Posts for June 11, 2022 (page 6)

The real witching hour
comes at 3:00 am. At least
that’s when my ghosts detach
themselves from shadows
dive into my dreams.

Sometimes they remain there
swirl memories, paint my sleep
in images of the living and the dead
whisper secrets I half-forget 
before I brew my coffee.

Sometimes they wake me 
gently, a kiss on the cheek, 
my mother’s voice murmuring
warm spot on the pillow
where a cat used to sleep.

And then, on nights like this,
they scream me awake 
tell me Run! I jolt up, pulse
pounding, relieved
that I escaped.

I could refer to her as grandma ,But honestly she isn’t so grand.

Quaint is more of the adjective for her. Still in her 70’s furnished home where she’s been widowed , life wallows where the whole home’s carpet is baby blue, but that sacred route she walks upstairs everyday has turned brown from her little feet and walker, as you can track her traces for years on years of her lonesome

(After a poem of the same title by Ben Jonson)

Tonight, you’re invited by our transforming apartment and I–
not because we think we’re worthy,
but because you enrich any feast.
We’ll do our part to entertain you,
keep you well fed with our menu:
olives, capers, pimiento spread for your palate,
a helping of traditional Grand Junction Taco Salad
to usher in my lover’s breaded chicken cutlets
and my lemon and caper chicken stirfry
atop creamy mashed potatoes if you have room.
I’ll tell you more, but lie, so you will come:
of roasts, smoked ribs, shrimp and cocktail sauce,
chicken fajitas, turkey pot pie, and rasta pasta,
which all may yet come to be,
in harmony with dietary need.
Assorted cheese and fruit will surely be offered,
but what inspires me is a pure cup of rich Canary wine–
it is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine.
Bring your companions, be an hour late if you wish.
Tell me and my chef will conjure you and your pet’s favorite dish.
We haven’t covered the desserts on our exhaustive list,
but are prepared to have them prepared — pistachio muffins,
authentic New York cheesecake, Boston Cream donuts so fine.
We set out the hors ’deovres and the glasses at 7 pm.
Come with your most-used emoji, your most precious meme.
Leave your status updates and key words at the door,
Unless they are vital to your goals, your passions, your family line.
All this awaits without reservation. The door’s unlocked. Come and dine.

Lying on my stomach, eyes closed, smooth concrete
hot against my chest and thighs, wet towel thrown over
my head and sunburned back, muffled voices, laughter,
shouting, talking.

Constant thumping, the bouncing of the Duraflex diving
board, the pale-blue, rough, sandpaper surface hurls another
kid smoothly into the air.

Ker floush! comes the report of another successful cannonball, water droplets hitting the towel and my legs.

Good one.

The next diver in the queue mounts the board, takes three steps and bounce.

Airborne.

One of summer’s small stages.

Only seconds to make it work.

Can you catch the eye of that special girl?

Execute a one-and-a-half before she loses interest, was it good
enough to impress?

Look for the look. Hope you get your chance.

Lifeguard’s whistle slows a runner on the deck, wet feet slapping
past me on the concrete as a kid returns from the concession stand.

Round-shaped grandmas in skirted swimsuits adjust sunshades
over new babies, while the new moms adjust new swimsuits over
their new bodies.

Hawaiian Tropic lotion, too-fruity gum, Marlboros and chlorine.

The smells of summer.

The radios are all tuned to the new rock station that’s broadcasting
in “FM.” Frequency Modulation, means the tunes come in clear and stay that way.

FM DJ so casual and cool. Voice made smooth by years of Luckies
and Jack. No static at all.

It’s a quarter till, a 10-minute break in 5.

Last turn on the diving board, fulcrum set all the way back, maximum lift, four steps and then big air.

Silence.

Alone in the moment.

Chest flat on thighs, tight, toes pointed, two-and-a-half turns, open and enter.

Straight, no splash, only the sound of the water rushing past my ears.

Cold.

Blue.

Silent.

Safe.

Lying flat on the bottom, 12 feet down.

