Third Marriage, Seaside.

 

Go down to the greenhouse and gather the blooms,

then scatter them all in separate rooms--

the rose on the grate of the fireplace cold

to lie there and die there as we grow old.

The arrangements are odd and enigmatic,

the occupants frail and most asthmatic

afflicted with allergies, fear and despair

made worse by the stale and fetid air.

Though we gasp our devotion like fish in a boat

and confess our passion by rite and rote,

we're as blinkered as babes, as clear as bells

as we rise from the drink on our half-assed shells.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--First Love

A Conversation About a Dog

 "I see that I'm too late," I said

"You don't see a damn thing. Open your eyes," he said. 

There was a train due, or that had already departed, or

that never was, or that was, but had long since gone.

"I think about the dog. A lot. I miss the dog."

"There was no dog," he said, taking a drag.

"Think about it," he added, blowing smoke my way.

There was a dog, but not his dog, or not the dog

he thought I meant, which we never had. 

"There was a dog." I was determined, and a little angry.

He laughed and took off his hat, dangling it from his hand.

"Whatever you say, you fucking crazy bitch."

Trains look small at a distance, deadly from up close.

There is time for one to become the other, either way.

I didn't answer. I wore a veil like a death mask.

I wore a small tam like a zucchetto. Pax vobiscum. 

"Wait here forever if you want, I'm leaving," he said

and stood up, but lingered, finishing his unfiltered.

"You still love me. I know you do," I said softly, viciously.

"You don't know shit. Try opening your mail sometimes."

There are letters that form words, others that stand for things;

letters one saves for years, others forgotten on a hall table.

"I miss that dog. he was a good dog," I said,

but there was no one there, and the station was gone.

__________

belatedly for Dora's Dverse Poetics: Dialogue It In! I will share with OLN. 

Image: Kate Bishop and Lucky the Pizza Dog

Music: Lydia Gray Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

Poem For Those Trying To Reach Me About My Car Warranty

 "I found that just surviving was a noble fight" --Billy Joel

If you're bleeding on my block

I'll call an ambulance.

If you're hanging around the kebab truck looking broke

I'll spring for some kofta,

but I can't carry the world's weight--

my own is enough.

It's September and once again I take stock. 

My trees are a little bigger--

I touch them with the flat of my hand as I pass

wishing them prosperity.

Sometimes a limb will fall;

I can see where the woodpeckers have been.

There are two different ones who visit--

are they the same ones as a year ago? Two years ago?

Am I the same as I was then? 

Will someone call an ambulance for me one day?

One night driving home I ran over a skunk.

My dog killed a different one on a different night.

I felt bad, but kept my car, bathed my dog.

He is my seventh dog. This is my only life. 

I've told it all, about the PTSD, the alcohol, the depressions,

and also about recovery, coping, finding joy where I can.

You want to talk about wars and rumors of wars.

Whose side am I on? Aren't I outraged? Don't I care? 

It's September and the sky is that glorious rare blue.

The jays have been by, and the grackles.

I did not drink today or wake up screaming. 

I did not consider methods of suicide.

I wish all of this for you, too, but peace

is too precious a thing and I'll only give what I can spare.

________

for What's Going On? --"Finding the Balance"

Dear November

 

Dear November,

It's mad easy to become lost.

You are so cold and distant, part of me is begging,

the rest of me a raised fist, cocked.

 

Everything inside me is in rivulets down a window

and it's moving,

dear November,

like a scared hare in the stalky brown fields. 

Dear November,

I think I married you once, had your child,

or came to your funeral every year wearing heartbroken black.

I was your dove, dear November,

and your crow.

Dear November,

I need to know that you remember me beautiful,

even if I turned dry as a page,

stale as a bowl of potpourri in a haunted house.

I am crying now, dear November

and December's smile mocks us both,

Cher Novembre,

mon triste bien-aime.*

________

*Dear November, my sad beloved

for Dverse Poetics for the love of letters. 

Ink Ribbons

 

This is not happening, does not exist

any more than Bogie on the flat screen smoking Camels

and looking world-weary at the bar.

Bogie's dead, eaten up by cancer,

liver hard and beaten-up as a gymnasium medicine ball.

And yet, here I am, and here is my heart

like a twin engine monoplane on the tarmac at Casablanca.

No smart suit and fashionable hat for me.

I want my father's old fedora and his jacket I used to wear

because I loved him, and we both

drove my mother to razor blades like matching bookends

around a collection of Hem and pulp novels and every page

read to her like THE END THE END THE END.

