Posts for 2020 (page 38)

the lake water is salty 
and to push underneath takes
force. 
green encapsulates 
your eyes; 
growing deeper. 
the hum of 
Margaritaville 
disappears when your
fingers sink into the 
bottom.

From ancient use we know
These names of assembly:

A clowder of kittens,
A murder of crows,
A skulk of foxes,
An ambush of tigers,
A charm of goldfinches,
A wisdom of wombats,
A lamentation of swans. 

Now we need new ones,
To meet the altered times. 

A muffle of mask-wearers,
A chap of hand-washers,
A pantomime of social distancers,
A scurry of grocery shoppers,
A pining of quarantiners, 
A graticule of Zoom participants,
A mendacity of politicians. 

Truth is a thorny branch under lush
leaves goaded by summer.  

Then autumn arrives & crumbles
leaves to crisp debris—  

landscape-context becomes clear,
thorn pricks our white flesh, & we cry  

What sorcery is this?
But the truth is that the meat  

of trees & skin of limb
have always been bare  

under the green lies
we heap on them.  

The splinters that invade
our fingers have been uncurling  

for over two centuries.  For some
autumn never fades  

into the arms of summer,
leaves cannot cushion,  

& landscape does not entertain
untruths.  Yet all they want  

to do is to widen viridian
wings, explode into a sheet  

of feathered umber & a flight
fraught with stormy clouds  

heading in someone else’s
direction over trees  

hung with moss.  

On Visiting Grant County

The farmhouse is gone now
          the foundation overtaken
          by weeds and honeysuckle…
               the scent of which
               fills this country air.

The old house
never was much
just lapboards and shingles
          miss matched and
          carried in by Granddaddy Carr.
But it kept out the cold
               in winter and
the storms of summer.
I can still see it
          even among shambles and brambles
of days gone by.

The yard is over run too and
rabbits hide
in the same places I once did
          when cousins
          tried to tag me
          in a game of hide and seek or
          kick the can.

Granny’s buttercups
have flourished
their yellow blooms
          peek out above
the burrs and briars.
They survived on their own
just like most of the grandkids did
          when they left this old farm.

Across the road
now pot holed, rutted and
nearly impassable
where once was a the garden.
The pride and plenty
          of my granddaddy.
Over there tomatoes and potatoes and
beans on poles
          grew abundantly
          in this fertile soil.
And gourds grew there too
          long handled dipper gourds
          basket gourds and
          little yellow and green ones.
The vines engulfed every inch
          they could find.
I drank cold well water
          from those gourds
          dried and cured and
          carved just right
for drinking.

On down the road
there’s a creek
          Eagle Creek…
Who knows where it springs up from
but it meanders its way
          completely around this farm.
There are shallow ripples and
deep holes where
Brim and Bass
live a fat life.
But many a cane pole and
worms have lured them out.

Somewhere down there
on a muddy bank
there is a big flat rock…
          Granny Carr’s favorite place
to tempt hungry fish.
She was a master fisherman
          with her straw hat
               cane pole
               red and white bobber and
               a few worms.
She could sit for hours
          waiting for a nibble.
I never had much patience
in those days.
I was many years
          learning that lesson
but I finally did.

The days of whittles on the porch and
kids running in the yard
          are past reduced
now to wild buttercups and
          honeysuckle.
But the life of this farm
lives on.

It lives on in every kid
          who ever kicked a can i
n every Uncle
          who ever planted a seed
or every mother
          who woke to a rooster crowing.

It lives on in our memory and
          can never die
as long as there is one of us around to tell the story.

Tony Sexton

I am too thick to pass
through walls like a specter,
but my presence here is
no less vague.

That clock
and the calendar
you’ve never remembered to move forward
are insignificant and indicative of nothing.

You see through me
except sometimes, your face grays
and I know you are recognizing me whole –
solid and destroyed.

I am stuck in the in-between.

Unable to step through,
perhaps into the harsh light
and the jarring unknown
of life without you.

Unable to sink down,
into the endless dim
and the soft known blur
of what was and is not.

I am an in-between girl,
for now,
one of the shadows in this house.

Sometimes an opening is an official boundary
But may also be a violation or a break
Where some deranged bull forces his way through
Determined to graze on the perceived greener grass.

Sometimes an opening is a promise, a potential,
Not fully formed or anticipated but offered
Or perhaps simply set quietly on the table
Beside the cake and flowers.

Sometimes an opening is a threat
Made when your boss waves you inside her office,
When your mother opens her mouth after a long measuring silence,
Or your father unbuckles his belt and pulls it from the loops with a violent whisper.

Sometimes an opening is really a closing
Letting in dangerous vapors and ideas
To contaminate and destroy
Everything possible with one breath.

Plied tenterhook,
round pout of reach
when I stretch
my flower mouth
toward yours
as house finches
shelter beneath
the linden while tea
grows cold, forgotten,
these rooms we
tumble through as if
in a boat, steering
through the waves
of new territory.

    I wrote a novel after seeing a full moon inside a halo of pale light, and lines of cloud around and through it, some waved, some gently curving. 
    I was born in a sack of amniotic fluid, turned to flesh by a miracle and my mother’s blood. The blood she gave me was a lubricant and a blessing. I thought I was part of her first, then thought I was different. That was the source of a  never to cease confusion.
    The things I know to be true are that I am often wrong and that I’m going to die. Otherwise, I can’t know or honestly say what is right or wrong, true or false, what love is, other than mother, what is real or illusion and what it is to die, though I know it will happen. 
     Critics attacked the work I did to see things naturally at least and write it down. None discussed death, because each of us is alone and naked. 
     I finished that novel in a summer dawn, the wakening sky bleeding scarlet on diaphanous pink upon a robin’s egg blue canvas. Velvet cloud piles turned to ash above a pencil-sketched, grey, if anything, curve of horizon flecked with gold. The moon was pale and fading but still insistent on its value in a remnant of celestial blue on the far side of my sight above the hours. It hung aloof well above my heart, my hair, my vision as a burst of blindness passed my face and shoulders and became heat and light behind me in a world newly forming.
     That was the morning, a movement from apprehension to bondage in the curse of time. Not a word did I say or think as that light renewed me, then chained me down with a new birth cord to a fate unspoken that would never change. Nor cursed but accepted it all as I had written.

a man on npr yesterday said a great big sahara dust storm
was moving in. it would bleach the sky milk white
and then color the sunsets a deep orange,
kind of like caution tape. it’s not unlike this book i read
last month, about the end of the world,
where a family watched the sky deepen
each night from the inside of their car
while a black cloud multiplied slowly into the father’s blood.
and this is all to say
i don’t think about dying too often,
but i think about how the moment right before
might be incomprehensibly beautiful.
in my ear now, will toledo croons
i’ll scatter like birds
i’ll go everywhere
i’ll scatter like birds, and
i want my girls to save me.
and this is all to say
i don’t think about dying too much, but
i think about where the dust of me might settle,
how it could shatter the sky into a million pieces.