Posts for June 28, 2023 (page 7)

If it must be
a game, let it be

my will against yours–
eye to eye, all hands on deck

shifting, positioning, sensing
energy beyond the physical

in this reciprocitous
exchange of desires.

When I was in third grade, I was in my first play:
The Flower Town Ball.

We were all cast as different flowers with suitable
colorful personalities. After reading

out the cast list, my teacher realized she forgot
to give me a part. “Oh no!” she cried.

“There is another flower for you.”
She scrambled through her mental garden.

I’m not sure what I said but I know
I blushed. I remember the heat as it filled me.

My head drooping. Color deepening.
Arms wilting over a hungry heart.

Boxes make pictures
arranged by calloused fingers
attached to no one.

I am…

I am dismantled debris – scattered pieces of waste and remains flung carelessly from the point of generation.

I am the sludge of ancestorial drosses –  filtered scum leftover and encapsulated within my occluded spaces.

I am ambient tortured tones – cleverly shimmering before one’s ear until cry of the cornered hare explodes unstable.

I am off-gassing vapor – transitory bubbling of diffused believes, misunderstandings, and bias from past generational exposures.

I am salvaged components – dispositioned towards chipping away thing superfluous to breath within the limited headspace.

I am an intermittent vacuum – appearing and disappearing, traversed by compressional waves of rarefaction; fragmentarily exhausted.  

I am imperfectly human.

V: Oh, over there, way to the west over the lake, those clouds. Looks like horses with their  
    tails flying.
Y: Must be some fast air up there and warm from baking under the sun all day. Looks pretty        
     unstable. Tonight when it cools off it’ll find its boundaries and create a stasis. By  
     morning, all that water will come down and we’ll have fog in the low fields.
     ‘Cold and water go down, warm and air rise up,’ That’s so old and so true it’s probably
     from the Iroquois.
V: Why don’t they just catch the weather channel.
Y: That’s just uncouth, Veronica. Our old timers might say the same thing but with different
    imagery, like this: ‘Grampa’s bones hurt, wet acomin’, but when you smell the corner, air’s
    arisin’.’
V,  A little green in the gills: The corner? Smell?
Y: Yea, over where the dog sleeps or where the gunney sack was laying all these years
     under the steamer trunk for the mice to hide. But that fish scale looking cloud over there
     to the south; its message is: ‘Mackerel sky, wet turns dry; mackerel sky, dry turns  wet.’
V: Poof, that’s just trying to have it all both ways at once.
Y: It’s just a saying, means a change is coming. But the more esoteric crowd would say:
    ‘Mackerel sky, speaking and listening, same as a leaf.’
V: What, who made that up; anachronistic, an abaration even, numbingly stupid.
Y: It’s similar to the idea that air and water communicate; speak and listen to each other,
    react to each other. Also that clouds and trees take the same shape. They are two
    manifestations of nature of the same architype.
V: Got to be an anomaly, Yolanda, for sure.
Y: My dear, you are locked into a materialist myopia, open yourself finally in your old age.
     Things can be remembered and understood by naming them. You know about
     pneumonic tricks and use them all the time. The ancients paid attention and named
     what they saw, it was: ‘Oh yea, I’ve seen this before, Grandma’s cranky or we’re all
     feeling boyant today.’ They looked for patterns. They developed organs of perception,
     antennae. When nature sighs they know it and give it names. A ring around the moon,
     old wounds, all give hints. When the mouton clouds or the muma grist are shaped    
     like sheep’s udders with a stormy nipple and they’re active, then it’s: ‘When sheep fight
     together then beware of stormy weather.’ All this was observed at the speed of a tree
     growing. Some of those ancients could watch glass slump, could swim inside of rocks.
     They were connected to the great mother. ‘Buttermilk sky is a lowering sky.’ That’s a
     scientific fact.
V: Just a whim.
Y: No. Right now is the right time to pay attention. All of nature is calling upon us to
    understand. My old great aunt said: ‘Pray at the pump before you put in the gas.’ She was
    fully conscious of how our daily doings connect to nature. She’d say: ‘Lighting the candle,
    money in the bank, setting the table, gas in the tank.’ She wanted to remember that these
    mundane things carry gteat weight.
V: I’m chastened.
    Now Yolanda rolls over on the couch and wraps Veronica in her arms, laughing.
Y: They’d also say: ‘When the red bird poops red and the blue nird poops blue then the
     berries are ripe on the vine and dinner is on you.’
V: That can’t possibly be true, now you’re pulling my chain.
     She throws a pillow. Says: And I’ve heard ’em say: ‘If the stove glows hot like a cracklin
     rose, be nice to her.’ Look out here come an Alberta clipper. She jumps on Yolanda and
     starts smacking her with the pillow.

The three of take our walk in the cemetery          
          chatting about burials, cremation, headstones
Always the educator, one says she desires               
                a monument of historical columns                  
                 Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian      
     though her family graveyard is far from civilization.
One says her husband will be wrapped               
               in a shroud, has pre-paid
           his green burial on a friend’s horse farm.
She plans only to continue
            her rigorous exercise routine.   I joke
              that like my mother, she expects
                             never to die.
I wish my ashes to be scattered secretly
         within my favorite nature sanctuary, a leafy celebration
            where friends are to recall my good fortune
         at having lived so long following my transplant.

                        Later, a jolt

  Some day there will be only two of us walking

                                      And then one  

                                     And then none  

Find myself on the verge this morning
Of what fully I am not sure
But most definitely on the cusp 
    Of these watery eyes boiling over
            Into full release…
                     But if I succumb to their pressure…

I loved how she grinned,

upon the arrival of pancakes with ricotta and lemon

I ordered the same and I’ll never forget the taste of them

funny how you learn to love them with a fixation,

the people, the things, and the places connected with the one you loved by association

I can not unhear the muse
whose whisper has become
a banshee wailing unbearably close to my ear.   
She’ll not be ignored,
standing in the doorway with hands on hips,
hopscotching though the kitchen where my coffee sits.
At night she fills my head with
cymbals and untuned strings.
It is the nightmare music of my dreams.
Dawn brings no silence.
Even the summer breeze wrecks her hair
as it straps birds to trees and they cry out.
If I write this poem – she screams –
WRITE ME! WRITE ME!
Will the pieces of the sky stop falling?

Braking behind a big beat-up box truck
that’s stopped by a garbage can 
someone has parked 
at the edge of their driveway,
I recognize the skewed
“SL” spray painted largely
on the side of the truck
as the initials of
Shiny Lee
who people in the county pay
$30 a month
to pick up their trash,
but there’s something else
about “SL”
that makes my brain hiccough
a few times
until I get it:

That’s Me

I am SL

I am Shiny.