Weight & Lightness

 

In morning, a thousand plans;

afternoon finds me recumbent

Hours become like contraband

and my plans undone but done with.

I feel unchanged, sitting by the window

but tire at the slightest exertion.

I watch as the evening bends low

and wonder at vitality's desertion.

But my mind! Imagination grown brighter!

While a simple chore leaves me breathless.

So I poeticize or read another chapter

and for the moment feel light, lifted, deathless. 

____________

for What's Going On? -- March of Time.

I have been a sad child and a wild addict and a recovering person, a long-time employee, been married and raised a son, been divorced and started over, called myself straight and LGBTQ, and I end as I began, with a love of dogs and poetry. What a long, strange trip it's been, but I am happy where I have landed. 

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List remains active through Sunday. 

Music: Fleetwood Mac Landslide

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

Angel For Alley Cats

 

"Never trust a man in a blue trench coat,

never drive a car when you're dead" --Tom Waits, "Telephone Call From Istanbul"

Don't drink that donkey piss, Angelo.

It'll make you dream of broken bells.

You'll wake up with a six-armed woman

who keeps her heart inside a sandy shell.

Come with me, Angelo,

say you'll pay them tomorrow with windfall money.

I know a place where saints serve spring water 

from blue painted pitchers, and it tastes like honey.

Angelo, don't you have a mother somewhere

waiting by the window where the spiders spin?

Pretend I'm a rolling bottle and follow me

down the Old Beach Road where she'll let us in.

What am I gonna do with you, Angelo?

Is there fare for fortune under your hat?

Leave it, but bring your bouzouki

to play like an angel for the alley cats.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #224.

Music: The Psychedelic Furs "Heaven"

 

Haint Blue

It is those with glass bones I fear,
bones full of empty
where the shot bird leaves its ashen song.

Night is a damply rotten blindfold
where the goblin-mother
stitches madness into nightmares.

I pay the wind to betray glass riders
who place black plumes
on the panicked heads of their Arab stallions.

I call for my blue sister who fell unborn
from the goblin-mother
in disguise of oleander and moonflower.

I paint my tongue haint blue
and call her here
to grow vines of sibling song,

In threads of peace, protection, 
and soft dawn light
braided on the morning glory bloom.
___________

For Sunday Muse #91, where I am hosting.

Butter Shoes

Exploring abandoned places is not for those too firmly anchored in the present.
One must wear butter shoes to slide across the temporal griddle.
Here, we have a record player inside a pink carrying case.
Over there, a cane and a broken mason jar.
And in the basement, a figure mummified inside a rolled-up rug,
stored carefully underneath a work bench.

Investigating further, we find mismatched dishes.
Red for the furious wife,
green for the husband submerged in murky dreams,
and yellow for the children churned by hand under a butter sun.

Afterward, we are hungry, for food and for the physical.
We slap each other playfully, clomping on peg legs across the wooden floor to the bedroom, 
where we hop like Russian dancers upon the griddle of our love.
You suggest we should buy cows,
Guernseys to provide us with milk and children already grown,

Who have their own houses devoid of plywood and yellow tape,
the emblems and talismans of our journey into urbex mystery.
_______

for Sunday Muse #84.

Night Support

You will argue that it's none of my concern

who you embrace,

what fruit your mouth accepts and expresses

as the pulp and sweetness of your desire.

Doesn't sick soil poison every leaf?

Doesn't richness bless every bloom?

I am the Quantifier and Keeper of Carnal Particulars.

The muscle of his shoulder beneath your cheek

 two Novembers ago?

Bin 47, lot 5.

The dusky sound of her woodsmoke voice

on a bridge above the river on a night last July?

Shelf 21B, Warehouse 2, Compound A.

You just wait.

Let that grating emptiness come over you when you're alone

remembering his paint-stained fingers

or the caramel curl of her hair.

You'll need to retrieve it then,

more than blooms need stems,

sharp as a outcasts need warm mercy.

There I'll be,

rolling my cart to space 4G7 in the auxiliary bay,

requisitioning the very thing you need,

sending it out,

replacing it,

maintaining inventory and your equilibrium.

I'm good at what I do

because I understand need and weakness and lack.

Envelope G, in file B7GK4

should contain your wicked smile,

the angle of your teeth, your lips,

your tongue,

and the 27 catalogued effects they had on my dissolving bones.

Inventory shows them on-hand,

but though I search your name, 

your skin,

your scent,

I can't find any particle of you;

just a ringing emptiness

and this paltry job to fill it.

______ 

for "job title" at Toads.