Lying flat just to do it, plenty of breath.

Legs push up, and one hard stroke to break the surface at the wall and out.

Was it good enough to impress?

Towel around shoulders, tugging on cutoff shorts over a wet speedo, wedging wet feet into hot Converse.

Walk out with the dripping throng.

Act like you are thinking about something. Anything. Except what
you think they think of you.

Almost to the gate.

Jet black hair.

Green eyes.

Fair skin, spray of freckles on her checks, a smile that could melt an iceberg.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Passing, holding eyes for a moment, then quickly looking down.

“Going to the ‘Y’ later?”

“I am now.”

Smiles.

Shortness of breath. Leave fast before you mess it up.

Black vinyl seats so hot you have to sit on the towel, steering wheel
and shifter too hot to touch.

Open windows and vents to try to cool it down.

Hit the key. Big-block, eight-cylinder, loping rhythm of the camshaft and the beautiful, throaty rumble of the exhaust.

Cherry bombs, red glass pack mufflers that sound like freedom.

Moving down the street, chirping second and third.

Speed moving hot air over hot skin, the smell of gasoline and chlorine in my nose.

Couple dollars left on my dresser, two milkshakes, maybe malts.

Just enough.

Downshift. Hear the high pitch of the engine, tach jumps and then
smoothly drops.

Red light, car sways in the engine’s rhythm, no brake needed, hold in place with clutch and gas.

I love this ’Bird.

Station wagon in front of me, wood-paneled, huge back-gate door, window down, two boys fresh from the pool and goofing.

They see me see them. One boy goes with the Asian eyes, tongue out; the other with thumbs in ears, four fingers out and wagging.

I counter with engine rev and roll forward. With middle finger, I slowly push up my sunglasses.

They laugh like hyenas, fall back out of sight.

Mom looks in rearview mirror like, “Good heavens, what now?”

Light turns green, ease clutch out, slowly begin to move.

Two glowing white butts rise up from below the back gate.

Double moon. Well played.

Station wagon pulls away, all of us laughing.

I miss second, loudly, boys hoot and shout, “Grind me a pound!”

They will retell that story. A lot.

Good times that bind.

Left turn, find my gear and head up the hill.

August heat shimmering in waves off the asphalt.

Her smile.

That small space between her front teeth.

				Memory

				
				I remember when
				                                      my sister was born.
				                                      I have never told
				                                      her for

				                                      I never thought to before.
				                                      I will permit my poem to hold
				                                      that memory of that morn-,
				ing, father, who had been

				                                      at the hospital,  
				hourly, waiting for her birth
				returned. My sister, brother,
				                                      and I were on Cartwright

				                                      mountain to stay the night
				                                      if necessary, and it was, for mother
				                                      labored long the way the earth
				                                      is noncommittal 

				to a seed’s need to burst
				                                      from the soil, 
				before its season to grow
				is come.

				Some
				                                       six days ago, 
				my sister’s toil
				got versed

				as poetry along 
                                dementia lines.
				 

[In honor of Hannah Szenes’s “A Walk to Caesarea” (1942)]

As so many things around her are ending
As they have before
As they do
As they will in times to come

A young woman stands before the might of the sea
And listens for its echoes
In times when she knows she too
Will be gone

They’d hobbled a dreamachine from Brion Gysin,
painted it black and white as zen, and then

twisted its lissome jaws to the scrumptious
grey of eidetic, despotic, and pothering pictures,

pulchritudinous nerve of a pansy drawn
to a gibbet of chrysolite,  thrawn and emerald

spires wiring Oz as the horse-kicked cheeks
of a munchkin, colors unplumbably curled

to a Mesmerist tie-dye, desiccant grey of diminishing
dishwater riddled with suppling bones and milk

teeth strewn around ocherous tendrils,

evermore gurgling lower and lower and

lowered now
                             lower
                                             again—
                                                     
