Once In a Lifetime

 Once in a lifetime you get the Big Prize

but it comes wrapped in rainy days

and cotton batting, incognito if you will.

You stupid fuck, wake up will you,

all you have to do is throw out a hand

and there it is, shiny as the 4th of July,

fantastic as a first kiss, spinning like a new planet.

You'll look back like Girl Genius some day and say,

yes yes THAT was the day, the thing that lit you, burned you brilliantly.

Sure, the slog and grind will still be there, grinning with

its lopsided sour grapes grin, the days will still stick with thorns,

but the thing, the marvelous unexpected thing, stays lit, stays true.

Look, Bunky, what I tell you is true, and when it's over you'll

howl and want to die, that's part of it, the lit thing the fantastic thing

that comes once in a lifetime, but if you throw out your hand,

your OTHER hand just as the ship is going under, sometimes

the once in a lifetime comes twice, repeats itself like double sixes,

and there you are, lucky and lucky again, you shiner, you flaming star.

---------

for Dverse Poetics "Once in a Lifetime"

Music: Blaze Foley "Clay Pigeons"

Bad Eye

 It's the harsh angle of the sun in August, I think, that tricks my bad eye. In the stillborn space where the walnut tree smothered its  lessers with shade, a cape of weedy green masquerades as grass, as lawn, a trickster for my blind spot. 

In the magnified bright reflecting off the house's siding in afternoon, the mulberry stump sends up a fresh forest of suckers, higher by the day. This is fool's summer, when what was is gone and what remains puts on a play, wearing a harlequin mask, and kindly saves a part for me, I tell myself "There is plenty of time, to repair, heal, do more than was done today." 

This is my bad eye telling tales and the iridescent image swims through a mirror that flows  in and out of vision, in and out of me, like life itself. 

______

for my friend Dora who is hosting at Dverse Prosery today. Her theme is "Luminous Accountings" and requires the use of the italicized section from "King of the River" by Stanley Kunitz. 

Process notes : I seem to be losing the vision in my left eye due to a mysterious spot that showed up on my eye exam in February. Some days it is just blurry, other days all I can see with it is shapes. Fortunately, my right eye remains just garden variety nearsighted. As if to make a joke as I wrote this, my  eye decided that an ocular migraine was in order. I get them sometimes. Not to be deterred, i counted the words up four times and they came to 144 each time. 

Last year my neighbor complained, quite reasonably, about my big mulberry tree that was scraping his roof and dropping berries pell mell on his porch, so I had it cut down, Then last month my beloved black walnut tree split in a storm and had to be removed. In the bare place where its shade prevented much from growing, there is now a carpet of some sort of creeping weed. Things come, things go--including me sooner or later--and are replaced by something else. Any passing dinosaur can tell you it's true. 

Walnut & Mulberry

 My big black walnut tree is gone--the storm took it.

The stump is something like the white skin where a ring recently was. I'd like to have a funeral procession but I lack coffin, instruments, mourners. I would like to dance for my lost companion, but am denied. Being old is like being a kid again, in the worst way. I nag: Watch your step don't fall careful with that don't drop it. I goggle at the world and the thousand things I cannot do. My mulberry tree was thirty feet tall. Now it sends up suckers, keen to be what it was, again. I can reach out my hand and touch the top. Watch where the root cracked the walk. Look where you're walking don't trip better sit, crack your knees catch your breath. I'm the same inside, what happened to this flesh, this life? Like the mulberry, it was cut down. Like the back walnut--the storm took it.

Post-Apocalyptic Movie Buff Gimbal Lock

 After the last movie theater closed,

cluttering the world with popcorn debris and unnumbered Curies NASA reverted to using steam locomotives. The astronauts in their unexpectedly heavy white mummy suits sweated and itched in the smoky, manic compartments all the way to the youth hostel one town over where the older crew got the bends from dust in their blood. An old woman with the moon in her eyes served them soup made from hemp rope and lemonweed then offered beds requiring a series of keys and a free shove. A movie was shown, an old celluloid copy and the astronauts' eyes were like searchlights as Ray Milland manned the ack ack gun and smiled at them in their theater-style seats up in the air, astonished, easy targets.

Hrimfaxi

 

Hrimfaxi shakes and cold stars fill the sky--

His breath falls and frosts the fields. 

Like the currents of tide or wind,

his movement is his purpose and your life

is simply a road for his hooves,

a place where he will go and has been.

Nótt whispers and he slows;

she raises her hand and time stutters, every star goes still.

The firmament is the field through which he goes,

and his hoofbeats are the ticking of time.

His body moves through wheeling constellations,

and the stars are the grains of his pitch-hooved mill. 

No structure can hold Hrimfaxi, no time precedes him.

There has never been an hour when he was not there,

carrying Nótt away from and toward Dagr and Skinfaxi.

Day, loud bright harlequin on Loki's leash, I give you no care.

I wait for Hrimfaxi, who stamps and stars tumble unmoored,

whose sides are bellows for a cold fire, and who treads the moonlit air.

for Dora at Dverse Poetics. 

Also in honor of my shieldmaiden BFF, Joy.

 

Death

 

Death--the capitalized one--

in his cosplay hoodie

holding his skateboard

is as dull as junk mail.

It's lying there dying that's terrifying.

That's when the real demons throw down their smokes

and get to work,

their feet up to the ankles in mud.

It's being left behind that's gutting.

It's the empty mug on the other side of the table

white as any skull,

that sends an earthquake along the bones.

Death--you know the one I mean--

is just a messenger

an ambulatory text

an intern dispatched to do the grunt work.

Save your fear for the stupidly almighty hours

killing that kiss, that poem, that dream

you had on the tip of your life

that's never going to come to you now. 

When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.