The tiger lilies
are in bloom.
A sea of orange
removes the gloom.
Golden marigolds
stand up right.
As a red rosebush
climbs to new heights.
A pink geranium
is in doubt.
The black-eyed Susans
will soon be out.
I spy a corkscrewed juniper
alone hugging itself.
When will the dahlias
begin to sprout?
The rain was good,
yes, indeed.
We need more
for the wildflower seed.
Have you heard the parable
about the two wolves battling
inside of us all?
The one that wins, they say,
is the one you feed.
But I have a pack of wolves
who have dug their den inside of me.
One is called My Body.
I feed her calories filled
with protein, fiber, and carbs
in just the right proportions–
I watch her prance and preen.
I feed her fat and sugar,
stroking her cravings as
I listen to her soft whines
of delight.
Another is called My Mind.
I feed it knowledge and
awareness, hard truths
to swallow and listen
to its stomach churn.
I feed it a cocktail of certainty
and rightness, and watch it
sway with eyes half shut.
And still another is called My Spirit.
I feed it music and poetry,
books and art. She feasts
with feral joy until her
fangs meet bone.
I feed her body and blood,
her eyes always filled
with wonder at the pretty
pieces of flesh.
Who wins the battle?
All of these wolves,
their wants foaming at the mouth.
I close my eyes, listening
to their unrestrained moans
and think, why not feed them all?
as i watch the evening’s shadows crescent
your face below the brim of your ballcap, blue
gaze fixed & focused, coltish
limbs growing infinitesimally
stronger & more balanced each day, listen
to the cheers of the crowd, your name
on strangers’ lips as you wind up
& release each steady pitch –
strike one!
two!
three! he’s out!
that i am the one who bestowed
it upon you, that your heart
& blood & bones
could have bloomed within my own
flawed & blemished body, that you
were once a tiny seed, some secret love
note penned & folded,
tucked away inside me.
for the birdsong
for the sunlight
for the touch of warmth on the curled ends of poppies and hound’s tail
she misses me but I no longer know what that means
nor I think does she
it is what we say like I love you or how is the weather there
the time away is more than the time together
it has been for quite a while now
the months piling up into years the counting stops
it is easier to simply live
to just call
out on a warm spring morning
I remember her face from before
was there a smile
can I hear a laugh
lost to the mists of reminiscence
perhaps like me
they were too heavy to pack out
the expression static with the concern once the breach was forged
a mother hooded in forgetting
the lapidary artist defends her
disco ball, the hiccupping spalls of
oyster shells and slug trails, glibly
commissioned by Franz Kline’s
cousin now twice removed
from the family trust or will: still
kicking the horse into
pablum, grass, and grist,
must I thus
seem so contemptibly kinked
to say the same small thing some
thousand louring times ’til somebody
shake me, saying it
back in but hardscrabble pig latin,
filling the knock-kneed white or the
black of the rorschached in-
cantation in, the
roads still cudding the
same four
tires square—un-
moved, reproved, un-
godly, and plotting out
doddering trots of a blood-
clotted endgame— (counter
melody)
clock-wise,
I’m
so busy
bent wondering
why my soles still itch
to pick out the pungent nigredo from
fallowing road tar, chockablock
borders contorting the
hull of the warbling
world into crep-
itant pitches in-
censing a bar
brawl’s diss-
onance; all
too sorely attuned to a chortling rock-
tumbler, teasing of gravel this endless
soap’s salve (shrill as a cross-eyed so-
prano’s empowered to whistle as moo-
n glow smoothed down lapis skies
or the bubbling thighs of a whale sprawl,
stoplight mirepoix sawing some torpid
chord, asea with just too many clenched keys de-
pressed),
to make much sense of Sibelius splintering
tones of a swan’s swoln breast bone buckling,
flipping the bird as the water-logged log stirs
round and
round, bald
tires un-
wound a-
round raveling mud in a
gutted attempt to grope
blood from a maxim that Rumi’s
acolyte’s
acolytes’
acolytes
passed as a conch-
kinked transcript of
sand-blasted sanskrit a
bandy-legged bodhisattva, gargling
change into little brown garlic pills, once
promised us might just salve that souring skin-
condition one’s soul’s suspended in
more than merely taking
Sibelius in for a few
scratched turns of his sobering
soul suspended in rattling plastic.
