They slumped dead in their soup, those Canadian Frenchmen, Their hearts stopped like cheap clocks by the winter or the wet or the notions some men get...
Down from them came my grandfather, the one I never knew-- The thing to do, it seemed to him, was to take a Native wife-- The one who bore him twins, then went mad, went dodgy, foggy, like summer grain gone bad.
The institution did what they could for her, the rest of her life-- The alcohol did what it could to him, with no wife and two boys dark of hair dark of eye until the day he died.
And so now, here I am, a seed blown down from northern winds, An island of French Canada and New York state, in love, as my grandfather was, with the midnight moon.
There are no islands where you are from, and so mine has come to you. What I really long to do is to stripe color across your cheeks, your shoulders, your thighs-- to paint a hand print on your pony and a circle around her eye.
Pretend I am prairie, though I am snow and river ice. Lay yourself soft across me and I will gather you like a willow, murmuring something you can't quite catch in French, which means: God is a madwoman after all, but as sweet as nickel candy-- as dark as owl's eyes, and as beautiful as your hair. _____
For the Sunday Mini-Challenge at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, this time hosted by Brendan, who requests that we write about islands. The word "island" is supposed to be in the title, and it was in my working title, but I changed it when I was finished. I hope this does not disqualify me.
Process notes: Much of the story in this poem is from my actual family history. However, the French-Canadian men with the inherited cardiac condition were on my mother's side. My father's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, in 1917, quite the scandal in those days. He really did marry a Native woman who bore him twin sons, but something happened to her after that and she was never right again. She lived out her days in an asylum. My grandfather became a heavy drinker, a gene that I inherited, though I have been able to be sober now for thirty years. My father told me that, when he went back to upstate New York for his father's funeral, everyone knew right away who he was, because the family resemblance was so strong. He also said that all the men asked after his mother--my grandmother--who was, it seems, the local beauty. She died when I was two, so unfortunately, I don't remember her.
If you're going to fall for me, do it just as the sun is going down, or not at all.
I've always needed someone to kick the chocks back in under my wheels, and to reach up and stop the propeller. Otherwise, the sky calls me with its own backassward gravity;
My hair stands straight up, all the blood rushes to my head, and the next time you see me, there I am, crossing in front of the moon.
If you're going to fall for me, feel me up, fill my ear with all the things you imagine that I am, wait until the last leaf falls.
Then, up to our haunches in October snow, I will kiss you the same way I kissed the woman I really loved; the one who wore red flannel, raised ravens, and was nothing like you.
If you're going to fall for me, whoever you are, do it on Halloween. Brain me with a shovel,
Or else I'll be running down the center of the airstrip at dawn, a gas can in one hand, passport in the other, taking off in Le Corbeau, my arms in the air,
Singing "Mon amour est folle comme la lune," and as red --oh! as soft-- as my hair. ______
In a land as close as birds to the branch and as far as the moon from the window, I came to do the one thing I must do, and that is
to kiss your hair because it is the night wind and to kiss your lips which are the river beneath the night wind, and to be inside your arms like a lost star.
In a land where to look at birds is to fall, and falling, to make them seem to shift and fly, it is really us who move, who fall, who flock and who have no language,
"What matters most is how well we walk through the fire." --Charles Bukowski
The maple keys are falling, as they do every year. I have taken to reading out in the yard, while my new dog wanders.
My walnut tree, the one the winter nearly killed two years ago, is green again, a home and pantry for squirrels. It is Michigan cool, late May, but warming.
I don't dream of your body as much as I used to, but my dreams are full of you all the same. I line up these poems like dolls, a puppet show to please you.
Books end, dogs die, summer runs its course. Stay, won't you, sweetheart? Call me when you can-- I will be here, spinning like a maple key, still your breezy northern girl.
______
For Play it Again, Toads. I chose Kenia's challenge to start with a line from a poet you don't like. I dislike Charles Bukowski, the idol of many. Too much booze, too much ugliness. I got the idea to write a very gentle poem about a very bold thing--making it through this life with some sort of grace.
