Worn Out
she used to say, propping
her square-toed shoes on the ottoman.
I, world-weary at 15, nodded.
I’d been worn out too. Occasionally,
she’d wear out my hide
when I didn’t obey
or when I’d worn something out
that she thought I shouldn’t.
the spring morning was fresh and clear
the sunlight illuminating the thin curtain
and turning the sparse room yellow-orange
my eyes register the glow, and i wrap the blanket
around my shoulders, tucking my hands tightly under my chin
and moving my face to feel the warmth of the new day
their voices flow in through the open window
words that do not match the unspoiled light of dawn
dark words, contrasting the cool new day with old anger
unfulfilled dreams, expectations found in the world of cinema
that cannot be made real by friend or spouse
old words and new words that mean the same thing,
over and over like repetitions at the gym
building strength for a competition that has no winner
i leave a second window open so the words flow through
my tiny house and don’t stick to me
they exit and move across the dew-covered back lawn
on the breeze they tumble
over and over
polishing each other to a smooth, dull sheen
smoother and smoother, like stones in a stream bed
searching for another open window
to enter
and stay
Most of my childhood was spent
right here on these creek banks
gathering rocks and sifting sand.
Thirty years ago, the trees didn’t loom
overhead casting shadows across deep
still water like they do now.
They were seedlings,
the water shallow, moving fast,
a sandbar curved in just the right place
to pass hours with my neighbors in
make believe worlds we built together
working hard in our play.
I listen to the mocking bird try out
different songs as fish dart across
spots of shade in and out of sun,
my kids observing turtle eggs and
crawdads and dragonflies
each of us quiet in our awe.
I soak in this stillness,
let the slow current carry me
back in time
back to those days
neither of us were so grownup.
after a summer dinner with friends, stopping for gas on the high ground while the sun was nearing the horizon and the storm roiled closer from the northwest. Perfect for driving, no blinding light at eye level, the imagination-startling, incredibly textured multi-grays of the clouds in place of endlessly featureless blue. Maybe you recall the photograph I sent you of the view from the pump, how much you said you loved me for sharing. I hope fantastic vistas force you to think of me for a sharpened moment among the dulling, infinite years of no longer needing me.
old stained glass window
The most poignant question asked in the interview
was what’s the hardest problem you’ve faced?
Should have been a thinker,
but my answer was immediate and honest:
people.
See, I’ve been the restaurant manager
buried in food tickets
with customers still pouring into the building
like shovelfuls of dirt,
the only solution being
to hunker down over immolating grill
and outdig.
In the warehouse, when trailers became
a rare and coveted commodity
making gridlocks of outbound loads,
I manipulated space like a flash game
to find every nook and cranny for a pallet,
constantly shifting pieces
until we could get the big one out.
I hunted down and found
your missing items in the grocery store
like tracking rare animals in the wild.
I finagled the splintering pallet
down from the highest racks
without the easy way out
offered by gravity.
Because the thing about inanimate objects
is they can only have so much power.
They’re predictable with rigid rules.
That which is created by humankind
can be conquered by humankind.
But people?
They’re all over the place.
They see the hard worker and know
their slack will be picked up.
They take advantage of systems,
paying no mind to who’s coming next,
who’s cleaning
the mess
they leave
behind.
Worse if they’re in leadership,
playing favorites
(or singling somebody out)
or refusing to hold everyone accountable
(including themselves)
and if you get run over by one of these people,
you’ll bleed our in their rearview,
laying there dying
on the side of the road
while other people (the cowards)
pretend not to notice.
It’s the only problem I can’t solve;
when someone chooses to be a problem.
Through any other challenge at me,
even Everest, I’ll come out on top.
But the wrong person, well
they can only hollow out my humanity.
Afternoon coffee is a different addiction.
Less hopeful, more settled.
Like we’ve accepted the world is hard
but still need to make it through.
I find the sunshine suspicious.
The lift of school children’s laughter at odds
with the smoke & muster
of a 3pm cappuccino.
I’m already awake.
Where more can this jolt take me?
ALMOST GONE
The green of spring is almost gone,
the freshness, the excitement.
Soon the world with bake
in the oven of summer,
the sidewalks will fry eggs,
and the days will steam
like a pot of hot coffee.
The parade is over,
the forsythia petals
have fallen, the blackberries
have bloomed with no winter
after their name.
We have no choice
but to get though this,
the days when dull leaves wither
and dream of their second act.
Old Ptarmigan says to me, “Strange—”
the crepitant squeal of a bloated boiler
shuffling crushed up Tums up
wheezing seams and rivets
run raw with sweat and conviction—
“The moods we muddle or mell of the
meddlesome tongues preposterous songsters stir
and prickle round girded ribs and spatchcocked sternums,
breastbones svelte as the gibbering wishbone
stripped from a chortling hen, coquettish and
comely, unbroken, cracked on the feckless faerie’s face
to pick at some scowling eye—” he dipped his beak
in a verdigrised thimble, nursing at nettles distended
in dew and duckweed, and offered a plangent wince
with a wall-eyed peridot dewy and garbled, heavied,
“to tune that disgruntled trace of a smirk.”
Then Ptarmigan slopped those lilies aligned upon
cat’s-pawed scowls of a muttering crick,
wan lilies, greened by the brush-sieved sun,
left lined to leer like a foreign phrase
embossed in red above brambling barbwire.
