Posts for June 13, 2025 (page 8)

Be the net, not the nest, analyst advice for an attached mother.
The dream is of an icy hill we are climbing in a car driven by the older
child. But the trouble is with the younger, I tell Doctor C. Yes, and
you’re being shown by the other. I don’t make it across when I try
to jump from glacier to glacier; because I land in dangerously cold water
we must turn back. Sorry to disappoint my son. My sons. Divorce
the ex again, I am told. I think perhaps it is time to stop demanding
investigations like I am some powerless Democratic senator.
All I’ve tried to be is democratic. Power in the people. The news
was depressing, so I just stopped driving. Nesting is a constant
tending, the thing you do before the baby comes. To be a net
is to hold something and wait for the baby bird to fall into it.

Living far from my
family on holidays
chokes my insides more
than I dreamed till it happened
that  particular birthday. 

At sixteen,

                             A Story
  
        As you read this silent work,
        imagine you are young,
        you decide what age.

        Imagine it to be in rural,
        you decide the state and county,
        and it is hot inside your home.

        Image your neighbor invites,
        you choose the number of community
        members to his house.

        Imagine that he has hung a white sheet
        on the wall of his white farmhouse
        and has chairs in rows for the audience.

        You have come to watch a movie.
        It is the silent film:
        The Great Train Robbery.

        Imagine there is no pianist,
        theater organist, or orchestra
        to play music.

        Think of it as your first movie–
        ever, and you are excited.
        You must be excited.

        When the steam powered train comes,
        picture the smoke rising
        and trailing behind it.

        Imagine a big man,
        you picture him,
        on a white stallion.

        He rides up, unseen,
        he is drunk, you figure how
        you know that…

        He pulls out his pistol,
        and shoots the robber
        on the screen.

        The movie is stopped.
        The man has never seen a movie before.
        He says he is on his way

        to the Sin Lot,
        and you are left
        to figure out why.

I am no Daisy Johnson,

is that cranky old man
brandishing his cliched cane
his curse-blasting ambience                                     
suspendered pants riding his ribs
hair a white brushfire
yammering over his precious lawn                                          
when all you want to do                      
is lie on the healing green
in the quixotic rain
swoon the hymning birds                         
and let your bones soak
sweet into the deep earth                                                 

                                                        For that rainy part of Pat Owen  

Glass of glowing fig
shaped splendor… purples
yellows, blues and blended
greens stretching oblong
& vasing gallons of air:
A Tiffany style trap of
Art against Nature.

Beyond, the Belle Epoque begins,
covered in paper flowers
and cigarette girls sprung
from the corpses of forgotten
Franco-Prussians:
A rebirth, a renaissance,
A respite before Les Fleurs
Du Mal from unmarked
graves and grass trampled
by infantry squares.

Lessons learned from war
dispersed by good food & drink
destined for repetition.

or  We Have No Knowledge of Such a World

A Winter Wren sustained on last summer’s snowmelt
lends his voice to our fence to measure days’ ends
and starts. In order still bound to sunlight’s lost edge,
he calls, cries, takes his post, cries out again, descends;
and how are both still here–the wren who felt
wind’s last breath spin through man’s junkyard,
saw before his very eyes, and mine, assemblage
of all our scattering parts into that damn jet engine,

fusualage, wings, emergency exit, tray table?
No room for envy in birdsong. His psalm able,
beak sharp (one clean pull ‘cross one mountaintop),
beckons godspeed, and echoing sentient crystals, says:
A thousand years to complete one good thought?
no big deal given these endless dies days.