My Love, never waste your singular self on unworthy noobs or stammering, unprepared buffoons.
Behold the noob. Harken to my inquiry of the noob, to explain in stanzas, equations, hymns, vulgarities and riddles your sexy cool self.
"Uh...well, basically...." The noob has no idea.
Placing the noob in an open field, we introduce them to the updraft that is you, the rotation and charge. The noob, covered in ice, returns to earth at speed. The noob breaks a windshield, then spins away with someone's roof.
Placing the noob in the lion's den, the noob becomes a yolk within a shell of teeth, tongue, jaws. In this way, the noob studies your sharpness, your appetites, your sudden strike and your tendency to toy with things. Lucky noob, copying down the poetry of your rough tongue!
Placing the noob in a tossing sea, overboard is the only place to be, cataloging starfish, hammerheads, heat vents, and written cautions to just go with it, not to rise too fast, and a decompression chamber at the ready in case of the bends.
My Love, discard and forget the noobs. You are the lioness riding a funnel cloud and carrying a beach umbrella. With you is the cub, the dust devil, the sharky koi pond, so that it all might continue into the next generation. That is the only noob you need. ________
for Marian's music prompt at Real Toads. My title is a tongue-in-cheek play on Herrick's "To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time."
My love is like asphalt and loose gravel. She's a fifty foot drop; no guard rail, just a descanso.
My love is not straight, and it's always been raining. She is nothing but the tops of pine trees reaching up for things that are not meant to fly, but suddenly, do. _______
The Perfect Love Poem, for Kenia at Real Toads. I have used comparison. Note: a descanso is a roadside shrine.
I fell out of love with myself-- I was cruel, I admit it. I said things, things I'm not proud of, and had no mercy, no care for what I did.
All the birds I am made from-- my own distinct darlings and devils-- elude illustration, cataloging, and most particularly, shotguns.
This happens, from time to time-- this disenchantment, this anger, this flocking out on the ledge. Loud noises ruin everything, and when I am feeling this way, I am a cacophony.
See how clever you are. See how my birds come to you, in winter in summer, in distress and in droves, saying "She is gone mad again, and we cannot reckon anymore." See how you shush and shelter them, my storm orphans.
Here is the curved sky, the similar earth below; here is the birdhouse with its precise holes for entry, and its green shingled roof for keeping out.
You asked me for a bird, tonight, knowing I wouldn't refuse. You brought no cage, no tether. How quiet it got, so that all there was to hear was feathers as I flew back into myself and became this poem,
the one you saved, the one I wrote in birdsong for you. ______
She fell out of the crop dusting plane-- chemicals may, in fact, have had something to do with it. She was certainly high. She may have been lit.
She threw herself, a bouquet, at the world. Here comes a blossom, a real live flesh and blood girl.
There were no stairs. Had there been, she could have done her best deb walk, descending photogenically from blue to bloom and from sky to stalk.
Okay, so it was me, on my way down from wing-walking of an afternoon. I thought I saw you below me, among the vines, eating a tomato and reading Whitman. It could have been you. It could have been chemistry or kismet or my eyes playing tricks.
Anyway, every time I breathe, my blood turns from moody jay to calling cardinal. That is why I had to come and kiss you, honey, even if I had to fall. _______
Zeus, reduced to a fairy story, his powers a parlor trick, is told a joke by the Stymphalian Birds, themselves now kept by old ladies who clip coupons and attend Mass on Wednesday, scattered like matrix dots around the pews.
Zeus laughs, frothing around his too-fat lips. This froth falls as snow flakes, here, on the shoulders of our wool coats, colored charcoal and navy blue. Isn't that just like a man to leave a mess? And why this place, this park, this January dusk? Why us?
"Stop bitching, sweetheart," you tell me, turning to face me, slow as a blizzard cloud. You place one black-gloved hand in my pocket, the other over my heart, and kiss me quiet as midnight.
"I want a Stymphalian Bird," I whisper, later, in your ear, my tongue as careless as grandma's Siamese. "You have one," you say to me. It's true, and isn't that just like a woman to love such hard sharp feathers, trusting her heart to a matchstick nest balanced in a tinder tree?