Harry S Truman enters
in plain clothes, hissing
his alphabet forwards,
backwards, black, and
white, still gathering what
were they calling those little
black mushrooms pitting the
skull of admonished Chernobyl;
Lilliput’s gods require a
smoke ring strangely trace
and sustain some cinching shape
of a dog track, stuck in its thirteenth lap and
lashed round what lapsed step-
ladder’s seventh or seventeenth
stammering step again, playing
at penitent dumbwaiter—
Steve McQueen is dead. Long live the Queen.
(Written after watching the movie “The Blob” and remembering that Steve McQueen died so young from cancer)
That bastard has stolen my heart
his fast cars and blue eyes
racing up the mountain to find the alien blob.
The doctor said,
I don’t know what it is.
I might have to amputate.
As the man on the couch
succumbed to the blob
in the primordial horror flick.
Kids yelling monster.
Kids saving the town.
Kids circling the citizens
to bag and bottle
the blob that swallows
everyone it touches.
It digests then like the fly
that sips liquid slurry
through its proboscis.
Kids screaming,
parents crying,
children dying,
and McQueen kissing a girl,
and a girl kissing McQueen,
and there’s no air left
after the co2 extinguisher
saves the world,
saves the girl,
saves the boy,
and all the time
all the blob wanted
was a steak dinner
and a ride back to the stars.
I marveled at the choices you made
of what to bring from your old life to the new,
but no thing intrigued me more
than that old, cylindrical, nylon hamper,
it’s opening round and gaping,
flat on the floor in your closet,
waiting to grow with
your dirty socks
and boxers,
your pants and shirts,
long-sleeved
and short.
Feed me, it yawned,
week after week, and you did,
and it grew ever upward
until it bulged to overflowing, holding,
only to be emptied
to be filled again,
just as it had for daughter number one
and again for daughter number two
during their college years. And you said
you were not nostalgic and yet,
you snagged it from your old home
and brought it to your new, where
it took turns in our utility room
with three, dull-white, plastic laundry baskets,
which I also salvaged from a former life.
Last week you announced it was time
to let it go, the tip of its metal coils were
poking through its nylon flesh, its inner
coming outer, beginning its collapse,
which in an act of clear determination,
you decided to hasten
by cutting its framework free.
And it sprung!
To life!
Nylon
splitting,
tearing, giving
coil
unwinding
stretching
freeing
a contemporary sculpture,
uncoiled, askew,
nestled in a pool of blue.
“What shall we call it?” I asked, giddy.
“Unhampered,” you said.
And if could, I would
marry you again.
“The worst fault you have is to be in love.”
The Bard himself
Knows my plight
My heart has betrayed me
And given its loyalty to love again
It aches to be held
To be nourished
by the promises it has
Yet to find fulfilled-
Instead only to be left the void
But still it holds fast to hope
Infallible hope for a love
That will engulf the soul-
Love- the kind that has been
written about for centuries
By poets and philosophers
Love that feeds the soul
Not for one lifetime-
But for centuries
“Oh that the gods have cursed
my heart by making me poetical-
Why could they not make me honest?”
For honesty would remember the heartbreak
From my innocent trust
In mortal, heathen men.
And it would not so freely
Open wide for a man
To have his way.
Yet here we are again
On the Precipice
Of something so bold
And beautiful- and so dangerous
I open my heart again
Vulnerable and free
Longing for
love’s next tragedy.
I didn’t walk two miles in the arboretum, visit the gym,
vacuum the rugs, wash windows or straighten the cupboard,
nor did I volunteer at the food bank, make calls for a political
candidate or compose a letter to the editor. However, I did
work the NYT crossword, start “Wordling” again (after a streak
of 128 hits that was interrupted by vacation), and I halved
a spaghetti squash, impaled on my sharpest, fiercest knife, by raising
it high and thump, thump, thumping it against the cutting board.
The squash, baked with Michael’s of Brooklyn puttanesca sauce
and topped with freshly grated parmesan, was quite tasty.
