Posts for June 12, 2024 (page 3)

we had stolen a few more days,
loving on borrowed time,
crying,
dancing,
pushing ourselves to stay awake
in case this was the last night.

then this morning.
the last kiss.
the last goodbye.
for me it was the cat.
for you, the lock on the door.
you say you can’t get back in.
i say i’ll always let you in.
you laugh.
i mean it.

i’ll sit passively in traffic,
it will not matter,
i’ll have no one to come home to.
when i lay in our bed
you will not be there to hold me.
and it will go on this way
for days and days and days.

bye, baby.

All the girls had the same expression
as Phil Ochs played in coffee houses,
at times hidden in church basements,
seal of the confessional.
The girls sat mesmerized by the lilting
of his voice, the charm of his style,
the message of his songs piercing hearts with arrows.
Sitting in rows of folding chairs,
chipped paint crusting the carpet,
they coveted every word he pierced with
rhythmic justice and pain.
The troubadour that gave us
a conscience and embraced us
with lyrical change, not measured by time
or grace.

       “Sit by my side, come as close as the air
        Share in a memory of gray
        And wander in my words
        Dream about the pictures that I play
        Of changes.”  Phil Ochs        

If there is another lifetime,
I will swim to you—across my soul,
and with every breath of starlight
I will know you are carrying
the moon on your back, pulling
me ashore, past the swaying
tide of heaven’s gate. 

the scissors’ eyes 
accuse me 
whenever I open their drawer

I took them
without asking permission
when I moved from our still house

not because I wanted this dark memento
of his mother slipping them through his stitches
or of him trimming his winter beard

maybe a little because 
I admired 
their surgical steel practicality

but mainly because 
no one was left
to ask

1. And when she doesn’t ask for a diagnosis
of her sheepbrain, draw a diagram of it with all the
edges hued in muddy gray, tell her she’s gonna get so
fat & fit for slaughter, her meaty heart will leak into a
skeleton fruit ripe enough to gnaw on, her minuscule
girlego so tasty it gives cataracts, makes the unsatiable
go baa & blind on her bone marrow
2. she so desperately desires a
herding                                 keen for a dissection of her
gray watered encephalon               she wants to
            be led        by the neck into limbo     lose her lithe face
to a gust of desolate didactic hopeless dreams
3.                                                            watch her walk into
her own shadow & get caught in the unearthed
darkness unfelting from it, she knows nonsense yet
memorized the back of her sheephands                 its
warm fur smoking, so much easier to digest her
rolled up into something suspended & breezy
                     she’s so painless to stomach
                     in small airy sheep doses,
                    count her vapor to sleep,`
                    watch her baa into a lull
                    filled daze of pretty little
                    euphemisms                     bleating
for her mother’s scent bloodless & bound to a
skeletal grave                bones bleached for silver-
ware                               she memorized the back of
her sheephand because it is in constant mourning
her human mother                                             not
                            dead but ghosting out her cuticles
4.  she was groomed by her infantile father’s
psyche       taught to herd it into her mournful fingers
cradle the misunderstood trauma Narcissus left for
feed                         she’s been ingesting it so long her
innards sound like his laughter belching from her
trachea
5. graphite her with her sheepskin shedding
into a fleshed-out mass of fur let her name it girl
let her herd it into her tiny sheepheart             she’s never
owned anything but weightlessness & lungs primed
to scream

menthol scent, camphor,
Siberian fir oil;
double barrel sneeze!

That green heron we watched
preening in the top of the sweet gum

was the best part of my day.
The way your excitement rushed out,

words tumbling over themselves
as you spotted it

just like when you were learning to speak
and couldn’t push sounds out quick enough

to keep up with delight, your body quaking
as you narrated its movements.

Its neck extending periodically,
then tucking back under its wing,

feathers a shadow
ruffled against the indigo sky.

And us, on the ground joined in awe until
it sprang from the branch and was gone.

Times over there seemed oddly questionable
Like a handshake of a deal
Muffled sounds and hazy interactions
Locked in rooms
With bright blonde hair, velvet overalls
And a loud presence
I saw no danger in my normal
Blazing through the kitchen hallway on a big wheel
I found outside
She’s a firecracker
She’s ornery
I bet I know where she gets that from
Running into cabinetry and making
Old people laugh while stirring soup
Zoom zoom
Where’s your shirt?
Where’s your shoes? 
What’s in your hair?
All these carpet burns

he could tell which flower would bloom first
in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter
but he could still tell
to explain, let’s go back in time
before we lost the wrinkled quiet man
my father, dad, or to most, brother Fred
can’t rightly tell when it started, yet
we know it started with a potted gift
that he’d seen at my sister’s neighbor’s
a yellow night-blooming primrose
the magic flowers as he called them
(or maybe I dreamed he named them that)
anyway, he was in utter awe
not just cause they bloomed each evening
but that said blooms opened so quickly,
a breathtaking act of nature
as accomplished as any ballet
with the reckless speed of a TV show
a true blink and you’d miss it spectacle, so
once they’d spread around the house
he’d ask, what time is it, and if past eight
he’d head out to the porch
to get a bead on the impending blooms
each somewhat conical bud open a bit
to show protrusions of yellow, those
soon to be flowers wrapped in green casing
tongue-like tabs of a petal showing first
these he knew would be opening
he’d eyeball each one
see that one bulging a bit, almost ready
look at the base of that one
see where it’s starting to split, it might be
just might be first
that one over there, could be second
then this other one, he’d point
it’s split further, the casing ready to pop off
which would unveil tightly curled petals to
open right before our eyes
yep, that’ll be the first
and he was most always right
in truth, whether he was or not, well
those nights I was privileged
to witness the flower show with him
well, that was the real
magic

I’m trying to be through with things, to sign on / for the invisible.            
             —Kathleen Graber  

A new friend says our tears will water us deep. So I wave
another wand across the magic of my sadness  

and see what happens when we seek to grow
via drops of stubborn saline. My dad calls to check in.  

I’m a mystery he keeps trying to save. He says these
are the pains that never go away and sights  

instances of heartbreak fifty years distant. He says
sometimes the only way to move forward  

is to shelve it, so I imagine a familiar darkened corner
forever cluttered with our love. You once said  

you were keeping me locked in a barnacled room,
while I wrote us a reality that softened every keyhole.  

(It was never enough.) I write poems with a friend
who is deeply in love with her husband, but she still writes  

line after line of longing. She says on this shelf things decay
slowly and gifts me the line for a poem of my own.  

A poem that begins: night pinks the sky of another June
without you. I’m not yet sure what grows from this.