Lebanese Dove Lost in A Mexican Market

 

I awake on a sidewalk as a bird

and in a moment of comic idiocy

I fly into a store

                         where a woman swings a broom at me,

shouting, "Un pájaro!"

She misses me by inches

as I have missed so many things

by inches or miles

                             and if she breaks my wings

her dustpan will be my grave.

Once, I knew--or dreamed

your skin by Tiffany lamp.

In those days,

                      the mornings were quiet and damp

like a woods at first light

where we could go walking

and not worry where we'd been.

I careen into packages of pasta

which fall like pilgrims to the floor.

The woman spits, 

                              "Ay! Diablo!" and has no more

pity for me than a loaded gun.

How did I become a bird

in this ridiculous situation?

I remember the day when you left

with your bags like a brood of chicks

gathered at your feet

                                   in their nest of sticks

like burning incense.

Now, I am a mourning dove without a sky

with a new woman now, who shouts, "Diablo! Ay!"

_______________

For Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

Music: Gary BB Coleman The Sky Is Crying

Poem About a Dream, With Shifting Tense

 

I dreamed you were there again

like a delayed letter in the mailbox

twined with thorns, slick with lipstick.

There you were, at my doorway

on my farm where I have never laid eyes

or set foot, nor sat cross-legged in the wild-grown meadow.

You were with someone new.

I was with someone new.

They were both starting to see how things are. 

Your hair, you know, it's like a pillow on a bed

where I long to be. And me, I have the key that you can't find,

as clunky as a cow's bell, as broken as an old washer. 

The guy you were with had begun to see the 

sunset behind your October eyes; I've known your full dark.

I'm here but obscured from the wildflower partner beside me.

I'm getting a vibe, like pixelated messages from space,

that your man would like to be mine instead, and drop his

heavy bags on my rag rug. I think my partner has checked out silently.

So there we stand, in a now that never was,

in a place we never were, playing out a scene like breezy clouds.

I see blackbirds on the split-rail fence, dipping, calling,

and feel my heart break apart inside my chest like a broken door handle.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--The Jesus Cow

Music: Coldplay The Scientist

Summer

 

Here's a secret:

summer isn't real. 

It's a replica cooked up in an industrial oven somewhere.

Want to know 

how I know

how I know 

want to know?

hmm hmm hmm?

Sugar, I could enlighten you about a few things,

lay out the deets like an Alexa  but with way better hair.

You see, the real summer, 

the one we grew up in like 

wogs in a puddle with our

bikes and Kool-Aid and

sense of endless warm nose-in-the-green-grass days ahead,

she's gone, my dude. 

They have her secured at Gitmo or Bethesda or somewhere,

trying to find out HOW, like HOW, summer? Give it up already!

She's a clam, she tells them to fuck right off, so there she stays.

This new summer, the one we're in now

like koi fish swimming around saying looky,

our orbit is decaying, mayday mayday!

water temp rising, abandon ship!

is

not

real.

This cheap knock-off, this ersatz season, is as fake as an Eligible Bachelor

with a certificate of authenticity laminated and embossed

with a realistic official seal sticking out of his man purse. I mean

gimme a break.

You don't know me and shit, I get that.

I could just be somebody off their meds

or trolling you because because because...

because that's the wonderful thing she does!

So here is 

one

true

sentence,

and it is the truest sentence that I know:

I long for Fall, because Fall knows me, keeps the windows

yellow-lit and has my long sweater ready, laundered

and scented, laid out next to my cute sox and funky newsboy cap;

Fall wants me, lets me know that I am a work of art and a woman

in the right flesh at the right time to carry the right soul  and a mug

of hot mocha straight into an October morning and live there.

Now imma cry and bake in the phony replacement sun

and maybe if you're any kind of friend you'll say shh shh

baby and tell me softly

in my ear

about leaves

and frost

and hope

and all that happy hopscotch,

ok?

Hang a while with me 

and be my balm in Gilead, 

 my Saint Anthony to the lost.

___________

For Word Garden Word List--Whisper Down the Lane. 

I kind of lifted my man Ernest's words for that one part. No wait, it's an homage!

Music: Fontella Bass Rescue Me

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. 

Hymn For Homeless Ghosts

 If I could lay hands on a visa 

issued by lost grandfathers--

some kind of ticket scented 

with summer dirt roads--

then I would wear a hat made of dandelions and leave.

The present moment

is just a rented room. 

Poor child, 

yesterday has vanished,

today was born already packing its case,

and tomorrow is asleep in a distant curtained chamber.

It was just a moment ago,

just a breath, when I was

new in the world and believed the world new as well.

Whose hand was on the door

that was closing even as it opened,

wearing the vanishing morning like fleeting fashion?

If I had a passport

made of more than shifting memory,

I would take a hired car

to shores where the waters say,

"Where have you been

delayed so long,

and why dear heart do you ask, through tears, 

                                                     to be told your own name?

_______________

for Six Sentence Stories, "visa". 

Music: Cesaria Evora Sodade

Lilac One

 I saw the devil standing in front of Lilac One

with the dawn across his shoulders

and his shirt cuffs undone

He said, "Why are you waiting, and who waits for you?"

then the dawn turned to diamonds

of peculiar blue.

The devil is lonely though he prowls Lilac Two

and his heart is a magpie

in a mirror that flew

with itself to itself in a blur of time spent

in evening's cold courtyard

by feigned accident.

