its sling of deep ocean
returns to shore shod in celadon
and indigo    its snap and torque heard
as a rushing sigh
given to guttering and mumbling
as surf sparkles like white bees and night
rushes to moon’s light
then falls away.
Tide meets sand    devours it
with salty mouth    leaves shore
dark and heavy and damp.    Here,
says tide with wide rolling mouth
as it spills foam like silver coins that curl
shimmer    disappear,
rest here. 

           I found a lemon in my house
        Behind the microwave
        It’d been there about six months
        And been so very brave

      Never called out “help I’m lost”
      Or tried to roll away
     Little thing just dried right up
     And counter sits today.

just because
they’re dead
doesn’t mean
they’re not
here

You had holes in your lungs 
like the annoying kind a straw
gets when you try to force it 
from the wrapper too quickly. 
More than one story could 
whiste through them when you 
woke up coughing in the middle 
of the night. 

You had blackened, missing teeth 
from drugs perscribed and also not. 
There was no telling with you. You talked
for years about dentures like the forty-four 
year-old old man God made you become. 

You had feet the size of hot air balloons. 
I wondered if some days all your strength 
pumped up inside them just you could stand. 

You had spider veins, but not the way 
old women do.  Your arms were the desert
in the middle of a drought, blue lines protruding 
and climbing toward the sun. 

You had quite the head of hair. 
Not even chemo could get it’s hands 
around the thick brown strands
that made women at bars ask if you were 
Kenny Chesney, just so they could get your name. 

All it took was some head and shoulders 
to keep you from disappearing.  Even as you lay 
in your coffin with veins touching the sky 
and soft gums where teeth ought to be, 
not a single piece feel out. 

Rolling friction tripping up
intellect minds, kindred thoughts
all part of the same wheel
churning out the majesty.

Circumference starting points
same center in all our hearts,
travel down respective spokes
unique roads carrying all our homes.

There you are in the distant
prospective journey launch,
an ordeal, a challenge binding us 
in the orbit of something beautiful.

This lofty goal, I embrace
but this time with a scale of hope
that when all the words have found the page,
the spoke I find myself closest to
is you.