I get tired of myself and living with ghosts
My cats even tire of my being
I take lots of showers – try to plant flowers
Nothing of interest to dream
I do art in my head
Write great songs in my bed
Heaven forbid I should clean
No one showed me how
Too late to start now
It’s a style – everything in a pile
So I try to write
Stay up half the night
Maybe I’ll get something said
Sometimes I scream
To just let off steam
It sends ghostie parts fleeing in fright.
After Wendell Berry
Last night a thought floated through me: maybe
marriage is an inherently unhappy country.
I knew it, immediately, as an unfair thought,
and selfish. A sort of not-thought. I remembered
dear Wendell spent a whole book on the country
of marriage, the barriers we create, anticipate.
Country as not the shared hallucination of state.
Country as in contra – against. Opposite.
As in, this land lying opposite to us. On the other
side of the mattress. Their wild and yonder blue;
Bragg singing Guthrie: way over yonder in the minor key.
As in the fields that oppose the farmer’s hands and plough.
Like my young squash chewed to ablation by flea beetles
with their own hungry agendas. God’s first reprimand.
I picture the circle of my own body and around that
the circle of us; the broken circle of born family,
the righteous circle of our chosen ones. I think
of the living sculpture I saw in a forest:
branches soaked and bent into arches,
which form a giant nest. How dark and safe
it was. How you could see through the cracks.
What it means to compromise. And to trust. How
did it take me so long to realize I didn’t understand
either notion well. A learning curve; the way a branch
has to soften, to take on water, in order to bend
without snapping. Learning the curve of his brow,
his gentle shoulder. Yes, I feel it. The way resolution
adds another layer of protection around us.
Everything we’ve brought to the nest, and hold up to the light:
our ragged feathers. Our stolen baubles, which flash and delight.
two button up tank tops
pit stains faded to a light grey
will look good with jeans
two pairs of jeans,
one black, to be turned into shorts
one light wash to be left as is
two pairs of shorts
need to be brought in at the waist
they don’t make shorts for these hips
one lightweight tank
soft and gauzy
is the henna design on the front cultural appropriation?
no words to speak.
It’s not my song to sing,
not my grief to wail,
yet if I remain silent,
it hurts those I wish
not to hurt the most.
This poem is not
about me. It never
was. Insignificance
protected in white
skin. Willing to offer
as protection, acknowledged
as privilege in a fucked-
up world. I am a mother
who collapsed howling
screaming pain in empathy
that cuts deeper than I ever
imagined as worst fear.
It’s not my worst fear
for my son’s fate. Beyond
comprehensible. I would
burn the motherfucking
world to the ground. Tear
my skin from my bones.
Gnashing, snarling menace
to fucking society, I do
not understand. This is not
my poem to write. I hold
vigil protecting my son’s
spheroidal blood cells
from an unknown virus.
It never occurred to me
to worry about the cops.
And that is exactly the problem.
Imagine knowing your name
may be reserved for a space on a protestor’s sign:
Maybe those whose names we say
now are among The Better Angels,
or maybe they are who
became The Better Angels,
the once-amongst-us now greeted and sheltered
by impossible winged ones who
welcome each other to some unspeakable hall
of honor in the heavens.
I am only now learning the way to speak of The Better Angels,
hope to herald their change and
also think of the families, friends, communities…
It isn’t about me, still that “I” I worked to use sparingly in high school love letters.
The list
of the names of people of color deserves
more than a monument because
our country– their country–
owes them the building of our wealth and national
treasures, credit woefully past due to care and protect
and treat them as humans and better
than most of us
treat ourselves.
At an untold heavenly altitude, I believe The Better Angels
fear no barriers and all of us can see we all can finally breathe.
i wish i had the courage
to prance from rock
to rock, right to the cliff’s edge.
to climb a tree, barefoot,
without any purpose, but
an urge–
childlike in innocence, hope, and wonder.
to simply watch you want
to do these things
is a wonder and a blessing
in itself.
the future haunts me
like the past,
as i imagine myself
surrounded by people,
feasting on my incurable loneliness–
begging to understand
the deep, raw complexity
of our existances
and i nod,
pretending to know the answers
The street cleaner moves along the circle
where we live now behind a manicured lawn
in a brick townhome – the first brick anything
we’ve owned. You have no doubt
assumed that we are white — and you would be
correct, though at least a few of our neighbors
(African-, Chinese-, Pakistani-American)
might flinch at that assumption.
Stiff metal bristles twirl, slow, slow,
beneath the cleaner truck, scraping up
mostly a lack of dirt. It is quiet
on this street. Sunlight quiet among trees
in a small park across the way. Not like our first
apartment, hard against asphalt, against the “inner”
city where kids traded pills, and worse, outside our door.
Before that my husband grew up in a five-room house
clean and modest, asbestos-shingled, his mother’s
beauty parlor in the back. None of our parents
had running water, growing up in rural houses–
at least at first. You see where I’m headed here:
we are part of how things worked well–
for some of us. For a while.
The product of the GI bill for him
(after Vietnam) and for my dad, post WWII.
We live on a street bought with their sacrifice,
bought with the lives of the ones (black and white
and otherwise) who didn’t make it back.
It’s not enough, not what they fought to make,
until we learn that no one’s safe unless all of us are.
And though the loudest sound at morning here
is birdsong in air clear, at least for now,
of bullets, tear gas, acrid smoke, and even rain,
the fire that needed to be lit burns closer.
Black lives matter!
What’s that you say?
“All lives matter”?
Why did you need to respond with that?
Here’s a tip:
If you can’t resist responding with that,
Be sure to add the word “equally.”
Otherwise, you’ll sound like Napoleon in ANIMAL FARM.
Plane.
Car.
Ship.
Bus.
These are all sighns of transportation.
Meaning they take you
from one place to another if they succeed.
They can take you from hot to cold to just right.
They can take you from a Volcano to Iceland to the cool and warm of the beach
and to the swifftness of the Ocean.
