American Sentence – June 10, 2022
Rain jails me upstairs where journal’s pages plot to devour hours.
Rain jails me upstairs where journal’s pages plot to devour hours.
I’m trying to remember one year ago.
I was teaching in Frankfort at the
Kentucky History Museum during the week.
My mother was becoming less coherent
and I would be awakened in the night,
needing to change her or move her.
The beauty of the passage of time is that
I cannot fully reimagine how my days and
nights were spent during that physically
and emotionally gruelling episode of being
deeply needed by my aged parents.
I know I was there.
I know I was alone in
the room when she died.
I just can’t remember what
kept me moving forward.
Sometimes hindsight is blank.
KW
6/17/2022
I have intrusive visions of you
When your head is out the car window
Fur breezed back, smiling and barking
As we ribbon through the thin
Backroads, tree-shrouded, tight
Winding sharp and shoulder-less
Headlights pierce the vantage point
And swerve towards us on the turn
There is a collision, hot blood
Exploding and glass and bone-crunch
Your head rolls back inside
Lopped off, red and still grinning
The other car doesn’t stop and I
Am screaming, thrashing and you
Are still here whining at my neck
The other car isn’t in the rear view
And I blink back to reality
The vision passes and the blood
Drains from my periphery
twilight zone day
odd, off
thunder and downpours
an afternoon to rest
I consider the timetable
how far I’ve come and the fact there’s a distance left to travel
why don’t air conditioners actually work properly and why is so much
so difficult
the adage, “that’s life”
and sure, sure
the gosh honest truth and then some
all I want is for that day to finally arrive
not sure yet what month, day or year
but it’s on the horizon, nonetheless
that day
I’m haunted by my memories,
like the kid on the flight deck
ten miles off Marble Mountain
one hot September day in ‘68,
my age and indisputably dead,
no question, no binary toss,
so the nightmares are my problem
but they don’t stop the mourning.
And sometimes there’s a void,
like thinking about women I loved
or thought I did, the ones who might
or tried or never felt the same,
decades and lifetimes in the dust,
the ones I’ll never hear from again,
so I hope they’re old, happy, well,
but there’s no way to open the box.
(after the 2021 painting Unveil, by Silvia Pelissero)
The tinkerer holds hands with the task
At hand
A Curiosity, I have brought
An offering. A plea.
a stone, but yielding—faceted—
Inside, just a bit of movement
exactly unlike a clock
in the glowing
From the counter, it looks like guesswork,
Or magic
As they work in a hum, running rasps of scarred fingertips across the
invulnerable Vulnerable thing
Cradling then
Picking a spry and sprightly trawling hook from the murky depths that is
Beneath. The hook is
Clean and
Sharp but
Lake Moss trails from the handle like a memory
The tinkerer’s practiced hands are fast
—in out—
& there
An amniotic Plop
of glowing Top
grade
Imagination.
Into my palm. Wet. Indelible. Nontransferable. Mine.
The tinkerer holds hungry gaze with fascination.
And knows that payment will be kind.
let my spirit spill like ink on paper,
— i cannot write —
let it seep into the table —
scribble my name in a heart —
onto the floor, once more
under the floorboards,
until it soaks itself into the dirt.
Spring births early summer
Sunlight filters earlier and lingers longer
I think I am a god.
And it is magnificent.
the river
In the last week alone, three mentions.
The first being Yellowstone flooding.
Runoff swelling, rivers changing course.
More melt possible in the heat waves ahead –
That greedy lap at the diabetic toes of our undoing.
The next, an opening to a poem I read – of the heart’s undoing.
The kind that unlaces our ribs in ecstatic abandon,
Allowing the floppy wet-backed fish below
To slop gamely on the counter gasping for legal access to air.
The third, poker.
A biopic about Texas Dolly & The Doyle Brunson Hand.
With two pair (10s & 2s) he goes all in and, on the river,
Gets a 10 of diamonds to win it all, baby.
It’s not a bluff.
The snowpack on Everest is swallowing
Climbers into crevasses overnight.
Basecamp to shift down 400m in 2023.
Words like torrential and indefinitely.
And case-studies of what happens to
Humans in humid heat beyond the melt point –
Once water in cannot catch up to
Water lost.
You’ve got to hand it to Brunson – 2 years in
A row, the same river.
But when you’re on fire
There will be blame.
This ash doesn’t fall without begging flame.
So when I hear the river & think best of 3? –
From here on out, just undo me.
