Travel Stories For Girls

 

Someone messed with my story when I was still young,

trying to bend it like a bonsai tree

and so I wrapped it in paper and hid it away

in the throat of a bird, clandestinely. 

I was obliged to call my assaulter "mother"

and expected to pretend devotion.

Her mask was on her face so long

that her true face had become the illusion.

Grown, I went where the robins gathered

and found the cardinal who carried my loss.

It was in a grave, wrapped with quilts, 

but had marked its place with two twigs crossed.

I put it back in my body and felt its ice,

then its beat and its fine red heat.

There is nothing I love more than the thing

I smuggled past the killer-- the best of me.

That is not to say that all survived--

those who say they love are heard as fakes,

assassins or fools; give this hungry woman jewels

and see what a pretty figure my turned back makes.

______________

for Word Garden Word List--Sula 

Music: Damien Jurado Orphans in the Key of E

Big Sur

 

Back in bus-and-duffel days

turned out, less to than away,

half-high, with no plan,

I went up the coast.

San Luis Obisbo, Carmel, San Fran

and on up to Portland.

That's where we go now

--people my age--

but this was then

when I had no means, no ways,

and just my naivete.

Out in the water, somebody said

to watch for the whales.

They live in the dark underneath,

and like me, come up, then back down

without learning a thing or so it seemed.

On the bus some guy liked

Gordon Lightfoot

You've Been Talking In Your Sleep. 

He spoke my language like a native

better than the pidgin kid that was me.

He told me a blue whale's heart

weighs as much as a grand piano

and can be heard from two miles away.

Bye daddy, behind me down the coast--

thanks for kicking me out.

I wondered, as Seattle became B.C.,

what if it's all just big empty water,

and me lugging some big booming beater for nothing?

Or what if I'm all ears

but the watersong was never for me?

What then? 

And what now?

I look out these days not at California coast

but at Michigan lakes,

cold and deep, choppy or still.

I know only that I still don't know

and never will.

________

for What's Going On? -- Whales and Other Wonders.

Music: Bobby Womack California Dreamin'

My Bear

 

My bear

has to be awoken gently.

(We've been through any number

of jarring alarm clocks, smashed to bits on the floor.)

My bear

needs to get up by April

or he's groggy all summer.

Wakey, baby,

I whisper in his cute furry ear.

My bear

is the super in our building.

His keys jingle like

Christmas bells.

He is jolly and waddles to the rescue.

My bear

gets dissed by some of the 

harpies on the top floor.

Then they go kiss

the apes and hyenas they married

who keep Cameros under tarps in the parking garage.

My bear

solves problems by waving

at them with his massive paws.

He groans offendedly

when this does not solve the problem.

Then he tries chewing on it or tipping it over.

My bear

makes the residents' kids

get out of the storeroom in the basement.

He gets up on two legs

and shakes his head no.

Some of them need to change trousers afterward.

My bear

is my bruin castle keep.*

We talk in bed and decide

that if we have a girl we'll name her Ursala,

and if we have boy he'll go to Boston

to play ice hockey.

My bear

knows that I will buy

his favorite fruit preserves

and real honey in jars, not the fake stuff.

We have twelve different

honey dippers

and each wear one ring.

My bear

sits back on his butt like a Buddha.

I wear a bucket hat and a thousand

cuffs and necklaces.

He huffs the air with his big fat black nose.

I sigh and smile.

It's a good life.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Help! A Bear Is Eating Me!

*this line is adapted from a previous poem of mine, "Our Bear."

Music: The Bare Necessities

The Water Dove

 

I kissed the dove

who made her nest

in the lonely pool at the bottom of my heart.

Little water-dove

sweet creature, feathered mother,

when I breathe, you flutter, shift, and sigh.

I kissed the foxes

whose meal was lately

in the henhouse where all rain is born.

Little hidden ones

with your silent black feet,

when I cry, you peer out from moonlit memory.

I kissed the gamesman

in the old pink cottage

because he was there, and silent, like God.

