Sensei At Sunset

 

And so, once again

I speak to you of the rat--

the bachelor rat--

who visits my garage.

He is a good rat,

even a fine one as rats go.

Never once has he lied to me

or tried to be anything

but what he is.

I feed him each evening

but tried to stop when the weather improved.

He came out and looked at me

as if to ask what had happened

and couldn't we overcome it?

I admire the rat.

He harbors no silent resentments.

He is who he is

all the time

and perhaps that is why he is alone.

I am alone also

and I am who I am, as the rat teaches.

I have a fine dog.

Many birds come to visit

and I feed this rat

rather than trying to kill him.

Goodnight, good sir.

I am grateful for your life

and my own.

___________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar. 

Music: Leon Russell Stranger In A Strange Land

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

The Duenna

 The light now is a young man

at a long table

with a full plate,

holding forth as jeweled women lean

to catch his words and scent like hungry cats. 

I stay next to the duenna, summer's old widow,

her skin a dead garden under the high neck and long black sleeves.

She used to read him stories

when the silence scared him

and he grew there in the crook of her arm

like a plum added to a grocery sack.

"I wish it would rain," I say to her as I have every day

since summer arrived like a visiting bishop

waving from a sedan chair,

cheered by women wearing head scarves

because others do, and God is watching.

The duenna pats my hand.

I am sick of the brightness of white shirt and linen jacket,

arms gesticulating as children's do when feeding the swans,

and the swans dip their faces in mock modesty.

If only the wind would rise and the sky darken,

this tablecloth would show

how wings are meant to be used,

plates and wine glasses smashing on the stone floor.

"In time," whispers the duenna, as calm as a bread loaf.

These blowy tales will wear themselves out,

the cats and swans will begin to bicker,

and the nights will lengthen beneath our feet like shadows.

Then the duenna will shed her weeds

and wear the moon on her shoulders glittering.

_______

Musci: Bananarama Cruel Summer

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.

Craxis

 

I keep seven calendars, six clocks,

and live in a brick house on a street with no wolves.

There is wind sometimes,

stars,

and I like to read when it rains.

I have been here twenty years and buried five dogs.

I was married before,

considered suicide,

kicked booze,

had a garden.

Every morning, I rise early.

Things must be begun immediately, worked on steadily.

I like muffins and coffee.

I think of my father tearing out his feeding tube,

eager to die if he couldn't have an omelette or a cigar.

The butter and blackberry jam are superb.

I will write another poem this morning,

do dishes,

take time for my projects,

watch some tv.

There is a new spot on my neck. It's nothing.

My dog watches me watch myself in the mirror.

I wonder if anyone will want my books when I die?

I shake it off, go and put on boots.

"Come on," I tell him, "We have jobs to do."

We spend the day outdoors,

come in happy and tired.

I give him part of my snack as a movie plays.

Then, time for bed. 

Brush teeth, 

consider what got done and what didn't,

go around and double check that the doors are locked.

Who would take care of my dog if I died?

We are both just heart beats

in a bed in a house in a sprawling world.

I kiss his head, turn off the light.

"I love you," I tell him,

as I used to tell my spouse, my child, my other dogs.

"See you in the morning."

I close my eyes and sleep easy, as if it were a given.

________

for Dverse Poetics The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, hosted by Linda Lyberg.

image: Woman With An Airdale Terrier by Edvard Munch

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"

CQD

 

Membrane Boy's parents have separated,

pending divorce.

They communicate through him, as if shouting

through a sealed porthole.

"Remind Frank to pick you up at six."

"Tell Linda a little junk food won't kill you."

He relays all this as if he were a Marconi operator

working Cape Race.

Membrane Boy arrives home to find

his mother in bed, all vials empty.

He dials 911.

"Man the lifeboats. Stop.

Position 700 nautical miles east of Halifax. Stop."

The 911 operator answers:

"Tell your father not to have his bimbo there."

"Tell your mother to stop playing the martyr."

Stop.

Membrane Boy's mother is a berg,

his father a double hull.

Trapped crew members bang hammers on the side,

A dead stoker smiles at the boy, his eyes blank.

"You have your whole future ahead of you, son," says the dead stoker.

"Full steam ahead," calls the Captain.

The lifeboats are lowered,

their wood between sea and air.

The ship lists, the lifeboats overturn.

Drowning souls cling

to the upturned hulls.

Membrane Boy wants to save them

to push them off

to save them

to watch them die

to be alone

to not be alone

Stop.

Bird

 There is a blue and yellow bird.

He can say "pretty bird."

He can take off your finger before you know it.

There is a room with a large cage,

or that is a large cage,

with a sentinel window where only light passes.

Say that this bird is yours.

Say that he lights on your shoulder.

Your skin will envy the window glass, and long for distance.

You can sit quietly in the evening.

The bird can strut and scream on its perch in the afternoon.

When you die, tomorrow or ten years from now,

The bird will tilt its head, fluff its feathers, tap its mirror

tap tap tap

in boredom or in victory, a line of sun across its rope trapeze.

_______

Interview

It is not new

this interviewing of myself.

In a dark or dull hour

ghosts rent my tongue,

black flocks rend my mind's sky.

I called a nightmare by name

to break its back.

Making a paste from fury and innocence,

I conjured a papier mache landlord,

all purpose, no heart.

The renters scattered.

The birds flew into a vortex, blind and damned.

Moving into my own skin,

I learned new oxygen

with my keys held tight between my fingers

just in case.

______

for Sunday Muse.

civil defense

concussions rain dust

on flowers in a fruit jar

steady in my palm

____

a fauxku for Out Of Standard "Gimme (Fallout) Shelter"

the image is from the movie "10 Cloverfield Lane"