When I was in the USAF, I worked night support in a warehouse, finding aircraft parts for delivery to the flight line. I drew on that, for this.

Sadie Hawkins Dance

At eleven, we were hollow-stemmed, yellow-haired flowering weeds,

all taller than the boys,

chained around a crab apple branch like thaw drops.

We were departing swallows

quicker than afternoon;

smug with our lessers, cowed by our betters,

kites with cat-tails, casting for a clue.

Want to go with me?

Say no, say yes, say no, say yes!

Whatever they said, it would be years before we felt this power again,

at the high arc of a cycle of seasons,

calling the steps, knowing the music would change.

___________

day 16

for Rommy's "Fun and Games" prompt at Toads.

Sonya's Tale Of Rasputin

My sister is older than me,
by over a hundred years;
Daddy a dynamo, prolific,
with new wives as often as new cars.

Sis's name is Sonya,
and she spoke to me, 
not a year after she died.
My tea had gone cold on the night table,
and so she brought a samovar and a tale to tell,
waking me with a kiss. 

Being kissed by ghosts may be a Russian thing,
like the men getting drunk, or the inevitable failure of the collectives.
I patted the bed and we sat together,
like reindeer waiting to pull the sleigh of a midnight fable.
Finally, Sonya began.

"I met Grigori Rasputin in a barn when I was 17.
He was asleep, slack-jawed in late morning half-light,
the motes spinning lazily around him like stars. 
The Russian cross he wore
and the vodka bottle he cradled
both shone as if they had souls of their own."

I propped myself up with an elbow and listened.

"There are ways and there are ways, little sparrow," Sonya went on.
"Labor is productive, prayer is powerful.
But sometimes the breeze stirs the leaves just as if they were barynya dancers. 
All I did was set my bucket down and join him--a breeze myself--
and he showed me how God created the world."

I said, "They say he stank. That he was insane!
How could you--"

"Pochemuchka," my sister whispered, 
"Madness is essentially Russian. Without that,
without hallucinations in our blood, how could we endure the winter?
And he smelled only of straw,
holiness, and masculine vigor."

Sonya smiled then.
"Little One, do you remember my oldest,
the sandy-haired one, my poet who died on the battlefield in 1915?
Of course you wouldn't. I forget how young you are."
She looked far away for a moment, even for a ghost.
"He had the gift.
The same one you have,
a closeness with the spirit world, and an appetite for everything."

The tea was gone.
Even here, dawn arrives eventually.
Sonya finished her story, saying,
"I warned Grigori to beware
of cakes, aristocrats, bullets, and wide cold waters. 
He laughed, his big bearded head thrown back,
a booming laugh like a fireball landing in a Siberian forest.
He told me he already knew."

With that, Sonya was gone.
Our old one-eyed rooster crowed outside in the yard.
I sat up, pushing my long hair back with my fingers,
and collected my coat, scarf, and ice skates.
Out, then, to the pond where a local fox keeps her den full of kits,
watching my every move.
I spread my arms out to glide, easy as branches in a breeze,
not needing to lay eyes on her to know, 
just the same, 
that she is there. 
________

for Out of Standard at Toads

pochemuchka--a child who asks a lot of questions

barynya--traditional "Cossack Dance" featuring the prisyadka, or knee-bend. 

Between Order And Chaos

Between order and chaos,
in the interstice between air and swallow's wing--
in the silent interlude between rippled pond and snow-dusted ice,
there lies the thing I have wanted to say.

I have been thinking about the difference between old glass and new;
whether the wave is perceived or actual--
in the pane, the mind, or somewhere beyond.
And....is the smooth order of new glass wanted--needed--
in every window, upstairs and down, from vane to garden shed?

Today, I thought of your hands,
swallow-small; and like them, never still.
I thought of you holding a knife, an orchard apple, a fallen bird, my face.
I knelt among the tomato vines held on their stakes,
thick with green leaves going yellow around red offerings.
I sobbed. 
I couldn't help myself.

In the indigo between coin-moon and a million stars,
between ink and score where the fermata speaks to a single heart beat,
there lies the explanation, the cold-water borderline
between order and chaos, wrapped in silk, 
held between fingers like a tarot card.

Oh...chaos the surface and the core at once.
Order, these lines, these rows, these days and weeks;
the ones I live in now,
with my routines, my dog, and this terrible, lovely music
pressed between my ear and the late-year air--
for you,
for angels and devils,
for sane and insane,
carried on a gust that swirls forward in a round dance,
no end or beginning,
called by no one, moving through rows and woods, over water, into winter.
_______