The proposed book title is so hilarious
I ask if I can use it in a poem
We had just finished sharing all we had —
bread and cheese, ideas, flower seeds,
munched on arugula from her garden
No, she says
Too many things have been taken from me
Innocence, love, comfort, trust
Nonetheless her garden blooms wildly
I wonder where she finds it, her tender determination
The day my bride arrives
Like Cassius Clay
Much potential and without religion
What do you have that you did not receive?
(after the 1943 painting “Refugee Thanksgiving,” by Norman Rockwell)
She has not been killed,
or otherwise bodily injured,
in the fleeing from her home,
finding shelter and freedom
elsewhere, behind the other line.
She is tired, hungry,
cold and frightened,
and her young soul
knows just enough
to say, “These will hurt
as long as you remember.”
Still, seated in a broken church,
she is old enough to keep faith
for better days, for years full
with love, and grace, and joy.
And so she folds her hands,
says an honest prayer of thanks
for the simple meal she received,
the over large, used, warm coat,
both from a stranger, without asking.
I’m here again,
sitting in the living room,
lamplight yellow,
scratching places
unmentionable.
I would tell you to kiss my ass
if the game were less real.
I would tell you to eat worms
if the garden wears turned and planted.
I would tell you I love you
if you looked at me again.
But you don’t look at me
and I fold in half,
paper doll holding hands with myself.
Clarity is buoyant in the dark.
I smell good weather stretching her palm
to hold a sun certain to rise.
Today is the deadline.
Be it life or death, my heart is light.
this sterling antenna entwined with a dangling limb,
gruff scratch of a car crash, rapt
with a gnashing yowl,
this
sour wassailing lascivious cats distend
across scuffled macadam and stuttering
street lamps strewn through the hedgerows
silvery peels of expended smelt
and a glowering
vision of Christ displaced
amidst scowling
gates dissembling rusting antlers—
whereby a
toddler hums
with a dimpled discretion
those first few bars of Dmitri’s Babi Yar,
and the juniper shrub
that a barrister’d twisted,
tickling verdigrised teeth of a stunted fence,
recalls its morning’s
surly stirrup of starlings
stringing their songs along groggily sprawling sycamores,
moths among bristling pin oaks,
the sky scrubbed red as a raucous knee
(attempting
to trace
the shape of some semblance of
awe,
that’s colored this way or
no—
transcribing from groaning
bones of a vibraphone
something akin to a feeling tone filliped
by this or that,
a coloratura of cramp bark berries,
those stammering gods amongst fence slats,
rippling,
riffling,
pulse of a dulcet bell—
black eye like a bulging knot hole bunging,
percussing, say, shuffling shifting sands,
this lustrous seam amid buckling concrete,
simpering veins of a hand outstretched about
restive ebony shucked from a stock or those
thwarted horns refined to these twiddling keys
that virginal feelers,
small as a glistening vole
or swoln to a possum’s paunch
caught cracked across staticky roadsides, evermore
grope for).
In the new apartment, living alone for the first time
in years, you want to start fresh with the walls,
so you strip off the faded old wallpaper,
only to find another layer beneath,
another under that, & one more
for good measure.
It’s like peeling an onion one layer at a time
and slicing it into rings, each cut
of the knife releasing a spray
that stings your eyes.
It’s like taking off your coat, then your shirt & jeans,
then your underwear & socks, then your
skin, standing there like nothing
but meat & bone.
It’s like with each layer of wallpaper you pull away
another decade of your life, your forties & thirties,
your twenties & teens, & by the end you’re a kid
in the schoolyard playing marbles
in the dirt, waiting for someone
to walk by.
