Yesterday I visited my grandparents
80 and 82
In their house with air conditioning
High speed internet
iPads and WiFi routers
It is 2023.
When they were children,
Neither of my grandparents
Had an indoor toilet.
They are not retirees.
They are time travelers.
She lets the cool breeze
Liberate her
Her heavy green gives way to
Gleaming gold
This is her grand crescendo
As she acquieces
To Design
In the coming days
She will be stripped
Of all she once held
Heavily
While we wrestle against
Nature and Man
Making choices
And demands
We throw on layer after layer
As the world grows cold
While she stands naked
Brave and bold
Without shame
you said you liked how i touched you
on the front steps
i was smoking with your roommate i shared my cigarettes
you talked to me when i was half asleep
don’t remember the words but i know what you mean
i wonder if i kissed you more than anyone else did
i think you know the words i traced on your skin
i think i heard you whisper them once but i didn’t ask
i saw how you looked at me because i was looking back
i kissed your back when you were wrong
you took running back up and said you’re gonna get strong
my uber driver drives me home like you used to
and i’m drunk in the backseat wishing i was up front with you
you talked to me when i was half asleep
maybe you knew that i was pretending
what is
the next thing?
eat it up
dominate / press down / shake together
repurpose / upcycle
were years behind this woman
who saw banks in coffee tins
and toilet paper in phone books
the fastest on slow fashion
who saved ripped out zippers
for 4H skirts, old panty hose
tie up gladiolus, fallen
what is
the next thing?
wear it out
old boot given to the son,
then the son, then the daughter
then dipped in gold and placed
on the piano
to be worshiped
what is
the next thing?
do without
a sock without a match
turned into a duster, a buffer,
a puppet. Lord no not a puppet,
we have to
what is
the next thing?
Tiny drops of tea
spill quietly
from my healing mouth
parched with drought
I try to sip carefully
unsuccessfully
after my frenectomy
A gallon sized container
nestled strong roots and fanning vines.
Planted, they’ll climb cedar
posts placed so. Perhaps
they’ll bloom before climbing the peak.
Then call humming birds.
Razed, dilipated, erased, GONE–
The old home place, grandpa’s–SILENT.
Hungering for a trace of him
Who taught me to hoe, tell stories
En sync to the rhythm of the hoe stickes,
Only a deep, empty ache smothered my heart.
There She stood!
Tall, angler in the brilliant summer sun
Drooping with fresh pears to mellow
In autumn’s coolness–
.
She remembered–invited me to come
Taste of her coarse grainy fruit much like
Pa who planted her over a hundered years ago.
A gregarious man
A big hearted man
A laid low man
A easy to love man
Lost it the day he was born
It?: brain cells all out of line
It?: acumen agility ability
Understanding being silly
But kept his stamina his love his senses
Twenty twenty pitch perfect articulate
Sings a song of sixpence, tells a dirty joke
Laughs out loud with a beer joint smile
He’s six two but wait, when he was four
Took a hit for a family of twelve
Was the only one to get polio
Nineteen and fifty seven
A gregarious man
A big hearted man
A laid low man
A easy man to love
FIRST of the trumpeting smokescreens
playing shibari with tarp-smocked,
knock-kneed cinderblocks
just on the edge of the pond
they’d whilom tilled to furnish a ball field,
cigarette
number three remembering
Haymarket fires and Zenith’s young Elmer Gantry
and everything gay and gray and vaguely
grim as deciduous misery—
wan reek of some somebody prodding
a friable pile of smoldering diapers,
blasphemous plastic picked
to a licorice snakeskin
echoing crepitant bends
of the treacly Fremont sucked
to a spluttering smudge,
like tar slung salving and suturing
bruised macadam,
the gangrenous ache of congealing
asphalt
scored with a viper’s tongue,
these scowling staves
that grass seed
violently
elbows, throbbing
a torpid heart
against
glowering paddocks of
tantalum packed like
cackling pallets
exhumed from a ruinous Walmart’s spleen,
left stacked
like snickering sedges dissembling
cityscapes, sulkily
greige as a sand flea
cramped in a surf-licked keep—
some sucked-in skull and its teething
crenellate laurels slopped down a
shrunken scowl—left reading
for rent.
Millie saw blood on the concrete,
called it a rorschach,
took it for lunch at Christie’s,
told old Rum Tum Thomathon Hoving,
pale as the Washington Obelisk
cocked above bickersome bog scum,
Say, it looks a bit like Plato, now, doesn’t it?
Plato cringed on the fringe of the finicky Lethe,
wormed beneath Rose and Vine St.,
shouldered the carcass of Donald Judd
as a whale as stale and pale as drug-smuggled horse cum,
dragged him up-over Mulberry Hill and the
gutters of Elm Tree, muttering
then and again
and again,
Is this what you meant by
‘The winter is bleak.’
‘If somebody says it’s art, it’s art.’
‘Most art is fragile
and some should be placed
and never moved
away.’—
To think of it…,
froze before a disparaged lawn
and the bones of a cankerous yew tree,
shuddering shotguns slopped all
pyrrole orange and
phthalo green and
quinacridone rose,
each sold for a Swiss-cheesed shipping container
some huckster’d stuffed with but butter-soft shillings
grown greener than gorse-eaten horse shit
clabbering oat milk
set out to pasture,
squeezed— and
then,
possessed with the devil’s mischief,
sowed sole-first this soulless hull of a shaper
to preen as an emulous stand of rebar,
mocking the knock-kneed trees and eaves,
and screamed,
through whistling teeth,
I claim this land for Ancient Greece!
and though it recoiled and swelled against
canted brick
at the cantering clip of an Arabic
palfrey whipped with a chortling surge of obsidian
frothed to pahoehoe,
nobody seems to recall having heard it—
Plato discovered a squealing Expo.
Studio Apartment,
$900, (water, gas, and sewage incl.)
Donald uncaps his pen
and tries to remember,
with bleating brow,
the soul of a circle,
the shape of the Nao Victoria’s
prow impressed against curdling maps;
and somebody, elsewhere,
alien, scrapes an illumining
dollop of char they’d chipped
from a split and glistening joist
across wrinkling concrete, echoing
ginkgo leaves and the skirts of those
Balinese dancers prancing, tracing
a wild bequest of steps
and gestures churned
from an ancient trance.
