Posts for June 11, 2018 (page 4)

Wild child fled expectations
with a move to California,
floated through parties,
mushrooms and powder.
Elder brother dutifully
followed Father’s design,
milking the cows, planting
the wheat, while I remained
in my apron assuring
everyone was fed–
that there was a home
to come home to.

Wild child, out of options,
drained of health and wealth
straggles home where Father embraces
him as a returning hero,
as the long-lost favored one.
Elder brother steams
resentful, unappreciated,
well-aware he never got the blessing.

No one notices I’m still in the kitchen
behind the door, sharpening knives,
preparing the fatted calf.

Bought a brand new pair of shoes
What I was looking for
I’d been searching far and wide
From store to store to store

Finally found the color
And the style, width and size
Got them home and wore them
but much to my surprise…

When I walked, they creaked
It was very, very loud
Both shoes to be sure!
Why you could hear it in  crowd

I am not returning them
They took too long to find
They fit me so very well,
and the label says Anne Klein!

                         ~

Guess what was once said is true…
There is no great beauty
                                           without a flaw or two –
SO –

I’ll walk the road untrodden
Stealthy, like a mouse
Knowing that in my very walk
I sound like a haunted house!

the first was a shieldbug.
in the bathroom where i hang clothes to dry, i found you waddling the drawn-legged march
          of your kind
across mountains of wrinkles,
and i decided to let you be for the time being.
the following day, you’d fallen the fall of Icarus,
and your legs were up against the air and your shield was in the sea of suburban-cream tiles.
 
a cricket was next.
i don’t know its tale, but its legend can say
it was a traveling minstrel who
thought the shieldbug’s corpse lonely.
 
a row at the edge of the living room carpet, neat as the stones in a military cemetery,
captained by a simple brown spider
with a ground beetle for lieutenant
and two too-many-foot soldiers:
millipedes, one languid in death as it had been in the barracks,
the other spiral-furled, probably an old veteran
who was sad to have wielded its antennae in war.
 
the one in the kitchen was discovered with a cosmos-ending crunch.
i bent down bow stance, fingers on toes like a frog to be sure
it wasn’t just a Cocoa Pebble.
rolly polly pillbug,
the empty dry shell of you
was collapsed and bisected like a pleated doric column of an acropolis
whose laws and orders no longer reach its people.
for your eulogy i wish your spirit nectar more sustaining and sweet than a Cocoa Pebble.
 
on the steps to the front door
there was a firefly.
its milky abdomen dead pallor, ghost lantern never to glow.
it had its six legs all tangled together like
someone trying to learn to pray.

He could still read me
like an open book
of Braille.

Something in me is trying to answer
the shapes of the trees
mountain cradling the cloud
reflected in the water
glorious cold green
a clearer language
a new delineation
a swing to the earth and sky    

~ Cento of lines taken from Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr, p. 22, 26, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42

one single rose said so today
by the entrance to the main st bridge
right there not far from the scioto
and the smoothie stand
she straightened her skirt band
and gave a good spin of glitter tee
fist in the air do you care?
put it up and believe me.

I hear the river singing when I think of you. That early fall in Paris, the water lapping at the broad steps on the Left Bank gaining and losing intensity as the boats passed, is part of our story. We felt hidden in the vague shadows, part of love’s misleading blindness. I know we were lost in our kisses, deep in each other’s nearness, not oblivious to the world but taking it as background noise. Closing my eyes reveals you in belted black slacks, a white blouse open deep at the neck, a thin plaid car coat. The thing is, we were never in Paris. We never got as far as fall. Only one of us might have been in love. If it never happened, is a memory a lie?

frenzied flapping makes
baby roasters’ feathers fly
a muffin, too, can be filling

When touched
seeds spills on the page.
The habitual curve
toward the sun.
Red, of course,
as blood just before it dries,
a bandana
left in a south-facing window.
Its green days are long gone;
no one grows cockscomb
for its green.
This one is plucked from my garden;
my mother’s grew tall as children,
blooms as wide as your hand.
It’s hard to find those now.

Poem below but THIS is how the linebreaks should really look; I need more space! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EriAJ2bkdfThKkemNxpCZxsZUxixKxKKpuRqDeI1Nsg/edit?usp=sharing

the pool

polyanna, for the kill
as usual, i drank in
                                       all the sparkles of night water
                                       light; this is our flying, you said        
                                                                                                  and it was
but it was a sideways
                                      dream, a folly of a child’s mind; 
                                      (a doll without a name floats in
the shallow end); i wanted you to hold my head under water, as foreplay, as my surrender to our danger and i wanted to play splash your face with a new universe and spit it in later

and just when i was ready to really really live
you gave me everything the old me wanted–

the still forever

all the way
under.