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

Beauty

 I stole beauty from another girl--

Ripped it right out of her hands
In a hail of cosmetics and hairspray,
Then ghosted away with it to my underground lair.
But when I tried to bash it open,
The lock wouldn't budge
And anyway, it wasn't my size.


I took it to my mother's house and dropped it dead center on her holiday table--
Shrieking, I raked my broken fingernails right down to the bone of love and hatred that props us together, and she
Embraced
The locked
Foreign
Beauty that I ripped off from some bitch on the bus,
And said, "Daughter,
At last!
Welcome home."

___________

for What's Going On? "Beauty"

Bachelor Rat

 

There is a bachelor rat

living alone in my neighbor's garage

as I also live alone,

a single dog lady in my lighted box. 

I have begun to feed him

leaving a Tupperware of dog kibble,

french fries, a leaf of lettuce

or whatever, out for him last thing each night.

Watching from the window

I see him, five minutes later, skittering

across the yard like a pleasure

boat on choppy seas, to claim his plunder. 

I eat in the evenings

in front of tv, solving mysteries

as the bachelor rat

also does, always alert for killers.

Predators concern us both

(mine call me up, his lay low in the ground ivy.)

The neighbor behind tries

to poison him, as social media tries to poison me.

We just woke up in these skins,

he in his, me in mine, flesh costumes of the moment,

costumes that get hungry, cold,

ill, old, and any number of other similarities.

Why feed that bachelor rat?

some may ask, aghast. He's nothing but vermin.

I just feel like there are so many cats

set on doing harm to one little rat, or one old woman,

and so I set out his Tupperware

meal last thing while letting my dog out each night.

I wish him good fortune, my simpatico

bachelor rat, to make it through the winter all right.

_______________

Paris

 

So here I am in Paris

but it isn't really.

It is only what I imagine Paris to be

or would like it to be

or have hoped it would be.

So here I am, in Paris, with you

but not exactly.

You are not what I imagined you to be

or would like you to be

or had hoped you would be. 

So here I am alone

in a strange place.

I am not how I imagined myself to be

or would like to be

or had hoped I would be. 

I wish I had a loaf of French bread

and a sweet pastry

since even in my imagining, wine is out.

I wish I had a hand to hold

or a book to read

written in both languages.

I wish I had a balcony

overlooking a busy boulevard

full of small cars

and bright bicycles.

I wish there were geraniums in hanging pots

and a flowered gown to wear.

I wish that for a day

I could be not-old again.

There would be an unmade bed,

also a dog,

and perhaps a man, or a woman.

I'd be happy either way.

So here I am in Paris

but not Paris.

Here I am with you,

but not you at all.

Here I am

whoever it is that I am,

leaning out from my balcony

in my flowered gown,

completely mystified like a little girl

giving her dolls names like

Hortense

Matilda

Jeanne Marie

or Shay Caroline

calling them by name and serving tea. 

_________

I used THIS list of prompts again, this time #9. 

Orphans

 

We were made orphans by the war and brought here

fresh as the day's catch, stunned and open-mouthed.

Maps at the front of our classrooms had to be updated daily

as bombardments revolutionized cartography.

We liked to climb things. Nearby hills, the orphanage fences,

bunk bed ladders, walls, and each other when the explosions came too near.

We lost many things. Teddy bears. parents, barrettes, books, brothers and

sisters, homes, friends, cereal bowls, pets, and our sense of fear.

Years have passed, along with everyone we knew except each other.

Our teachers turned dead and brown like ivy from the gas.

We developed immunity and emerge now changed, arriving in towns

across our devastated country, with our steady gaze and detached manner.

We are young, beautiful in our way, outwardly unmarked and shining.

Approach us, kiss us, make plans to repopulate and recover

from the waste, carnage and horror through us, the only hope remaining.

We are as bold as bullets, jacketed, calling you pretty pigeon, townie, lover.

__________

for Sunday Muse #260

and shared with desperatepoets open link  #4. 

Music: Tommorrow from Annie. A favorite of mine.  Yes, I'm a sap at heart.

Un Recuerdo (A Memory)

 

When I was younger, one of my co-workers

was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.

She was just always there,

a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--

some sort of salad. 

She was just an ample, 

stationary emplacement 

as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin

to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties

still rumbling around Havana,

something you'd smile at

but not feel had anything to do with you.

She wore a cross that rested on her bosom,

like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis. 

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.

"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce. 

I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.

What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather

blood and bone and breath

breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.

There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,

just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.

British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs

in grainy archive footage

as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing. 

"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered. 

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.