                             hold your breath,
count to three,
make a wish,
let us go then—

The pleasant Patina paraded her
soles swoln sticky with flour
across which charred and charted roads,

what slippery streets where smoldering cigarettes
float as the half-snuffed stars once stirring
a firmament, snagged

about broken branches bridging but
bickering realms of a hacking ash tree,
trammeled in crackling vacuum slackly

sluiced from the eye of a dozing dog. Such
scowling macadam that cloud-shat showers
slop and soothe to a mirror’s moire
(some star had pickled and pinked to a groaning glare),

here lamplight bruises orange as a
salvaged stone-fruit’s flesh that’s splashed across concrete,
sage as a sickening squint, that buttery

greige of a smokestack gargling
crackling coals to frozen smoke.
She neared McCartney, combing

the can-studded stone with a
tinker’s raking gait, who had always
loathed her dandling pe’ots, her autumnal bonnet

ginkgo-gold or greige, her smirking affliction
glib as the rain-eaten skomorokh picking at Kiril—
thrumming primordial ribs and scratching out icons

brash as a rash of wassailing cats.
McCartney’s tabard was black,
that black of the coal-clad Cash’s sweet

and sepulchral hymnal, black as the bronze
of a death mask propped upon purling, skittish plinths.
His slacks were sewn of circuitous dictums,

deep as the moth-wan tissues worms refuse
and starched like the worming vertebrae fused
in a smarting hunch, slumped sick

as the havocking curs encoached
in a roach’s war—His face
was milky and speckled and just

as it was some sobering summers past,
once signed by the brands of burning beer signs,
chiseled with sharpening shadows

spat from the blearing blush of a cat-calling streetlamp;
teased to a winsome and secretive simper,
a wildly rattling wreath of teeth,

some twisted stare of sardonic indignance; or
settled in wriggling rue and snow-chewn ruins 
runnied with hungering mud and kudzu

ensnaring slavering squatters—and here
he seemed as a shanty leant against
listless waves and shriveling sea oats,

a shiftless rib of smoke uncoiling,
chimneys sunk to unsettling dust—
a golem of sorts, though pressed from a tacit talc

and pressed by absurdist epistles,
embittering blotter paper tacked to a tired tongue,
and the grumbling signals strummed up

scrunching ribs and the queasily capoed strings
of a warping neck and wheezing pistons;
an integument tethered in powdery pith and

embittering pips of paled pomelos
but rough and repulsive sunsets savaged—
a hollowed hare, which eclectic confectioners

cast in a batter of gin and aspirin, he
who’d forgotten the churlish gags,
the oenomel giggles of dish dogs,

braying and strange, the nicknames
nipping at tippling ankles, dragging
the staggering steps, the lamed and

belaboring gaits of poisoned putti,
rusalki sulking on warping linoleum
webbed in a watery sinew spurt from a

burbling, haggard, and cracked commode
left choking on sunken, encrusted tissue;
thrust to the wiling strides of exuberant brumbies,

mutts made one among otters and ocelots,
dryads, naiads, and godlings…
Though his cat still whispers,

Tigers of wrath are wiser, P., yes,
even than brumbies bent to be broke about
scarps or stirrups, or maundering mutts

that cock a disquieted tail against clamorous stars—
She’d then scuff stool across biting tile,
ever imperfectly parallel with but gritting grout.

They grazed in a tremulous, frantic neglect,
wan squeals of scraping skiffs that scud upon placid ponds,
like accidentals tugging meandering melodies twain,

as keys must scratch about anxious pockets
picking their preening peaks to pieces—
passed upon patchwork concrete

frolicking dogs demurred, disdained,
laid waste to—
And as the dissonance scratchily waxed,

she cobbled a conversation drawn
among puddles and potholes, drowned
as wrinkles rubbed round wind-strummed meres

by a cat’s-paw settle in pensive, speechless, shapeless smoothness

                                   :

They jawed along snickering spillways, scuffling
soles against frankensteined macadam stitched
in snakeskin tarred to a crippling stiffness.

