Posts for June 6, 2022 (page 11)

Look at the flowers.
They’re always looking at you,
laughing in your face. 

Raymond Carver sobered up & met his true
companion, Tess Gallagher, but hidden
in the pink branches
of his lungs was a slow seed

of malignancy. Tess was the beneficiary
of his temperance unlike Maryann,
his first wife, whose head he once cracked
open with a vodka bottle. His recovery

lasted 11 years—he called
them gravy—& they included words like beloved,
union, deliverance. Ray’s final
days spent contemplating

roses, reading Chekhov
from the back porch of his oak
& pine house in drizzly
Port Angeles. Crushed

by loss, Tess stabbed
at the void with poetry—sixty
poems, all elegiac, filled
a volume called Moon

Crossing Bridge. Pieces of grieving
stretched like a triple load
of laundry on the line. Everything
around her quickened, all parts

of heartbrokenness felt, which
made a map for me. A footpath
to walk during the first
year of losing you.

Hail to the mowers of lawns
And loppers of limbs.
Hail to the trimmers of shrubs.
We revel in halting plants grow.  

We trim the grass,
Whack stray branches,
And tame the unruly bushes …
We fertilized six months ago.

Because
     it was the sharpest knife
Because
     it came with a warning
Because
     it did the job the best
Because
     it was used each morning
Because 
     I became careless
Because 
     I knew the knife as mine
Because
     I left the guard off

I got cut every time. 

To my younger self,
The wisdom I would offer: 
Slow down and savor. 

As my sister was dying — 
lung cancer, stage IV, metastasized —
we celebrated her birthday with helium balloons.
Red, blue and green. A few pink ones thrown in, 
my father being the one who went 
to the party store to buy them.

Afterwards, no one could bring themselves to throw them away, 
so we just got used to dodging the dangling strings 
and, as the helium lost its magic, head-bumping 
the slowly falling ones.

My sister would sit in her recliner, wig off, glaring at the balloons,
waiting for the end to come —just a few days later 
she fell into a merciful deep sleep 
from which she didn’t awaken. She was 44.

By now the balloons were on the floor, 
skipping across the Berber, puckered at the knot. 
Their skin gave to the knife tip, but still they popped — 
oh, how they popped. 

Time is a bird
we hold too tight.
Gold is a spider
that bites.
Joy is a mule 
That does not fight.
Home is a wolf
In silver moon’s light. 

My universe is 
made of bone
and muscle and you.

So many wars
and all enemy sides appeal to you
to side with them,
to arm with their outrage,
to adopt their fears.
So many dirty wars
with no positive characters –
just righteous ones you can barely catch up with.
As many shameful, fake wars,
as all these masterful attempts to derail you
from your own tiny, laughable war,
from the shrapnel of the buttercup
and the munition of the crocus,
to forget that you shoot solely towards the sky –
and never against people.

To forget why you are striding stooped towards the lighthouse
since you have no ship.

Author: Marin Bodakov
Translator: Katerina Stoykova

i dreamed I was gliding across the yard
on a metal scooter, then
the scooter rose into the air, and
i was flying, covering incredible
distances with each second,
finally landing in front
of a perfect white wooden farmhouse
from the fifties

a lady was there, welcoming me
with a smile that terrified me, that
said, i am hungry
i asked her where i was
in her unblinking eyes i saw her thinking
you will get back home
be calm calm calm
something in her voice
detached, robotic

i tried to open my eyes–not
my dream eyes, my actual eyes–and
they would not open
then, i knew this was no dream
–it was a screen—
to hide what was
happening to my body, no longer
in my bed

as i realized this, the smile left its
face and its eyes were huge and hateful
and then i woke and the
sun was up and the clock
was blinking 12:00 and i felt
pain and my pillow was
in the hallway and my nightgown
was inside out and
i tried to hold on to
the memory and
i heard a voice coming from the
boney bump at the base
of my skull, and the voice said

we
are
near