This is prop whiskey, the gin is Dasani water but the lime is real.

This mood, though, it's the view from a blacked-out liner

at night and I can just make out the lanterns at a cafe on the shore

where they drink the real stuff,

spread lovely lies like butter on bread,

and the solitaries read James Joyce with their works in their pocket.

The off-duty ferryman raises his glass. To me? Not possible.

I am the woman with ink ribbons in her hair, erstatz ether bows

imaginary like the humming presses in a 1940's movie scene.

Edit out the brassy blonde coming through the door,

there's only room for one hard case here

with a PI license and a heart of paper, cotton, leather,

but never even around the corner from silver or gold.

So bottoms up, sobersides, please rush in from the rain I've drummed up

and say something nice. It's always 3 a.m. in these scenes

and I long for morning,

                                       and lanterns lit

                                                                 like my father's smile. 

___________________

for Desperate Poets "I wake up screaming: Desperate Noir." 

Image at top: Bing AI

Music: Billie Holiday Willow Weep For Me

October

 

These early evenings, the sun sinks slowly,

like a 'do-ragged painter down spider-leg scaffolding.

We are all weary these days

as the world rolls beneath us and we logwalk,

our eventual fall following beside us like an unpredictable dog.

Then quietly, as crickets guard the evening filigree,

your ghost comes to me

where I smoke in the Adirondack

under the weak-sister yellow moon of the outside light,

to portend a storm that's already passed and gone.

In a canning jar, under the basement stairs, 

I have kept your hoodoo,

that sacrifice chant-dance made of woodsmoke and razor grass

that you wove to your bones

to make me love you as if you were food, as if you were solid earth.

Whether in Butte or Chicago, Pushmataha County

or Devil's Hand, it makes no difference.

Even the ocean is not shatterproof, so my bags drowse in the attic,

with old costumes and dressmaker's dummies

that you went to while I slept off the soft poison of your words.

I know why you're here.

I know why yellowjacks have stingers

and I can't write these poems forever just to stave you off.

You'll use the knife I gave you as a pick

and play some stupid banjo breakdown at my funeral

as if it were spring, as if you were sane, as if I didn't matter.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten.

I don't smoke. The poem lies!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot "Dreamland"

Linguist

 It's like a telephone call from the gut,

a mirror garlanded with white dahlias where the moon lives

behind the glass, shifting,

swinging a railroad lantern,

calling you by an unsuspected name.

Now you are a brick and must throw yourself.

Now you are a throat and must sing yourself

until you fall to the flagstones empty, an overturned ewer.

Desert the war, go home to your bed with its hand-sewn quilt.

There is a woman there

or a man

or no one--it doesn't matter. Go. 

Now you are a blooming vine, and the earth moves 

with you each time you step.

Beware the imbecile with his scythe.

Carry the fragrance of God in your laced boot.

Use playing cards to confound thieves.

Find Venus on the night horizon during a crescent moon.

Keep an oriole, a falcon, and a buzzard.

Live alone, 

but with the door open

so that April can call you with her rain-voice

like a petal volcano

birthing bees from your tongue in new language,

the thing you longed for

now--in astonishment--named.

_________

for Sunday Muse 202. 

A 7 Line Poem

There was a wall made entirely of glass, and a bird with a tether on its leg. 

There was you, in your olive raincoat, and a sky of grandfathers, complaining.

There were lilacs, dogwood blossoms, a wrought iron screen hung from a fence peg.

It was April in the finest chill of dusk, a Wednesday with an hour's light remaining.

There were angles to the gables, to the downspout, and the feeling beyond naming

That I carried in a Gladstone bag kept hidden with the gewgaws

Preserved and cared for like that bird, to rise toward home when he does.

________

linked to dverse oln.

Palilalia

 "Here I am back home again

I'm here to rest

All they ask is where I've been

knowing I've been west " --Tim Hardin 

One wrong move away from a coffin, I came back

glissading hell-for-breakfast down a ribbon road called Interstice 95.

I am become a Gypsy, I said. 

I am become a radio, broadcasting myself at some higher frequency.

I am a skull singing starlings out into the Void.

This is our tree, stay the fuck off it we say

with our

pugnacious

puny 

little 

beaks.

Sometimes dead is better, someone said. 

All I want is my Hudson Bay blanket.

All I want is a mother, not my  mother, but one like the ones in storybooks,

and not Grimm's.

