Poem For Love & Healing

If I were a florist,
I would grow mint, catnip, sage, and blackberries.
I would arrange them with red roses,
asters,
and blue violets.
I would speak your name over them.
I would deliver them to you with the sun at my back,
in the late morning,
by hand.

If I were a waitress,
I would bring you apricots, raisins, honey and ginger.
I would bring them on plates of white earthenware
edged in blue.
I would make sure your glass was green,
and the table yellow.
I would serve you by name,
and satisfy your desires--
even the ones
you only dreamed.
_______

All of the herbs, foods and colors in this poem are considered to possess healing qualities.

Red roses signify love; asters and blue violets represent love and faithfulness. 

The Perspectives Of An Idiot

The perspectives of an idiot
may a certain beauty bear--
as a sorceress in stocks, under questioning and locks,
shorn of her hair,
fed on flung incivilities, poxy blackbirds in the air--

Tell us.
Do not reject the embrace of mercy.
Confess to us
what you are capable of; healing, harlotry and heresy...

The choreography of the somber
may dark comedy conceal--
as a seductress sent to ash, under pretense, purpose and mask,
purified by flame,
removed from those grinning cretins who call hypocrisy by name.
______

photograph: Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil

tongue-in-cheek musical accompaniment 

  

Motown Dreams

Despite precautions,
despite an arty hand-made cross on the wall of every room--
despite the bus schedule copied down on the back of an envelope--
the wind blows
in January, in Detroit,
the wind blows
as if it knew you before you knew yourself,
like a too-loud aunt resurrected from childhood.
The wind blows
as if it knows you by name, by predilection--
the wind blows
as if it knows and has a problem with you.

Here in Detroit,
we are almost Canadian;
despite the MKZ's in the circular drives of Oakland County,
we are mutts;
we are donut-heads and hockey-hearted Janes.
Look, I'm not proud.
I pick my way through the slush and into the Dollar General,
happy as a skunk at midnight.
I put on no airs--
I like Randall and the honey badger every bit as much as Rimbaud,
and I would kiss a French trapper right on the lips,
right through his six months' beard,
if I could ever find one.

Despite tenacious hope,
despite the redeeming power of toll house cookies,
the wind blows
in January, in Detroit,
the wind blows
and carries me into another afternoon,
as smoothly as delirium rolling
off the cold, competent assembly line
of winter time double shift Motown dreams.
_______

I really do have an "arty hand-made cross on the wall of (almost) every room". I brought them home with me from San Antonio.

...and, a song to go with, which references "south Detroit". They play it at the Red Wings' games and everybody shouts that part. But anyone who lives here knows that there is no "south Detroit." There is "downriver", and there is *in* the river. Take a look at the shape of the mitten, and you'll see what I mean.

 

The Nanny

I'm the nanny.
I'm not some sawed-off Jap bitch, trailing cherry blossoms,
smiling like she just heard the Holy Haiku, even as she
slips your pearls into her pocket.

No.

I'm an American girl from Sioux City,
with a crew of younger sibs I practically raised myself.
Our mom was a goth who got old,
sitting on a tombstone on weekday afternoons,
reciting Baudelaire from memory
while I was left home to field calls from the school
and to fix French toast for a screaming pack of snotty-nosed midgets.

I loved them.
I did.
I do, still.

My employer calls herself Hecate, what kind of name is that?
You wouldn't think it to look at her, 
with her no-nonsense, wash-and-run short 'do
and the Blackberry and the Bluetooth
or whatever all that crap is,
but the woman could get knocked up just by standing in the moonlight.

Don't think she doesn't let me know it.
Don't think she doesn't hammer me over the head
with her fecundity.

Look, you, I play a mean game of Candyland.
You haven't seen me in action--
I can be so sweet, you'd swear my veins were full of Splenda.
I've got those good birthing hips,
and can lug two brats around and boss the rest
without missing a beat.

In the evening,
when she turns back into a fucking pumpkin,
it's "Thank you, Janet," with a certain unmistakable finality,
like I'd just finished bagging her fucking Yoplait and arugula,
not taken care of her children all day.