“Preposterous songsters,” rolled as a robin barks,
“ill-perched upon straggling thorns enshrined
in a litter of sensuous locust flowers
flexed to a fretted and threatening furor or
fanned round flinching fans of fragrant ginkgoes
sucked to a puckering gold—”
He threaded his feathery feelers through
a bedraggled coif of quills and sprigs
grown glaucous, gizzardly, shriveled
and shy—
“And your smile’s stiffer
than pinions poised upon pampering breezes, updrafts
shyly spit from a diffident storm cloud ever unsure of its shape, and the
piling sapphire buffed to a powdery silver
nettles and pecks an arrested, reckless ken,
sows gobs of groaning roe amid flexible flesh
fresh-furrowed and scratched to a scowl.
“And the golden world, in its wistful wisdom
warped to a sinuous flange of sumac,
bids its jonquils generous spans
to crane above giggling halberds,
green as that comely cat mint
(dark as the morning who’d suckled a barrel of arils
around its chipping lips);
those jonquils born of the briny germ,
the squealing weal of gulls and terns and
sanderlings shooed from a slavering tide;
the sea spit squeezed from a peafowl prised
from the pride of its peerless fan
by an echoing reprimand
unfounded, floundering
free as the starlings’ symphonies,
free as the frenzy fanned in a charring theatre.
“The sun’s encased in a quailing caul,
some omen snapping a smile straight
as the cat nip’s crazed and abrading chatter
entices eyes disguised in grass.
The burp of a wasted worm I slopped
upon seventy seeds of unfounded flowers
maybe had sickened me, maybe
had twisted the senses wild and lithe as ivy.
Or was it the doleful croon a bassooning rock dove
sews round brambling boughs and
louring wires cruelly shaven spruces splint,
charred legs of a scrunched-up spider’s stilted fist
unhinged, incensed, compelled
to spool, as an assuming garland,
lamp wick tinsel, tarmac taffeta
teased to but comely, languorous tresses
racked up a reticent cello’s neck
(that longs for the coaxing stroke of some
brazen bow restored to a finger of rosewood);
“garland tamed and hanged in the
deathly decorum of tight-lipped wights
washed up with the bilious foam of dyspeptic tides
uneasily worming and burbling over the hip of a trash-studded shoreline;
veins of garland honoring shinnying shadows shelled
by a stammering street lamp;
veins of a blushing bulb that roll with the withering prickle
of brusque and dismissive winds,
grown glaring and garish with crystalline tendrils,
finicky mucus seized of a hundred sundry sneezes silenced—
“pit as a pearl.”
Then Ptarmigan, dribbling nettles and dew
and duck weed down his beak blown brash
as a bulletshell cocked at a clockwork star,
his eyes rolled over embrangling branches
cloaking a scowling canopy,
lurid as matcha clung at a moth-eaten lambrequin,
green as an ensign’s first crusade.
The faerie figured him practically drowning,
nettles and such ensnaring his gurgling beak
and breast as an ascot wrested fresh from a splintering gibbet.
His body ceased to pulse in affected stillness,
possums plopped in a pothole,
spiders splayed across silken ribs that
days ago sloughed their petals of nacreous glass
and blenched to a delicate shrillness. “Now,”
the Ptarmigan’s engine turned with the thump of thwarted stock,
“the canopy seems a repurposed gallows,
green as the tumbling fledgling flung from a
darkly sharpened scarp or a staggering bluff
resplendent as icicles, snagged
about breakneck boughs of a maple whose
shadow some skulking storm has softened;
its bark as obsidian seized in sere and tumultuous
crests, some meddlesome siren’s wry meringue,
the restive tang of a prickling epic inflamed and
stiff as the stern and fang-sharp shadows of street lamps.
“The chill of impending tears that tickle
cerulean glims to a rasping jasper
crawl and claw up a crimping beak
as flesh left stippled from feathers threshed
by a painful, pulsing, pregnant pause
grows cold as a wave-lapped wishbone ripped
from those jigs you dangle through delicate ice.
“And you’re thinking, my! what feathers threshed,
what quills uncurled! what will’s compelled
and pealed from a thrashing chrysalis
floundering lithe as a strangled fish
across searing quays in stridulous mimicry,
braying, My! what feathers threshed! and etc.
“You’re the malingering chaff an articulate quern assays
and casts in deep and disquieting cracks of a tortuous workshop.
You’re that shrillest husk of a doll that’s resolved from
doubling nubbly corn husks over and under an undulous knot—
this molten pearl of a pitying engine lapping up
stop-leak brusquely as cat’s claw curtains.
“And as pregnant germs of jonquils threaten to,
blot by blot, disturb the coif of your fresh-combed coat,
and you’re winnowing cruelest cryptids clawed
in the umbrous bellies of brambling leaves;
a basooning dove entoils each chortling leaf
with a silvered, sepulchral majesty,
summons each golden glint as a farrow of
fireflies roused from resolving dew
(as tadpoles squeeze from a scummy scab
some stone’s seduced to begrudgingly shoulder,
or as cantoring crackles of thin and ephemeral
music squirm from the fleeing sea foam)
“Look,” she says, the Ptarmigan’s beak like a rusted syringe,
a mosquito’s broken nose attempting to eskimo kiss an ant lion,
“I get it. You’re feeling weird. It’s fine.
And tomorrow, below but a new-shorn sky
split red as abandoned placenta, maybe
you’ll dredge from a different dream or
sift amid screeds of the sillier starlings
strewn in a county-wide call-and-respond
of Samuel Barber, Sullivan, Schubert,
Strauss, a more pleasant impression of flowers
picked and pinned to gussy-up moldy chestnuts.
Get me? Cool? Now shut the fuck up.”
And the old Ptarmigan, drunk as a pixie,
slumped in a pool of pernicious esteem
and bubbled, “The night is young, my darling.
Dare I dream it younger still?”