I still think of that day at the hospice, though

and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,

like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,

at that wind-down hour.

He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,

but though we protest that we were only in the middle, 

I want to see how it ends

he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,

"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Dunn. 

The last line says, "Nothing is forever, not even suffering." 

Music: Compay Segundo Chan Chan

Handsome

 Nobody thought he was handsome except for me,

the sharp-elbowed stick girl with the camera around her neck.

Always, he would show up on the street early,

a midnight cat sliding in on private grooves, to sit and wait

on the curb for the other workmen and the Jonah bus 

that swallowed them away.

If I could've, I'd have built him a church,

with Host of egg sandwich and coffee black or white.

I'd swear I saw him take out a rosary one diesel-rattle dawn

and it was strung with candy skulls and baseballs.

I imagined his prayers were colorful foreigners wandering 

in warehouse downriver drab Detroit, hated by strangers, loved by God.

After an absence, getting off gin and bad poetry,

I returned to find him gone, the bus stop shifted, the lone tree down.

The starlings had lost their home, me my jones,

and my camera stayed empty for a year after that, like an unfed stray.

I asked a girlfriend once, "Remember that guy, the different one

we used to see waiting?" Ugh, she said, that one. 

Like I said, only I thought he was handsome, like rain, 

like new work boots pawned.

_______

 for Word Garden Word List--Dave Kelly.

In Camera

"You've got to remain to bein' yourself... you cannot be

Nobody else, it ain't no use tryin' bein' no whirlwind

An' uh, jumpin' here an' an' playin' checkers with

Your own life, that ain't gonna work, baby..."  --Propher Omega 

The mirror is running a con.

No reflection or meat-suit can tell you who you are.

Yes you, in disguise there. You are

a sparrow flown straight from the hand of God.

You are a bulb that wants its light back,

but you are the light.

It's the bulb that struts in its brittle body

voguing like it thought you up.

We have come through the looking glass, 

in costume, in camera, incognito,

even to ourselves. We wander lanes of traffic like amnesiacs,

dreamers who show up naked and unprepared, in a panic of shame

for a test we have already taken and passed. 

________

for Sunday Muse 227. 

Music: Adrian Belew and Prophet Omega "I Am What I Am"

Mykonos

 Sugar plum, fairy

who kindly took me in,

you looked like one of those

white buildings on Mykonos

clean as a tide

in an open shirt.

Me, just a ragamuffin then, but

you treated me like turquoise and silver,

a small sparkling thing.

I loved your love of Gato Barbieri

and the notion

that I was worth the introduction.

Sugar pea, you knew me better

than I knew myself,

didn't you?

That soothing shade of Greek blue is called

Ambiguous,

and it's lovely, like early morning

or an offered hand

in a pearly cuff.

______

for Dverse Poetics "double dipper." 

I used Sugar Plum. 

The Man With The Glass Eye

The man with the glass eye
possesses smooth clarity of vision.
He rolls his glass eye
to dispense balm for frail children who then recover.

Look into his glass eye.
You will see yourself split into fractals--
all the selves you are capable of being.
He greets each one
warmly, personally.

At night, he sets his eye on the nightstand
in a glass of solution.
It shimmers like a planet there, from which horoscopes might be drawn.
In the morning he replaces it and is filled with intelligent resolve.

If you meet the man with the glass eye,
do not ask what happened to his "real" eye.
It is in your head,
whispering sweetly.
_____

for Day 10 of my 39 poems in 39 days.

image: Tete d'homme barbu by Picasso.

Rumors Of Wars

image by Rebecca Sygnus

We were foreigners bloomed in exotic soil,
a kind of invasive pet.

Wherever we went, we had nothing,
and so performed and begged and stole,
spreading our arms in sheepish apology as our bellies growled.

We wore the emblems and baubles of our homeland,
as meaningless as gum wrappers here.
We were restless,
resentful,
thrilled to be free of all that constrained us at home.

None of us were ever going to wear
those conical hats
or our men grow those little goatees threaded gray with eastern wisdom.

Someone called my name, in accusation or greeting
and I looked up to see only my familiar ceiling.
There was no "we", no scraping sharp-edged survival,
and so I rose, fetched the morning paper from the step,

And searched through every page, as if for crumbs
to feed the thing I had felt
in the life I never lived at all
with the imagined companions upon whom there was no reporting

Though I missed them with a ferocity that held on for hours
like a dying foxhole brother.
_________

For Sunday Muse #77, from a wild and intense dream I had before waking this morning. Why I should dream of being part of a lost military expedition in Indochina is beyond me, but there it is.