Posts for June 26, 2019 (page 3)

Eight sardines
                  (Some sad
And needing to pee)
Packed in the company
Ford Fairlane
Stuck at a RR track
In Beaver Damn where
A girl in a red dress
On a porch swing
Dark hair flowing
Smiles at me (pressed
Against the rear window)
With a face I cannot read
      Up the crossing gates go
Dad starts our slow depart
And to my diappoint
She gives no wave

In Central City
I see my Mr. Hershey’s
Back pocket melted sludge
Messier than baby sister’s
diaper and three hours yet
to Uncle Mike’s

We auction off
pots and paintings
as if they are these
invaluable,
priceless,
pieces.
But
when a true historian approaches,
one who has lived through that
which we will not know,
we push them aside,
act as if they’re a broken record.

We don’t miss
either antique
until it’s 
gone.

Suffering from a general lack of cuteness
in my life during a move, 
I bought myself a stuffed hedgehog
to supervise the rest of the packing
from a cozy spot, somewhere.
but there aren’t any cozy spots
left. So he’ll have to make do
like the rest of us. 

 Awareness expanded                                    
as pink animals flew over the crowd
before the band began to play
like a psychedelic floating barn yard
joined by a giant flying tuxedoed penguin.

Clouds floated up
to the penguin and pigs on a wing
as the bravery grew for the selected few
not thinking past the now.

Blanket trampolines
would find their own volunteer high flier
higher and higher each person would go
flailing about in midair with each launch
while the crowd screamed
higher, higher, higher.

And when they were too close to the sun
the make believe Eskimo would crash to the ground
where another dirty blanket
would become a pretend stretcher
to carry them far away. 

Dumb as a stump someone new would climb on
for the ride of their lives
Higher, higher, higher. 

We could not look away
amazed and confussed
while human size hail rained down
on the masses
the year that Elvis left the building for the last time.

Some White Bird
     “They take and release sunlight
     like stained glass outside my small window.
     A light that sometines prompts me to want
     to leave the world and settle, like some white bird
     on another mountain.”
                                              from Lightfoot by Charles Wright

There are dinosaurs on my porch, weighing
down the nameless trees sprouted there, scattering
leaves, with bodies small to my hand. Winged
remnant-cousins, common as sparrows. Twig-
legged, egg-borne just the same. They fling
air aside with as much abandon as their ancient
grands, stub-winged and downy, plated tails swishing.
Aloft, their soft bodies scatter. Late going
     they take and release sunlight

in their tiny beaks, heedless of the shape
of shadows they’ve left behind like seed-husks. Shade
accumulates on the window sill, the kitchen table,
the bowl of a spoon. Maybe it will add wild tang
to the soup, shouldering its surface-scrim, elbowing
a bubble upwards. A slow potato nudges carrot discs,
rolls the barley-beads across the kettle bottom.
Steam frosts my glasses as I stir, sip, watch the light
rearrange asters and maples at the edge of my yard,
scattering bruise-purple petals, toothy leaves
sun-shot gold and patina’d
     like stained glass outside my small window.

That same high, small rectangle, boxed in beside the door,
an afterthought or concession to someone else, I suppose.
It’s a surprise package of seasons and hours I delay
opening, sometimes. A treat. A treasure. Sometimes
a startlement of pain. One winter, the moon
froze in place, weighted with glacial ice, ancient,
dripping itself away, misting up toward a star-rent sky,
finding comfort at last among the craters and cold, cold seas.
Slowly it melted into
     a light that sometimes prompts me to want

another home, another earth-world where I can breathe
and sing, push aside shadows, cup benign starlight
so very old, yet it still feels its way toward the edge
of whatever envelops, unseen. But will there be
birds to ponder, in that new place? Will there be soil.
life-sift of boulder and antelope, green leaves
to make patterns? Is it moon-madness, this pull, this lean
     to leave the world and settle, like some white bird

released from it’s brown-speckled egg, nested near raucous
waters, handled by winds and twig-toed feet, to embrace
blue air in search of whatever is beyond pervious clouds,
to eye-map unrecorded valleys, the fire-shaded scree
     on another mountain? 

who asked him to tell her stories before the candles’ snuffing, to read old poems or sing new songs meant only for her ears. He plumbed his genes for ancestral mountains and forgotten seas, his memories for the plains that spread from one to the other. Later, in the glow of their hearts and the dark of the night, she slept smiling in his arms as he kissed her three times on her forehead. Some mornings, she embellished his words with responses pictured in their wake. Now he rises from dreams of them to feel her phantom weight on their bed, hear her whisper in her sleep, and wonders what ghosts dream of.

One says,
Overtime may suck
but it makes a greener paycheck!

Another says,
The more you make
the more they take.

I recall by brief time spent
with the uncertainties of unemployment,
how I was a lucky one getting out so quick.

Thus I wonder:
where might I be able to go
to buy some untainted optimism?

As I look at my window

Driving down the road

I’m surrounded by trees

And the smell of a small farm town

People I know all around

I think about how I love it here,

And maybe I’ll stay

But, my brain can’t help to go

To everything that has happened here

Everything that still happens.

Surrounded by the same people

I think about how I could get away from here

In less than a year

I’ll be on my own

An adult

And maybe I’ll leave

you used to hate
the way your past
captivated you 

how its hands
would squeeze
against your lungs,
heart beating against ribs
like fists on cage walls

but after all this time 
you have fallen in love
with it

you couldn’t leave 
if it gave you keys

even if a breeze
tangled curtains
in an open window

Striped, small, lowly,
of little consequence,
I munch quietly on the toxic leaves
of my family tree.  

At first,
I ate unknowingly,
unaware of the poisonous juices
flavored with
deception,
mistrust,
and mental illness.  

But then I watched as birds of prey –
birds of
depression,
anxiety,
and addiction –
swooped in
and scooped up other caterpillars
on this family tree.  

And so I climbed,
higher and higher,
hoping to reach the refuge
of leaves tucked safely
in the deep, hidden folds 
of this ugly canopy.  

Can I escape these birds of prey?
Can I move beyond this harmful food,
consumed for years?
Can a tree wish itself
into producing different fruit?
Can a flower decide
to alter the color of its petals?  

If I am to make this change,
it needs to be much more
than a mere matter of will.
I need time spent in silence,
in a chrysalis of self-examination.
I need to feel the struggle
of true transformation
and the beautiful pain
of metamorphosis.  

I need to fly away from this family tree,
not crushed in the sharp beak
of generational pain,
but as a new creation –
a butterfly
with horizons all her own.