Something Small
Gentle as the flap of a butterfly wing
Small sparks spreading
The touch of a lifetime
Foreward: This poem is meant to communicate back and forth with the source poem. To contrast it in ways, and to mirror it in others. I have spoken with Carolyn and she agreed I should post her poem in its entirety (and gave me permission to do so). The messages, clearly, are intended differently. Think of it as a mirror through which to compare, contrast, complicate the individual readings of each. I HIGHLY suggest you order her book posthaste; it is literal genius in its endless layers, intended and otherwise (and she would point to the external genius as muse). All italicized words are hers. Borrowed or appropriated (with permission). Expect a few more epigraphs or responses this month. I include the link to her author website and Shadelandpress (where you can order) at the bottom of this post:
IV.
“I reach for you with hands that hold
what isn’t there—your phantom curves
a silhouette in which you glow—
your eyes are soft, your throat exposed.
We make believe. We make belief
of murmured need and hungry reach.
I trace your waist, the sketch a blur
of tangled truths—you gasp against
my view of you, the love that holds
you near yourself. The effort was
a battlefield, but now, just sky—
a light swept sea. And here we are.
You come to me like breaking dawn.
You know—I’ve loved you—all along.”
– Carolyn Grace, from Grenadine and Other Love Affairs; Invariance
Exposed
I message you with words that hide the truths
I must not say—your read receipts
realities removed—the closure closed,
a vulnerable that never was revealed.
I make believe. I make belief (for two)
& fashion what I thought impassioned touch
from lingering, backseat moments, like a shrine
to build a scaffold silhouette; you buck
against my view of you, a love that forced
you from yourself. The effort is
an empty battlefield, both blood & crow
& darkened sea. & there we are:
you go from me, pale gloaming in my heart;
you know—you knew—I loved you from the start.
https://www.carolyngraceauthor.com
https://smpbooks.com/product/grenadine-and-other-love-affairs/
Two children, and too many
Words to describe us. Human dictionaries
That wore our hearts on our sleeves. Diagnosis:
Adolescence. [REDACTED]. Things we don’t talk about
Any more. What healed you, friend,
Is the same flame that made scars
Of me. I think of us every drive up,
Drive down back to where we began-
Cherry limeade slushy and my hair
In pigtails, we were too old
For this. These are memories I have chosen
To forget. Today you are hungover
And the phone line is silent, but I know
You are still waiting for me, not much
Older, but so close I can almost hear you.
I can almost hear you
In the tall grasses
Or in the pouring rain on the brick outside
But I am dry, and you still don’t
Understand why I had to go.
This is not a letter
Of goodbye.
The streetlights almost make it seem like there’s still a bit of daylight left.
They give off that eerie glow of the sun refusing to go all the way down.
I don’t mind,
it makes me feel like I’m getting home earlier than I am.
I’m feeling shy tonight.
I wanted to stay home tonight
but I’m a responsible employee or whatever.
How people have the audacity to stay up to an hour after closing is beyond me.
I want to say thankfully they only stayed thirty after tonight
but I’m not thankful.
The moment we met we knew
we came covered with soot, sediment.
History. Like attracts like- were are old books of curiosity
with worn edges, artifacts containing
pressed wildflowers and recipes-
mixtures of grimoire and survival guide.
Two years later, during interviews and introductions, I’ll say
that first the timing wasn’t right- but here
I am, more than a thousand miles from Berea because that’s
where I found my treasure map. No one will rush there,
looking for their own- it’s too late.
Even if they conquer time travel and
beat me to the door.