He dreamt of the woods immured in the green
of a golf course, quivers of irons and woods
supplanting sleepily gamboling saplings rose

with a sinking star and the harrowing toes
of a whinnying ice storm—wooed some frozen feeling feeding
on twisted tongues, which a sticky aluminum clenches.

Peter McCartney waxed to a critical shrillness,
spat, “It’s A Wonderful Life? It’s a crock of shit!
It’s a dream. It’s a harrowing movie, the bleating

feed of shapeless sheeple—technically good,”

(Now, mind you, Peter McCartney here
was a sordid shadow, which thrawn and
ponderous rain’d unplumbably picked at,
no more Peter than Yeats’ da, in a meddlesome dream,
was smoothly immured in a stubborn doorknob.)

“—though it sets an unsoundable standard.”

“One where people are truly good?
It’s a beautiful movie, flickering flake
by flake. It cuts through the souring sutures

thorned through a sucked and puckering sternum…
To think it a crock of shit, you’d have to have
solely seen among mirrors scuffed

with the glair of scum-scowled witches’ windows,
sieved from the turbidly bitter bdelygmia
bubbled in troubled and gurgling potholes,

strictly a finicky specter stitched
from the stillborn teeth interred in teratomas
covering frowns inflamed by a blistering lick

of unshakable shame and a teetering
tower of louring waste where once there 
posed self-pitying Peter.” Patina

stood on a bulbous shard of tar,
the hunch of a buried domovoi
schismic, bickering, scraps of stone had,

teased by a wryly wassailing storm,
implored to the crazing borderlands boarded
with broken rock and cagey concrete,

firm as a flopped and flinching fence.
The water’d cinched to a frothing moat
but bridged by a shriveling pinch of stone.

She hunched upon Bubbleland, even the Elba
Pope once promised a flimsy farce, and
snapped her umbrella’s spine on the gurgling drawbridge:

“And as these rains irremeably rise
spurred on by a sore and insoluble sadness,
this skittering drawbridge slouches, splinters,

picks the teeth of Leviathan clean as a
typeface freckles a thoughtless leaf,
as stars explode in a moribund hunger,

leaving less than impressions
sticky as cigarettes sallowing stuffy apartments.
Have you considered Jesus, son—?

I’m kidding, although he’d have,
by far, a far better bead on things
than this.”

In darkness, the old miner stood
by the window, looked out over
the savaged valley, burdened
deep with tailings and spoil – 
the headwaters of Barren Creek
buried. It was bad enough
in the time the old bosses
raided this place, but when
Wall Street came, the change
was forever. The mountains
descended into the valleys,
broken, like he was in the long-
wall days, like his home place
is now.

My bones are rotten.

          My joints are as fragile as Russian tea cakes.

My hips, though, ohhhh-my-hips,

           my hips are titanium.

The surgeon prophesied: my hips will outlast the rest of me.

          He does not know my heart is blue granite.

I lose friends to money or love. I tell myself it’s not any weakness in me.

          I lose my husband. I tell myself I can do another day alone.

There are flecks the color of my husband’s eyes in the blue granite of his headstone.

          His heart was a worn-out bass drum.

I ached to watch my grandmother knead dough with gnarled hands.

          I have my grandmother’s thumbs now.

My hips, though, ohhhh-my-hips,

          my hips still remember the rhythm of a bass drum.

          My hips will remain silvery-grey.

          My heart will stay a slab of blue stone.

Be as patient as the century plant?
Daily I check it out through my window on the courtyard,
Peer through my phone-camera to examine the blooms,
Try to find a hint of blossoms to come. 
But the century plant is on its own timeline and will not rush its blossoms or its death.   After all, what else takes a century?  

The Hundred-Years-War,
Galileo’s theories.
Vermeer’s paintings.
Bach’s Baroque.
The Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, 1933,
Weathering the noses on Mount Rushmore.
How the mesas along I-40 will look different.
The flying cars in The Jetsons
Change in the Catholic Church (well perhaps not).
The light in the eyes of the last World War I veteran.
Light from some nearby galaxy.
Nothing in the embrace of a lover.