Posts for June 21, 2018 (page 2)

LETTERS TO THE DEAD: TWENTY-ONE
 
6/21/2018 To Mike Lally (1941 – 2015)

Vignettes (…with a tossed salad on the longest day)  

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don’t know.  
(“The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by W. Berry)  

1 a.m.
At my house on Old 19
you find the silo behind the barn
and howl and howl till the echoes flow
up to the stars  

3:15 a.m.
Single bulb in the jail house ceiling
becomes your Singular God
who awaits further instructions  

4:55 a.m.
Checking freight cars for black survivors
the trains of Birmingham
barely miss our naked man  

7:30 a.m.
You turn my poem over, write:
going down to strawberry town
to fetch a pocket full of mental
health then coming home alone
with a pocket full of pretzel
 
8:18 a.m.
Bon Harbor but no safe
sailing.  Tsunami
over a bowl of cereal  

10:30 a.m.
The Great Chase of Pat
around town
with a baseball bat
because you never strike out
 
11:19 a.m.
Yeah that’s right
throw your lithium into Utah sand
follow a bigamist to his wigwam
and somehow come back alive  

Noon
This is the famous day
you (we?) flush Kevin’s head
in the toilet, screaming:
Stop Being A Sissy  

2:11 p.m.
On your last Gin Fizz
she walks across the street
to Dutchman’s Bar with the news
Dad died  

2:12 p.m.
All the kindnesses begin  

3:00 p.m.
Twelve steps twelve thousand times:
ex-cons, whores, addicts
you bring them home  

5:00 p.m.
Tuesday with Jude
without fail (and Friday too)
if just to snore at the couch  

7:08 p.m.
Dirty Nun joke at Mom’s visitation,
3 totaled cars,
$100 bills raining on strangers,
anger lost with Wall Mart receipts,
he’s somewhere, just not here  

9:16 p.m.
I walk Jude’s dog up Barret St.
A man appears out of the gloom:
sorry about your brother
he saved my life
can I have a cigarette?
 
11:49 p.m.
In Wendell Berry’s book
between pages 44  & 45
I find a poem of yours:
Steel Square
The clerk’s balding red hair
hangs over his wire rims.
“Look at this one,” he says.
“It has a twenty-four inch body
with a sixteen inch tongue.”
Living anatomy is never so concise,
I think.
Nor could it have such an appetite.

To trust means dancing
With the possibility of looking
Like a fool spinning
Cracked records 

Again and again and again

“Arguably one of the most beautiful trees in Kentucky”
But how do you measure that? 
Is it the spread of the branches,
measuring the vault of the sky with reaching limbs?

Is it the quality of light
spilling down summer sticky
in a haze of green and gold
and patchwork shadows?

Is it the wavering fractal
of mossy boughs
spread just so to climb up 
into the canopy
just a bit above the world?

Is it heady fragrances
flowers and fruit and damp Earth
breathing in to our lungs
incense curling up and around and out? 

Is it the tendrils
of root rhizome mosaic
curling down down and out
into moist darkness
giving and taking molecules and messages
in a slow glory we will never see?

What makes a tree beautiful? 

I have come to old haunting grounds,
where memories are alive in the trees,
shapes and curvatures of
Hickory, Oak, and Elm leaves,

relics of another reality.

How I went to you for comfort, then,
wore your pungence
on hair and skin,
ingested your creeks, winding in
among tree roots,
collecting in secret pools
where Water Striders and Minnows lived
in a constant state of flux,
where hair from dangling legs stood out
like crawdad feelers,
sifting river bottom silt,
seeking nutrience
in your flow of stillness.

You emptied my chaos
sending it tumbling down stream over stone
and over arrowhead into the forest
where it got lost in the rituals
of loving land.

1: Red

Dancing with crimson
rhythmic alizarin waltz
our étude de trois

2: Yellow

Aureolin tint
melody of luminance
radiant beauty

3: Blue

Cascading cobalt
elemental ore, Kobold
our étude de trois

At your graduation party
you engage in effortless conversation
with friends, professors, Miss Bunny, the housemother,
circling back to check on your awkward parents.

It is fun watching you grow
from the 10-year old unable to turn down a dance
to the tall gentleman loved by everybody,
including other mothers, for your solicitude and friendship.

The boy who drew comics of good and evil twins,
you cast yourself as the popular devil character
in last semester’s morality play.
You tame Vinnie, the newest of our three cats.

You sing “Your Man” backed by 15 a cappella singers.
You compose the sesquicentennial stanza
of your school hymn in trochaic tetrameter, the last words
shared with classmates before processing from the chapel.

You snag a job in the library,
find the first few days of working 8 – 5 “exhilirating,”
earn a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference,
and still beat both parents in a mean game of Scrabble.

You favor a bow tie and wear topsiders,
send your dad a T-shirt to “buff up” his summer,
find one of my poems “touching,”
give a firm handshake and a lingering hug.

I can’t wait to see what you do next.

For a limited time only
you can get Eternal Life
for just 666 easy installments
of only 69 69!
That’s right
only 666 easy payments
of 69 69 !
You’ll love making your friends 
jealous of your Eternal Life.
(Common side effects include death.)
Call now while supplies last!

The way
a person 
folds a tarp with you
for the first time
is a strong indicator
of a red flag
or a fitted 
future.

Maybe I’m the opposite of a vampire,
looking to find my own blue of remembered sky.
A starfish shadow,
dinged a time or two from unspeakable dangers,
the golden waves that ripple when my balance is disturbed.
I am not embarrassed that I know no other—
it’s a beautiful word and how long is the wait?
There is that about old souls and granite rocks,
they both wordlessly observe and silently speak their peace.
A treasure or a burden?
Hope and I, we don’t run too much together.
Such a difficult object to admire and hold.
The inner shell smooths into golden honey orange
and whispers wisdom from its tightening curves.
I see its inner workings, an onion gone rogue,
like a conscience almost.
(You fool me with your curves.)
I have not used what my mother gave me.
She stood at the counter in house coat and slippers,
49 cent sifter in hand,
rusty now with disuse.
Metal whirring against metal—shh, shh, shh…
I will hide one more memory among them
(There is nothing so blue as memory) —
the smooth shell memory of my daughter’s hand in mine.
Stop and breathe a moment of beauty.
It is so much easier to lose a thing than to find yourself again

Cento from a workshop with the Cincinnati Book Arts Society