I was the little nanny

in the graveyard singing

to the doves, and foxes, and gamesman

peering back at me from the lonely pool 

of moonlit memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Life After Life. 

Music: Rodrigo Adagio 

Three Views of a Singularity

 

There were

     a fox 

     in the wildflowers,

a coyote

     in the weeds,

and me

     lying in the lilies, waiting.

The fox offered

     certain pieties

that the red-necked chicken

     spoke tacitly against.

The coyote carried

     a lucky amulet

that the rabbit might be missing

     could she rise from his belly.

There was

      a soup

     strained from April,

a blues

     blown from 

     scents of oranges

and me

     lying in the lilies

     waiting.

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Yusef Komunyakka 

Music: Anouar Brahem The Astounding Eyes of Rita

AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

You

"Maybe tomorrow honey

Some place down the line, I'll wake up older

So much older mama,

I'll wake up older and I'll just stop all my trying." --Jackson C. Frank

You, wearing your father's coat

and a ribbon in your hair,

you're the one I spoke to in a blackbird dream.

You, like a pocket sun,

burning down and rising up in continual blaze

all while reading a book, riding the bus, counting raindrops on the pane.

At home you wear a long shirt

made from calendar pages and paste.

Both are white as summer light, or a fallen blue jay's breast.

You, in love with Michigan in the fall, Morrocco in hazel eyes.

In your boot, a trove of travel tickets,

bad paper, and the echo of smoke-gone nights.

You lay your heart in the curve of the sickle moon

and claim to have no desires,

but they leave your skin and howl in the hills all night. 

You, with a sense of home in your chest like a tumor,

wounding and soothing you like the gin you used to love

until you can hardly stand it anymore.

There is a house from 1925, with a Packard in the drive.

Someone is washing it as if it were a memory

there on the tarmac arc beneath the pear tree.

You held your dolls up against the leaded windows

before you were born, after you died, 

before any of this thorned tapestry you're stitched into now.

The leaves are turning red, the nights are cool.

There is no kiss that holds a hospital for souls,

no soft-bound convent that knows the right prayer.

You can just listen to the yarn-ball clock and when you're ready

let it fall, think of nothing, and find yourself home

where we're waiting for you, those whose names you knew, and now recall.

______

shared with Desperate Poets open link. 

Music: Janis Joplin Little Girl Blue

Vox Humana

 

My voice slipped out as I slept,

taking the path between rows of white narcissus

to the upturned boat, just port side and starboard side,

no deck, no keel, with the world below and beyond.

It had normally slept in the blanket of my throat,

silent, cupped in a chrysalis.

Now it went up and down upon the earth

filterless, making many enemies, there when I awoke.

I hid my voice inside a bell, but it was only louder.

I stuffed it in the pages of a newspaper, but caged birds repeated everything.

I set it in the hands of my lover, and my lover left, cursing.

I hid it in the sound hole of a guitar and it spoke in every language.

I taught it manners and it died of boredom.

I taught it doublespeak and it ran for high office.

I taught it sanctimony and it attracted a congregation.

I taught it flattery and it was beloved. 

Desperate, I taught it poetry and it lay down again in my throat

where my bones fell in love with it.

A doctor diagnosed the shaking as palsy

and prescribed a pilgrimage to Branson or Las Vegas.

_________

for Challenge #1 Desperate Poetry. 

Music: Leonard Cohen A Singer Must Die

Concubine of the Quarter Moon

 

I did not hire the day laborer inside whose bones I ride. 

Here is motion, here is time, here is the spinning world.

Here is the trowel, mortar, and metronome hand industrious.

Here is the moon, the hidden language, the valuable burl. 

Here is my compulsion to sing, and my throat empty as a new vase. 

Here is the afflicted tree holding one jewel and a thousand birds.

Merged, the swordsman and the healer, missionary from God.

Ice and ivy grown on my tongue break the bricks with words.

I am a scorched bird born of lightning, hatched from geode silence.

I am more beautiful than any river. I am cloaked in thorns and tar.

