Common Fence

 

Some kind of poison, like a wounding word

has found the vines on the common fence.

My neighbor, fond of bottles,

goes around spraying when he's sober enough--

whole years go by when he's not.

I love the vines, the green view, their wild blind reaching.

They have more faith than a cleric,

more will than any new arrival with a nickel.

The vines are sick and brown on the neighbor's side,

thick and green on mine, and yet,

at the tips of the sick stems healthy tendrils have appeared.

Each morning I go out with my dog to check the vines.

I move slowly. Sleep is an old love whose face is a memory.

The seasons come and go, one dog is followed by a new one.

I worry for the vines, though they seem to be immortal.

The neighbor is the third there's been on that side.

My dog is the seventh of seven and may be a charmed soul.

I can't remember when the vines first appeared, or how the sun

got so high. Ten years go by in an afternoon.

I'm tired and call my dog to go inside. He follows me instantly,

with no thought for the vines, and no doubt at all

that he should follow me. I could cry for loving him so.

_________

for Sunday Muse #217.

A Spilling of Ephemera

 

My life spilled out and spread.

The glass lay on its side like a drunk or a sleeper.

"I await my dream lover," it said, and I called the police. 

One cop turned out to be the Right One and they jumped the nightstick the next day.

"I can't even get arrested in this town," I bitch to my spilled life.

It never says anything back.

I try staring it down but all I see is my reflection and every time it's a draw.

Art for art's sake, just like in the movies. Me in the role of me.

I plunge into my spilled life like a mermaid,

wearing it like a scaly tail. I sing to sailors and to other mermaids

such lovely songs that end in ruin. I am a chest bobbing on the surface,

a promise I can never keep to you or to myself, 

a bright reflection in a dazzled eye, 

a quicksilver tease of things rich with remove, 

a luminous dying and deathless ephemera.

___________

for Sunday Muse #216

Greta and Ted, A Love Story

 

image by Corinne Geersten

Ghosts don't normally send fire through the mail, but they tend

to be a little bit muzzy-headed, the dead.

Water stamps temper these communications slightly

but flame is a Gypsy and wanders brightly,

making suggestions of passion on the carpets where they end.

Greta, not knowing she is dead, not knowing she's a shade,

sends these immolations postage-paid

and if such silly wooden houses go up, if roofs collapse,

then their occupants' lives, like hers, will lapse

and you can't fight infernos with a lemonade glass.

Poor Greta, sharing hell with the taciturn Unabomber,

who wishes all kinds of ill upon her,

who stinks and mumbles and never changes clothes or shaves

so that when one letter is returned to sender

she will blow and burn so that none can mend her.

Lonely Greta, sullen Ted

with a packed pipe and a black rose on their summer-dry graves.

_______

for Sunday Muse #214.

Jenny Mechanical

 

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house

but too human for the tool shed.

She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,

provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.

She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer

and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,

telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.

She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,

but she is crying into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

She is needed but not loved, maintained but casually disposable,

and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,

glowing pink

then rose

then lavender

then blue

then indigo

like space that has no atmosphere yet sustains those billion burning stars.

_________

for Sunday Muse #213. 

Poor Betty

 

She built a doorway of hard-done-by and walked straight into it,

then said she'd been beaten by the future.

She placed a putty god in a mushroom soup sky

like a bumper sticker on a car made of wind.

Go, Betty, Our Lady of the Tinkertoy Triptych.

It's sad magic to watch a woman become an infant,

plastic ring on a tiny fat hand, teething on the little vile grenades

she treats like dollies, dumb scapegoats to blame for her dead dandelion smile.

______

for The Sunday Muse #212.

Castaway

 I have searched for my twin in prismed multiplicity,

called in secret language for my double in duality,

milled in crowds,

wandered the countryside,

hurried after a vanishing face I thought I recognized,

and waited as night fell, dawn came, and still I lingered

searching for my twin

but always as a castaway, a solitary stranger.

______

for The Sunday Muse #211.

The Post Office of Souls

 

At the Post Office of Souls, there's a late letter

and the hand that wrote it is the hand that delayed it.

The sorting machines are made of jacaranda and white iris--

only the postmistress is fully automated, an Egypto-Mechan perfect fit.

Stamps roll out from dreams and are hard to remember.

Women hired to sleep them also catalog--they are pregnant with postage

and have your address on file, a complete roster of your life in miniature.

They deliver you, cradle you, sing you on through to your dotage.

The aisles are of indigo water mermaid clerks circulate under

estimate arrival times, currents, allowing for windage and mercurial local poohbahs.

Open an envelope, catch the scent of lilacs, bribe Anubis with a kiss

and receive safe passage, receipt of contents, S.W.A.K and certified, you cannot lose us.

________

for Dverse "Compound Me." I have used "underestimate."