The devil said, "Nothing can mar Lilac Three

though tomorrow's black roses

are vased there for thee."

Then he shook his hair out like leaving a love

that he's carefully carved--

that's a lot to think of.

________

shared to Dverse OLN. 

Things She Would Tell You If She Could

 

Romeo, gosh, I'm sorry how things turned out,

and sorry I didn't die after all like you thought.

I'm old now, you wouldn't look twice at me 

but I miss you still, even so, most definitely.

You could find me tonight across from a cornfield

working the St. Lucy's Fall Festival and how would you feel

about that, babe? I wear a lumpy old overcoat

and sell tickets to teenagers so in love they almost float.

I get feeling sentimental and sad about everything

remembering how you said you were the All-Powerful Weather King

and could make the sun come out if I wished it,

or kiss me and kiss me again if I told you I missed it.

My goodness, Romeo, you don't know how often I still think of you,

like when I saw some crestfallen kid with wild hair walking through

the festival like he had something on his mind

and he seemed lonesome, like you, and quiet and kind.

It's almost midnight and the lights are going dim

so I've got to pack up and go home alone again.

I wish so hard that things had turned out different

and I'd say, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and you'd know what I meant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Tom Waits.

Music: Tom Waits "Blue Valentines"

Steampunk Starling

 

Steampunk starling is noisy at dawn

at the base of the window, not the tops of the trees.

The steampunk sun and the regular one

animate her heart that is wound with keys.

Steampunk bird, lonely trifle

wheels and sits in interpretive fits

her gears all meshing with teeth all threshing

the odious this from the marvelous that.

Steampunk starling, nobody's darling

but God's if mechanical God may be

she sits in the gloaming prevented from roaming

an ornament for Master's library.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: "Passions Stamped On Lifeless Things"

Hybrid Perennial

 

He brought her a manuscript made from sidewalks

and evening air.

He had eaten stars, nearly died, fathered a revolution,

all while admiring the lilies in her hair.

She complained of her situation and boredom while drinking

formaldehyde.

He developed a cough, and from the cough

came the man she now lounges beside.

Someone buried the manuscript and where it was buried

roses unfurled.

He fills his pipe with suicide, does not recognize his only child

and the woman smiles, become an ingenue, a cipher, a nattering girl.

______

The Pines

I made my skin call itself snow,

and wrapped that body around my heart.

There was no sound except the groaning of the pines.

The world has died, I said.

I have died, there is no sound except the pines.

There was still the sun, 91 million miles away,

dribbling through the branches of the groaning pines. 

There was still my skin of snow.

There was still my heart, a stunned bird fallen from the pines.

Hear the song of the snow falling from the pines,

falling on itself, increasing itself

in thrall to its remote Master,

saying, we are small white suns without heat,

bright, blinding.

I made my skin call itself cold,

and wrapped myself around my heart. 

I said, idiot pines, here is peace, here is stillness.

The pines stood groaning, green day and night,

oblivious to the Master's moods, saying glory glory.

All the while, my heart stirred, brown and puny,

whispering itself out as friable desire

for light, for voice, for the pines that sway

in the unseen, unending movement

of the empty, restless sky.

_______

for Sunday Muse #145.

Recurring Dream Of My Childhood

Alone in a strange city at night--
everything dark, wet from recent rain,
lights too far away or just reflections in the damp pavement;
buildings empty hulks, yet somehow watching,

indifferent,
unfamiliar,
no sanctuary.

A car pulls up to the curb--
a late 40's or early 50s model,
black, maybe a Buick or a Hudson,
and though well out of date, shiny as a snake.

A woman in red dress steps out of the passenger side--
she's vaguely Hispanic,
wearing pearls and heels.
her cheekbones are high, she's almost pretty, but cold,
pretending to be helpful. A man sits in silent shadow behind the wheel.

"Are you lost?" she asks me. Yes. The curb feels like a cliff.
"Get in," she says, gesturing toward the car.
I don't want to.
It feels like a shark's mouth, a precipice, no good end in there,
and yet, I am lost and by myself,
in this strange city at night.

Sometimes I get in, and then it gets much worse--
they drive me to a doctor, a doctor who is not human,
whose treatments are misery, and who cures nothing.
Other times, I have some sense of a memory warning me
not to go with them, and I refuse.

My temporary escape is no joyful thing, but rather,
a stay of execution to be taken up on another night.
_____

Not really a poem, but an accurate description of a recurring nightmare I had as a child.

For Bjorn's "nightmare" mini-challenge at Real Toads. 

Lost Birds

Lost birds, soft as smoke
fly above a dry burning land--
they don't stop to rest in bare black trees--
lost birds come straight to your hand.

Lady gentle as the touch of death,
so beautiful, like a lost bird's song--
they sing, so sure you're their homeward star--
but they're wrong, those birds, lost and wrong.

Lost bird finds out when you stroke its wing--
lost bird lost Heaven, lost everything.

I've seen how you make fruit from flower
and leave a stem curling brown on the branch--
I've seen how you look at the ripening rows--
and the barbs on the fence where the night birds catch.

Lost birds come all the way from Mexico
caught in crosswinds east then south--
all just to bring you a Spanish song
from a lost bird's throat to your calico's mouth.

Lost birds lose whatever they bring--
lose sky, lose Heaven, lose everything. 
______

for magpie #295.