One day, laborer and wall will dissolve intestate

and I will rise, concubine of the quarter moon, magna voce avatar.

_______

Self-Portrait

 

Here I am, grime-faced at the bottom of a mine shaft. 

Here I am behind this ever-changing Halloween mask.

Here I am gorgeous, touched by God and given favor.

Here I am, so eat my dust, see you bitches later.

Here I am untouchable, unthinkable, unclean.

Ask dear mother, she'll explain exactly what that means.

Here I am quiet, just a watcher in the wings

made of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Here I am inside a book, inside an old cocoon.

Here I am reflecting light as if I were the moon.

Here I am in love with you, a fool to end all fools.

Here I am, a joker queen who can't tell shit from jewels.

Here I am to dazzle you with swooping magic madness.

Here I am one hour more, paralyzed with sadness.

Here I am, an urchin girl without a pot to piss in

to fetch your smoking pipe and tell you where you can put this in.

Here I am for Jesus, here I am for Puck.

To those who'd like to pin me down, I wish you all good luck.

_________

for Sunday Muse #198.

Line 8 taken from "The Walrus & the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll.

 

Medea Visits Phaedra On The Ninth Floor

 

Hey Phaedra, what gives?

I came as soon as I could.

Creepy how they lock the door like that.

Hey Phaedra, shh now, don't cry.

You're emotional and it's late in the day.

They said something happened with the kids.

When they call like that, it's never good.

Acamas will be all right, he's in his room with his cat.

Demophon told me it's all a lie

and Hippy himself won't exactly say.

Did they give you those little cups with lids

for pills to take with their shitty food?

God, Phaedra, it's so hot, why do they lock the thermostat?

Theseus will be all right as long as his martini's dry

and I'm sure he doesn't think you're cray.

So, Phaedra honey, just tell me this,

was it Hippy who put you in this mood?

You've been just like a mom to him. No one's denying that.

I know it's cringey but what happened? Tell me. Try.

You know I'll listen. I'm here. I'll stay.

This all got Theseus where he lives.

He's gone to Poseidon's to bitch and brood.

Phaedra baby, Hippy's just talking trash.

He's confused or maybe even high.

Aw honey, who can figure brats today anyway?

_________

Rimas Dissolutas for Dverse Poetics. 

Good Friday

 

In 1978, I found a man crouched inside of my borrowed tv,

building an engine that resembled Dick Cavett.

I accused him of stealing my off-hours, asked him if he

was my father or my child and he said, "No, I am just here

to eat my way out of you from within."

I turned the channel knob and he appeared in tails,

then drag, then a Broadway production of "An American In Paris"

and finally in a ridiculous purple wig that kept sliding off.

I told him he had to leave before Easter, which was

expected presently, but he clung to his mechanical Cavett

and broke for commercial before my mother arrived, complaining.

"What have you done to my tv, it has a dent in it 

and the Jesus is gone." Before she could stab me, I moved away

to a flat in Chelsea where Sappho knits booties for monsters

and I lie on the table like a place mat, serving six and howling.

_______

a second poem for the Corso word list. 

Remember The Alamo

 

"And now! What did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?" --St. John Perse

"Love is a stranger in an open car" --the Eurythmics

When love is a stranger, things can get twisted.

A girl can get sick, being the McDonald's drive-thru of eating shit.

She may cop an attitude, or hear the cop say

to his partner, "That chick might as well just shoot herself."

That stuff sticks.

When daddy and his strophe wife, the replacement who shoots up Thomas Mann say,

"We'd like you to move out," after just a month of nervous dumbshow confusion,

the mulligans are running out and the road calls.

Where else you gonna go, baby?

When love is a stranger, there are still poets, painters, 

failed academics, leering dittybops, locust nutjobs

and grandfathers walking with canes into

the roaring pandemonium of downtown San Antonio.

There are still stricken drunks on pulpit stools

to tell you, baby,

let's get out of here,

I know a slaughterhouse on the south side

where a girl like you could see god in fumed gold Krylon.

