An alien moon rises large
on the horizon beyond trees
as thin as strands of memory.
Other days, I could perhaps
explain, finding the proper words.
Today, the answers you seek
to the journalist’s questions
insist on eluding my tongue.
All I can conjure is the barest
glimpse of you among the leaves.
(after an untitled image by Bill Thorburn)
the jubilation
from impromptu,
as you strike in poses
I’m drawn to,
as though Van Gogh had drawn you
How do you cope
when your
body is on fire
and it won’t be
put out
for weeks?
I wake up exhausted
in the mornings.
Pain wakes me up
in the middle of the night.
Car trips over an hour
are pure hell.
There is no discrete way
to ice one’s hemorrhoid
at work
(so I don’t).
My concentration is shot.
I pretend to work.
I stop writing.
I drop all my major projects:
personal, spiritual, career,
all of it.
Some days
the ice packs
and the ointment
help.
Some days they don’t.
I don’t feel human.
I don’t feel real.
I don’t feel seen.
I feel abandoned.
I am waiting to pick my life up
again
where I left it months ago.
I resent living in this much pain.
I resent living
a life on hold.
the trip imminent
time to share the road map. Mom,
that’s a lot of rocks.
Where music flows
over 200 year old sidewalks,
slick slates broken
under thousands of feet.
There’s a word never said
that invites ghosts
who carry me out
to the center of Lake Ponchartrain
where I can stand
head and shoulders deep
within the soft currents
until finding the sea
at last light of day.
Time is cruel. It carries me
back – just when I’d forgotten
that things end
and so seldom return,
flowing in long sliding rhythms
like the beat of drums,
pounding below the surface.
Peering out my backyard plain beige sticks stand
6 feet tall smooshed together forming a fence. I laugh.
Miss Kemp’s fourth grade art class dances in my head.
Creamsicles and Fudgesicles drip down my sticky hand.
Other fences aren’t as tall. Popsicle fence confines a
rambunctious Labradoodle that jumped the shorter one.
His childish glee contained now by hints of youth.
I’ll trade 10 thousand joys to replace the
deeper, familiar regrets:
Flowers blooming like
Firecrackers in the summer sky
Brightest yellows, crisp green
Warm oranges, exotic pinks
A dizzying arrary of colors
As if Monet had captured the scene
The atmospheric, vivid tones
Sweeping across the field
As were a canvas awashed with paint
Fields of lavender moving with the breeze
A distant sea of purple
It’s scent carried by the winds
The last of the dandelion puffs
Standing tall before bursting
Into the yellow bits of sunshine
Like confetti on the hills
Mulberry trees aross paths
Splats of juicy purple
Small treats for squirrels and birds
All of us enjoying the beauty here
bass beats
in the night my neighbor
alone in her car
ah, first fireflies…
a wild party
across the street
rolling
toward solstice loving
the light
have to break myself down with breath, death by lung, in order to leave a shell to swell with the Ohr Ein Sof, the Nur and Nar, the prima materia of burning hot angelic plasma, call it what you want dear Kali, dear Christ—I call it What Waits, I call it Space Pudding, I call it God Dust, and I have to kill the bear and babe and serpent and stallion inside me to make room for a lighthouse that spans my kitchen and backyard and all things.
