A Sequence of Bells

 

Where is the bell that was ringing?

it is in your throat

waiting for Sunday.

Where is the bell that has not yet rung?

it is in the ring

shrugging and feinting. 

Where is the tongue

with which the bell will speak?

The cat took it

and left it on the porch rail.

What does the ringing bell signify?

That the priest's hand

is strong and able. 

The boxer delivers his sermon.

You speak, and a shiver goes through me.

The cat is a night cat

and goes before me, always.

___________

American Pandora

 

Pandora admires her stack of new moving boxes from U-Haul.

After the debacle last time,

any problems should be small

like the railroad apartment she's leaving.

Pandora was a gifted kid, winning science projects and writing ribbons

tacked up on a bulletin board,

but like many to whom much is given,

she never expected the burn-out and the drifting.

Buck up, girl! she tells herself, and starts sorting gewgaws and hair bows.

I was set up to fail, she thinks,

loaded up with junk and mottoes

from all those uncles appearing from workbenches with scavenged parts.

She'll pack these boxes and mail them to herself out in Santa Fe

where the Land of Enchantment

waits with its southwestern way

of letting hope grow like junipers around the foothills and her heart.

____________

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is good through Saturday. Come, on, peek inside!

Yarn Ball

 

The devout go to graveyards, too.

numbered from the day we are born;

winter-bearers disguised in gentian blue.

Every cat knows the yarn ball has its end.

stitched into a world of glorious patterns

comprised of flesh, genomes, accident, atoms.

I am the baby playing in the April clover

riding inside the disappearing bone-brittle

biddy, herself a rider who with Charon must settle.

In between I live my dream within a dream

within a buzzing hive of urgent ephemeral illusion,

a corporeal toy. an aspect of God, in a barrel on a waterfall stream.

___________________

for Word Garden Word List--A.E.Stallings

Tulips In Headscarves

 

Rain comes at night

wandering between buildings,

wearing a long black coat

and the silent hours.

Pink tulips beside the walk

dip their heads,

delicate and disappointed

as fallen birds.

Slate roofs facing the moon

shine for the rain

but feel nothing, admit nothing

aloof and blank.

Rain is the sky's child

but dies earthbound.

Tulips in their headscarves

mourn in

performative

pantomime.

_________

For What's Going On? "Rain".

A Vagabond Hour

 

It was just an afternoon in a blur of afternoons

scattered in a line like a row of troll dolls.

Where is the screen porch where we played

when an hour was long and a year eternity?

Where are the mud pies we put in tins?

Where are those houses, those girls, that summer?

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned. 

On a steel rack at the foot of the basement stairs

was a parade of winter coats in plastic sheaths

crowned brightly by hat boxes across the top.

One yellow box had a silhouetted carriage on the lid

and we swooned at the idea of suitors arriving 

as we stood tip-toe on a fold-out stool, snooping.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

Best friends, families, afternoons, troll dolls

all scatter, our solid center become fragile 

bric-a-brac. Today a package came, and in it

a yellow hat box, and in the hat box, the scent

of my late aunt's house, my childhood, and an afternoon

in summer 1966, perfectly preserved and vivid.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

________

for Dverse MTB: Boxing Clever to The Bop.

One day I received a package containing a book (which I changed to a hat box in the poem). The book was inside a plastic sleeve, and when I took it out and opened it, I was instantly back in my aunt's house as a child. I think the book had been kept at some time on a shelf where someone had used the same furniture polish as my aunt used. In any event, I buried my smiling face in the pages and breathed in that long-forgotten scent.  As for the troll dolls, mudpies, screen porches and coat rack with the yellow hat box on top, that was all stuff that I remember from childhood.

Image at top found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Grateful Dead Box of Rain