When love is a stranger and the bones bend 

like spines of books with pages knifed out 

to hold some lack-rent new straw man's works,

it's time to get knocked up with an idea,

blood out a new plan and join the shanghaied sailors

at the 12-step dock in the free lunch church downtown.

When some oxford-cloth fuck tells you not to come back,

You come back anyway, you find a new high,

you start scudding down San Pedro with no idea

and no wheels, but a sacred heart, a votive candle,

and maybe a shine-ghost mirage of something better.

Slide into the Olmos Theater,

start tatting together the film edges until you spill

out with the rest of the film buffs,

find a tarantula on the pavement on the way home and say,

"I will not die here." 

That's when you pick up some pride, some Spanish 

and some mom and pop Texican deliciousness

before doing the dishes to pay.

Hey chica,

it doesn't have to be this way.

New friend Jake tells me that til it rings my ears.

He buys me the leather jacket I was jonesing for,

and suddenly it's my world too,

holy fuck, I have the right to be here,

and I am walking down Alamo towards the cenotaph

thinking maybe being a live coward or dead hero

are not the only choices that I have.

_________

For Word Garden Word List #3, Grover Lewis. 

Emmeline, In November

 

Emmeline, darkling darling of November

wears russet and red and the rain at dawn.

Her summer-gone ways turn miser to spender,

Emmeline, darkling darling of November.

Her cucks in the churchyard rotting, remember

the rose and her wrist that dropped it down.

Emmeline, darkling darling of November

wears russet and red and the rain at dawn.

__________

this is a triolet poem. 

the image is French language singer Mylene Farmer.

I have written about Emmeline before.

"Emmeline By Evening"

and "Emmeline By Wolf Light"

Je Ne Regrette Rien

 

Here is the door you did not go through.

You, ghost handed, 

the handle deaf, 

non-days gathered,

a luggage pyramid entombing clouds and afternoons

discovered centuries later 

by fictions wearing anvil boots.

Come, recover here as the iron rails of empires

rise and intertwine, cobras

reciting the Romantics

with voices quilted from collected rhododendrons.

Stay with what is real,

the blistering sun, or the blue ice calving

every next minute 

into each moment's astonished respiration.

I love you.

I don't love you.

I have never met you.

I can't live without you.

What use the playing cards of a ferret scrying in a tumbler?

There is another door,

an infinity of mirrors,

One True Path

and a million sherpas hauling sermons

up Everest for nobody.

Forget this door, Fortunato its drunken ticket taker.

Walk away,

go home, 

slip yourself into a vase bed and bloom wildly

between the cracks of dreams.

Rise, 

regret nothing,

and proceed in any direction

jubilantly,

automatically,

as even the slightest blade of grass will, like a deity.

____________

for The Sunday Muse #187.

Oracle

 I was raised on the page of a magazine,

a pencil rammed down my spine that I might

keep better time.

My mother said, here, marry this potato,

this barbell,

this party hat,

this disease.

In the night they came to me

on the night trapeze.

I collected hallucinations--Laika in a capsule made of experts.

That winter, my husbands built priests in the garage,

confessed to plates of spaghetti

and drove down mine shafts to golf club coffins.

Now, I begin with new bones,

eyes placed on coins like hor d'ouevres 

for the Oracle who breathes deep

and tells my future

even knowing that no one will believe her.

Wild Tuxedo

Wild tuxedo

giving me that give-a-shit look

careful as a politician

cold as a chain link fence in November

eyes gorgeous as turquoise earrings.

Wild Tuxedo

mother to the one that lived

Is he lazing in someone's home?

Is he by the road and nothing but bones?

There is hunger and then there is hunger.

The set-out bowl is always empty

in the morning 

when the traffic hums.

Wild Tuxedo

distrustful as a third wife

hardy as a weed

I wake up worrying about you sometimes

because

There is hunger and there is hunger.

There is the moon,

the refrigerator kicking on

the clock ticking

and offered love you spurn without a thought.

_______