All I want is some chocolate, and a Secret Garden to sit in.

There should be a glider.

I could cry there and let the salt make me a sailor.

I want to be kissed in a way I have not been kissed in years. 

I want to be anesthetized.

I want to feel good, reconfigured without the anchors and anvils.

I want to ask Jesus some things.

Pah.

I would like to thank the cosmic shillelagh that thumped me here.

I would like to be stitched up and sent home with a note explaining 

me to myself.

None of that is in the works, and a carny appears and loads me into a clock

as if I were boarding the Kingda Ka at Six Flags back in Texas, USA. 

"You little feral Pick-Me Girl," says the carny,

serving up big happy helpings of easy scorn.

"Enjoy the ride!" he says, showing his teeth in a billboard grin.

FWOOMP!

My dog is glad to see me. 

There is lazy winter light in the window

and someone has left a casserole on the doorstep.

I am tempted to call someone but who? God?

She's a right canny doozy,

but my monkey body remembers warm flesh like rolls from the oven

and I don't think I can get up.

My heart is smashed

and the junk drawer offers no Gorilla Glue,

no note that can penetrate when hope goes deaf.

I sit and stutter and start to tell the dog 

all about this strange accident, this whole misadventure escapade

and, as it gets dark,

what I think it means.

__________

for Word Garden Word List #9.

Six Penny Poem

"The Architect by Erik Johansson

https://www.erikjo.com/

"Six Penny Poem"

I have written you this poem

made of lavender,

various weathers,

and six penny nails.

I've forgotten how to love, that's true

and never could accept the stuff.

Still, if your body were paper milled from butter and birch,

I would be flocked there and on the vines and boards

of a slant-lit garden.

This is a poem for absurd things, sweet things

last bloom and first frost

a poem for things I could not otherwise say,

a poem for you.
_______

for Sunday Muse #78.

Blues #3

(image is "Play For Me" by Ian Dooley)

At Susannha's, when they asked for "As Time Goes By,"
you gave them "St. James Infirmary Blues."
That's when I knew
Suss had chosen right.
You play as crisp as your white shirt 
and as blue as the river my brother never came out of
when he was just eleven.

I showed Suss his notebook
with the stories about stowing the teacher in a closet
and running down a dirt road in summer.
Suss said she liked his made-up world better,
kissed my cheek and whispered, "You're a dreamer, too."

When I slide my hand between your suspenders and white shirt,
you play "St. Louis Blues" when they want "Sweet Georgia Brown."
It's my fingers running through your hair,
and my breath on your cheek when it's Suss's you want.
Then you play "Smokestack Lightning" to break the moment.

Bobby, upstairs I've got
spray starch on the shelf,
raspberry jam on the table. 
Here, you've got Suss's picture instead of sheet music.
It's late, close the lid over the keys.
Come sleep on my couch again
and play "St. James Infirmary Blues" in your head.
I miss her as much as you, dear Bobby,
and wish it was me instead.
________

For Margaret's images at Real Toads.

 

The Woman Who Could Not Remember

Winter, pale and fat, presses himself against me,
insistent and stupid, dead oak leaves spilling
from his windy lips.

"Darling," I hear my voice confabulate. My memory
fell through the ice of his pride six years ago and hasn't been seen since.
So I make shit up:

"I missed you," and such fantastic idiocy. I send
weevils into his head to hunt for what went before,
and find my affair with his brother, Fall, and his 
first love turned bitter enemy and destroyer, Spring. 

She and I conspire by telepathy, though I forget afterwards. 

Can he hear the cicadas inside my bones, feel the
mosquito pond of my stilled airless blood?
My benefactor, the Sun, waits for him to subside and die

So that we can be together.

But this time the infuriating fool has the vitality of the nearly-expired,
and as he enters me, the shock of cold sends cracks 
from toes to skull and back again, I am riven
by lost and desperate ice-beaked birds who need me to the point of misery.

Secretly, as he bucks and the wind rises,
I receive the tiny crocus blooms his destroyer sends me
to help me hold on, to fashion together into a time,

Mine, when I will strangle him with rose vines,
sway to my feet as stalks of wheat, heavy as viburnum,
entirely forgetful and ascendant. 

"That's right," I coo, opening myself willingly now,
as a grave does, doing what it was born to do, 
becoming solid and sun-warmed, anticipating lilies.
________

For "take the weather with you" at Toads. Day #5 of Napo Nap Time. Greetings from the (still!) frozen wastes of the north.