We all have our tale of woe. A man with Jersey plates, who
believes in keeping plans and sticking to one’s word
sleeps beside me, a hundred hours of campfires
burned to ash now, five-thousand hours
or more to go. And the spines of our lives
propped together, the new entries clean, unknown.
were you expecting
a soul everted
in wet and indelicate spectacle,
pitched to the hunch of a pensive gorgon
milking of braided snakes some
sin-colored custard furnishing
quiche Lorraine and a bedpan
brimming with
fresh limoncello
and sullen bullion bobbing
as powdery marrow expelled from a blistering spit valve— hell,
no more than a crumbling clod
that the Acheron spat across scuttling Cygnus;
this caulk-clotted caul you’ve unclasped
from a blasted chin,
like sap punched fresh from a pin oak, or honeydew
tear streaks swoln ‘long louring sheaves,
unraveling greaves and gorgets
pressed from lascivious spittle and splintering limbs
you’ve pinched to dissemble the hull of some flaking friend
or an echo of what you’ve wished you’d
been,
since baffling birth throes thrust you
forth or twain,
but an instrument blunted,
dulled, fordid, rebuffed
by a slavering autoclave,
or what army of pie-eyed dry heaves arguing
what’s to save
from a factory fire—
but woebegone suet some listing servant seized
and muddled with crusted blood to but muster
a lipstick, let’s dub Dog-Dick Pink,
or the cellulite sloughed and splayed
and set in some simpering splint
you’d mount upon yawning panes
of a perfectly crystal acrylic,
as eyes and eyeteeth preen from a beach house
shuttered for fear of a gaily gimping cloud,
a shrew skull strangely marooned on a sand dune,
Innisfree crudely assembled in driftwood,
husks of plastic plug-ins that stammering hermit crabs
sleepily drag across uniform crumbs
(wan leavings of moments proportioned in
perfect homogeny squeezed through a spluttering
sandglass fixed in a bristling fit of Lamaze)
to inscribe this callused trouvaille she’d
stripped from the bones of a musty Redbook
left by a ticklish boobook mystic
threading its feathers through floundering spandex; why
you’d muttered of spiderwebs and small eft-like things,
of course, and debrided the storm-shod sea to a
little mess of whelks and stumbling sanderlings,
dubbed your husband Bill or Volition or something,
swaddled the sun in a splintering footprint,
said you’d abandoned the beach to the gulls and fleas,
and the tide dare suckle your knees now,
sulkily seeking a simple salve for its raddling lesions
laced like a scabbing tartan—
everything evermore marching
for your favor,
alley cats laying their teeth on disgusting streets,
the cottonwoods hobbling bothersome pothers of pollen,
ablating their progenies,
blue-footed chickens surrendering eggs and meat
and whatever you need, yet what is it
you must stubbornly savor, why
weren’t you just jazzed to still be breathing,
beating your heart to a dicky alarm clock,
tempering shins and chins to a spotless steel,
the winch of your Peloton reeling still,
and still, the stillborn dreams suspended,
clenched in a shunted drum of relish,
in dust disturbing the gut of a Dyson—
we’re a twisted bitch, now, aren’t we?
less than a gallic bulldog stricken with crippling bloat—!
as the Thames entwines with the Cuyahoga,
stoked by a feral film, by the fetid fumes
of a star expressing its restive pulse,
pinned up in a lavishly tidied aside,
our star left
pressed as a anal sac incensed and
pinched by an overwrought mother of
pugs whose sons and grandsons swell, kvelled
for their grass-wrought rashes,
lavished with passion fruit
smugly
groped to a pus-colored cold cream; she,
who slavers her listless lawn, like shriveling lime pulp
(like chapped lips of that wicked witch’s clittoris),
some six stints a night in the shadows
of Sugarloaf Mountain, left of Socorro,
south of the crackling Acheron; quivers
of peaky tears resolved to salve what
creak in what’s left of the bed of the
Rio Grande, like crepitant snakeskin
claiming its stake amongst rambling canyons,
broken crayons and crowns bid
pale as young Charon’s buskins
buttered in mud and blood and a dog knows
what of eternity’s worming
struts—
(you told me the house was shaking)
an intrusion of roaches shucked
and stuck above sticky scabbards dissembling
fan blades;
griseous skin upended, penned
in the plastic paunch of a nauseous dyson,
plump as the dust that buckles a puckering rug
to remind us of sumptuous boils and spoils in-
terred in the flanks of a cankered arroyo;
and silverfish squeakily scouring snickering frames
to glare as a silvered incisor, a slithering slug
kept safe in a shapeless smile, replacing
what oddly discolored in death, reminding
the moon that it never was full enough,
nary so thin you’d demur to refuse
to see it,
to feel it,
suppling— there.
