Vee Haff Informayshun!

As some of you have astutely discerned, I think Emmylou Harris is the second most fabulous human being on the planet after STWIASD (She To Whom I Am Slavishly Devoted). Only the most churlish of you would point out that Emmylou has no opinion about me, cos she, um, well, doesn't know I exist. 

But the wonderful blogger Sioux has alerted me to a really excellent article in the current issue of Garden & Gun magazine!  Garden & Gun??? Southerners...y'all are nucking futs! But the article is a fine one. Find it HERE.

Garden & Gun. What's next, Okra & Ought Sixes? 

This post approved by Giuseppe Verdi, kitten.

______

The Check-Up

The doctor is a white bird
Under a fluorescent sun.
I am a little frightened fish
Half mermaid, half undone.

He asks, "What brings you in today?
What do you mean by appearing here this way?
Have you had anything to eat?
Grasses, communion, meat?

Have you ever wondered how a raindrop stays round?
Or why they always fall?
What's the big attraction with the ground?
How old are you? Any idea at all?


Sexual partners?
Male?
Female?
Out to their families?
Symptoms?
Wings?
Tail?

What drugs have you taken?
This morning?
Last week?
Can you tell me?
Did you bring them?
Can you speak?

What did your father die of?
What did your relationships die of?
Or do they still persist?
Is there anything I've missed?

When you were a child,
Any fevers, coughs, or chills?
Was there one particular day
When you were most desperately, painfully ill?

When your heart beats,
Is it like a Chesapeake & Ohio train?
Are your ribs the track, your legs the trestle?
Does it rattle through your brain?


Or is it more like the lazy waves
Rolling in off the lake in July?
If you remember the time you had a hand to hold,
Will you act the girl, and cry?


All right.
I see.
None of this is exact.
None of this is free.


How do you like the paper gown?
Are you afraid of needles, sharps, and pokes?
Do you think you could go like this, for me?
Do you think this is a joke?


You can get dressed now, we're done.
Did you feel the need to pray? To dissociate? To come?
It's all normal.
Take three of these.
Call the desk with questions, or if you start to seize."


The doctor is a white bone,
His diploma terra cotta;
And I am a little frightened fish
Slipping back into the water.


_______
 

If I Were A Fox

 

If I were a fox,
I would crave clean sheets--
Ones you slept on.
Ones like these.

I know that you
Steal out to kiss the night,
Like a somnambulist,
Hardly knowing that you do, or why.

If I were a fox,
I would trick the morning,
Shake the vole,
Hide my kits all over your rolling lawns.

When you come to yourself,
Don't disbelieve in red things, just because.
Don't dismiss the lingering feel of fur,
Of tail, of paws.

If I were a fox,
I would lie hidden in your other life--
Beyond naming,
Beyond saving,
And especially beyond laws.

_______

for One Shot Wednesday 49

Thief

My desire to steal has become so keen

That I can balance on it,

Out here,

Like a black cat carrying a bird through daisies.


Your bedroom window glass was keeping us apart, and so

I wrapped my red kimono around my fist and broke it,

And now, for a minute,

There is a naked woman standing with her toes in your dewy lawn.


The sound woke him.

He asked you, "Who is it, dear?"

You said,

"A banshee and her hound."

You said,

"Sugar melted in cream."

You said

Something in Romany and the sun rose higher.




My desire to steal has become my heartbeat.

I touch nothing if it isn't your skin.

I could wait out here forever,

But I won't.

Gimme

Gimme

Gimme.

Send him away.

Let me in.

Believe me, my scorching dark dove,

The sky is always big enough

To hold every bird.

_______

Daddy's In His Shop

Daddy's in his shop
With the gadgets and the glop,
Toiling all the afternoon
To turn potatoes into shoes.

His coffee's laced with paint
All the better to enable
Him to fix his extra eye
Which had fallen on the table.

He doesn't eat his sandwich
Kindly placed at his right hand.
When you ask him what he's doing,
He says, "you wouldn't understand."

Electric charges bring the largest cat you've ever seen
Back from the brink to have a drink of flaming kerosene.
Then it eats some rotten meat and gaks up on the floor...
When daddy takes its heart for parts, it will not gak no more.

The missing neighbor
Is used for labor--
He claps on and claps off.
The answering machine
Eats aubergines
But has a nasty cough.


There are nails in a jar, petroleum and tar,
And little screws rolling loose;
Elbow joints and old toast points
Plus a railroad train caboose.


Daddy's in his shop
Of a Sunday afternoon,
He doesn't give a shit about the grandkids;
He pees in a can,
Sleeps in a sedan,
And lines his hat with old can lids.

_________

Fireblossom does not understand "puttering." 
No cats were harmed in the writing of this poem.
Photograph by Rob Hanson for One Shoot Sunday. 

Snow White, Hopeful Lycanthrope

"I got a woman
Way over town,
That's good to me.
Oh yeah!"  --Ray Charles

I keep an actor in a small suitcase on a high shelf.

I wait until it snows,

Then I take him out.


 I love a woman in the flatlands.

She can turn me inside out just cos she wanna,

And she wanna, sometimes, when the moon is new.


I told the actor,

"Here is your mark,"

Then pointed to a place where the floorboards were missing.


He laughed and said,

"I know why you love the snow.

It is because you, too, are always falling."


I wrote a letter to My Love.

I blush to say I begged.

I said, "If you don't do me soon,

I will turn into a saint,

Or some sort of Sunday school teacher,

And that would be a diabolical shame."


I keep my heart

hidden in a cookie jar

in my kitchen.


I keep the actor high,

and only feed him limes.

He says you won't come,


But I howl and call

all night in the blizzard,

just in case you do.

 * * *

God and Eros

As a child, I was given a skull and a knife to play with.


I turned the skull on its back, so it could look up and see God.

I gave it the knife for an eye, to sharpen its vision.


I said, "Dollie, what do you see?"

She said, "One eye sees a silver blade,

The other sees a table of sky."




For a long time, we played God and Girl,


My knife-eyed Dollie and me.


She said, "The clouds are plates,


The birds are tea cups."




I said, "Here are my fingers for spoons,


And a sugar of bones for our bowl."




My mother was angry that year.


She blew through like sleet.


"What are you doing?" she demanded, cleverly using the Wind's voice to accuse.


"Playing church," I lied.




When I grew up, I used knife-eyed Dollie's face to make some Woman love me.


"You see so much," she said.


I am the restless wolf with the moon in its mouth.


I make crows crazy with their own very blackness.




"Good girl," said the Woman,

And I kissed her hard.


 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~