Swing that sledge.
Drive that spike.
Is this any life for a smart, sensitive girl like me?

Weekends, she's got her garden,
like having a functioning uterus makes her The Ultimate Earth Mother.
Look at the sun, how it revolves around her head,
her personal golden halo.
"Are you all right, Janet?" she asks, standing in the open bathroom door--
her door, her bathroom, her porcelain and Kohler faucets--
as I puke my guts out.
No one holds my hair;
nobody runs for the Kaopectate.
The kids stand behind her and stare, as if they'd never seen me before.

In my room, I pray to whatever benevolent or malignant gods there may be.
Hear me, I say,
but they don't.

Monday comes, and Hecate gets in her MKZ, swinging her heeled foot in last,
as if she were Carmen, expiring on stage at the Met.
A whole weekend!
The kids, the friends, her husband Dave with his golf shirts,
all of them expecting, needing, smiling as they shell her.

"Sweet pea," she whispers to Madison, the youngest,
"You want to be just like Mommy when you grow up,
don't you?"

That afternoon, I park them in front of cartoons,
which I am never supposed to do.
I am supposed to play them Bach,
and try to teach the six year old Italian.
Fuck this, I think to myself, fuck this, fuck this!
Emmy, always the little caretaker, stands three feet away from me,
looking uncertain, one shoe untied, and very quietly wonders,
"Are you having a crisis, Miss Jan?"

I laugh. She is so kind and so doomed.
That night, I call my mother for the first time in weeks.
"Stop crying," she croons in her oddly endearing smoker's voice.
"Baby, stop crying."

By July, I am back in Sioux City, and it is sweltering.
I have an upstairs flat,
and time on my hands.
Hecate and Dave promised to give me good references.
I hugged the children, kissed them, 
but I couldn't speak until I was miles from them, almost to the airport.

Mom and I order mocha lattes and take them to the viaduct
where the commuter trains pass over our heads.
We sit by the crap-choked water and pretend we are visiting Lourdes,
though whether as nurses or cripples, who knows?

Emmy made me a construction paper angel the day before I left.
She had it in both hands, and presented it so solemnly, it was hard to bear.
"Ciao," she said.
"Ciao, baby," I managed.

I am the nanny, or was.
I still have that angel,
and I have my mother, whom I have forgiven.
I ask her one afternoon, as the trains go by,
"What would you like, if you could choose? What would make you happy?"
"Why, honey, I'd like to meet Baudelaire, In Paris.
We'd have an affair, and he would write me my own gorgeous, dark poems.
What about you, baby? Where would you go? What would satisfy your heart?
Can you tell me?"

She has never spoken so tenderly to me before.
My throat is dry, as if I had not spoken for years.
"Maybe Florence," I tell her,
"In the Spring."
Then we are quiet,
and the last train heads west instead of east,
straight into the halo of the sun.
_______


linked to Dverse Open Link #79

The Moonstone Ring

At the bottom of a pool ringed with high blades of brown grass,
I met my bare-legged love,
the one with the slender fingers and the starfish eyes.

"What is it like, drowning?" I asked,
removing her moonstone ring.
My thinking at the time was to restore her entire,
from a detail.
If I set out her favorite soaps,
would not her fingertips appear, to take them?
Would not her arm follow, serpentine, impossible?
Would I not sleep with her again that very night,
my returned heart,
my conjured desire?

The moonstone ring had tiny lizards traversing the band,
counterclockwise,
enchanted;
the stone itself so pale,
retrograde,
floating to one side in a blue morning sky
as I did in the pool,
suffocating on my very urgency to have her back.

"Dial it down," she said to me, filling her sorrowful, disembodied voice
with her familiar lazy patois.
The stars dragged themselves, too bright, over our heads
and then melted like pangs of conscience
or fading scars,
achingly final,
reducing us to ripples, my love and I,
spreading away from each other, vanishing, in spite of ourselves.
_______

Written using some words from a list. Thank you, Jasminecalyx.

Linked with Carry On Tuesday #186, where I failed to follow the rules.