and, needless to say,
I’ve miscarried
your wicked addendum,
some blue Narcissus gargling saccharine curds
of impervious throatsong, rooked from a broken bird
arraigned by a pallet of green-cheeked Johns and Georges
wove in an ornery gorse of gilded newsprint, suckling
succorous marrow from barnacled sacra,
settling stakes amongst brawling gods
or coldly muttering mothers, and
shaking a hollowed and wallowing limb gone limp,
to lavish this half-chewn grave
endeared with damp daffodils
woven of modal and grosgrain,
ouroboros unbroken, enthralled with the rambling
Ganges licked to invidious flame—
you’ll speak that psalm
you’ve stole from the gusseted
sugarfoot woodchuck shaman,
bright as a betta fish ripping its own reflections
rawed along walls of this motley, fish-eyed urn,
which betta fish churn and spurn borne baying
like listless querns fatigued from yet trying
to squeeze from a cabochon succulent nutmeat pink
as some prised blue-ribbon pudendum;
madlibbing elegies hinged on a whingeing pulse
once burnished the amber of bittersweet, exultations
on the lam, some dubious eulogy uttering only once
of a moment one simply couldn’t just stand to
simply try to
stand
for
what?! It’s a letter to,
what does it matter?!
Amid daffodil’d dewdrops darning a dammed-up crick,
I note your dismissive reflection.
Arrested, mortified, boisterous, gilt,
God speed you, Mame,
grand plinth of the splintering kilter,
bane of what idling gods could scarcely tame
with a careless tare
perversely afflicting a feather.
Night-night, now. Sweetest dreams. I’ll see you
later.
Mame’s rebuttal
(assaying just
what she’d sworn
was a surefire cure
for the scurvy)
Oranges, once so rare
to the Dobe Ju /hoan,
they became their word
for the female
orgasm—
and here, I
force them
down a cavorting
throat
in an effort to
leave the tongue
untouched—
for the vitamins, mind you.
As I begin to clean out your room I see the tarot cards gently placed on your nightstand.
Edges dog-eared and browned from back of house fingers.
Discolored from post-shifts filled with swishers and stolen scotch, I see you counting your tips, throwing pennies to the floor in disgust.
I will find them under your bed later.
Thumbing through the arcana I summon what remains of your DNA through my fingers. The cards are worn, bending into arches like broken backs.
I would dream of saving you. Spinning my sorrow into silken threads I’d stitch the cavity in your head and in my heart over and over.
I once tried to convince you that you were adopted. The kind of mean joke that older siblings play. You ran to our mother, your unruly eyebrows furrowed as she assured you that you were one of us.
But I knew the truth.
That you were otherworldly.
A gift, left in our charge, precious and fragile and temporary.
You were magic, and in-between…part earth and part stars.
This place didn’t love you like I did, its isolation, its $7.25 before taxes, its racist bar patrons who question your right to be in this country while you blankly ask for THEIR IDs, its military that fractured your spirit, its hustle and grind.
Did you turn to these cards for clarity?
Did they reveal who you really are? An extraterrestrial entity, stopping off in this midwestern purgatory to bless us with your beautiful lashes and endless sense of style.
Did you turn to them for instructions for how to go home?
I place the tarot cards in my purse in their own compartment. They will make their final home on my altar, next to your photo and favorite pocket watch.
I will do this, after I clean out your room.
I miss her
She would have been 103 today
Wrinkled hands could shave a tater
or apple in one long, curly strip
a skill born of necessity
pure Appalachian art
Never idle hands could whip
up perfect, scrumptious biscuits to go
with homemade, mouth-watering apple butter
a perpetual staple on the table
Strong calves could sit on hunkers
‘til the cows came home
and then some
like I’ve never known
haunches shaped by hard work
incessant grind
A green thumb could grow gobs
Hazel eyes would glow like sunshine
when her folks came to visit
kitchen table talk with a cup o’ joe
instant decaf Sanka for her
always listening more than speaking
A picture of patience
having raised nine children
and a spouse full of ‘shine
Endurance to the nines
Family was everything
A little woman with giant courage
A rock with a soft center
I miss her