Zeus, you has-been, you local character, boring the birds right out of the sky-- behold my darling, your daughter, your headache from the start-- with beak of bronze, bolts of fire, and her pretty owl-- my heart. ________
Born to make up stories, here's one I told myself last night so as not to cry, because crying upsets my new puppy.
I told myself whoppers just as if I were a country rube; stuff about wooden porches, citronella torches, and a '64 Pontiac painted custom blue.
I'm old and will just get more so; any warm body I'm likely to touch, lay down with me a good long while ago. But Goddess bless lies, cos Jesus loves a little yarn.
So I told myself --on a particularly lonely night-- --so as to spare puppy any perplexity-- that it was sweet July and a baby blue beauty had just come for me up the gravel way.
I was about to say that the driver, with her arm stretched lazy across the wheel, was Emmylou;
but no. I made it better. She was you. _______
For Corey at Real Toads. He said to write about your first car, but mine was just a nondescript hand-me-down on its last legs, so I have written about something else, but still a car. I don't think Corey will take away my lily pad for this small infraction, will he?
In the widow year of the bootleg bible, seven plagues were worn in the hatbands of devils. In the fortune cookie of the palsied calendar, these were read-- fear, death, murder, disease, hate, horror and waste.
In summer, I planted a window box; in autumn, a stripe of leaves on the sill, and in winter, the pretty almost-weightless tail of a sleeping beast.
In our bed that November, you left me your bones and gave your body to the noisy starlings. Each evening, I wait for them in the dusk-- they assemble and there you are, whole again; watching me cry over impossible things.
In the widow year of the bootleg bible, a man selling loosies was killed right there on the public sidewalk. His killers couldn't see him, and so they felt for him with their hands. He said he couldn't breathe, but they wouldn't spare him any air, because he was not a bird, and they were not the wind.
My love, survivor of the funeral year, I bought you an angel carved from wax, a pretty thing from a funky little shop before they lost their lease.
I will place her carefully between your ribs to help you re-make yourself when you return. Until then, I have my crystals, a Magic 8 Ball, and my Catholic faith, a mighty fortress against the vagaries of life in your absence. ________
In my 20s, I loved the newsstand. Neatly stacked out-of-town editions might have been pillows for my future lovers, just arrived, or stepping stones across a river, never the same one twice.
These days, I have become a homebody, but when I press my face to your skin, I always smell newsprint along with shea butter and lavender. Part of the pleasure in loving another woman is the feeling of being on home ground, as easy as raiding your own kitchen in the dark.
Still, love is always a fearless journey into foreign lands. Even though I practice a daily discipline of advice columns and horoscopes, having learned the language of you the way a novitiate learns about faith; and even though I find home in your hair, your eyes, your voice, you will always be feathered with a thousand pages that I somehow missed.
So, here goes: down the hatch, take that turn, trust that guide. I love you, fearlessly, and always in the manner of front page news. ______
Let's talk about your tiger. The one that started following you around, years ago now, until you wonder how in the hell you used to slog through the days without one.
The tiger rides in your car with you, fucking with the automatic windows. She winds her way through the aisles at Target, close by your side. Make way, shoppers! She leaps into the basket, taking the whole thing up.
Two biddies are scowling at you. "Isn't it against the rules???" "That tiger should be in the rain forest. Or wherever tigers live. Where is the manager????"
Tiger could care less. She has fangs and claws that would make anybody crap their pants. And who knows? Maybe she has raised little tigers til there were enough baby tigers. Maybe she has plucked monkeys right out of trees. Maybe whole villages have had to stay in at night, on her account.
Your tiger wanders the 'burb at 3 a.m. "Poor stewardship," says your next door neighbor, in a written note. "Selfish, keeping a wild animal like that," says the busybody across the street. But maybe the tiger was sick of the mangroves. Maybe it was lonely there. Maybe she felt lacking, like a museum tiger, until she found you, but waking upon receiving your smokin' hot kiss, she made up her mind then and there. She stays because she wants to. She's a tiger. Who's gonna tell her no, when she's such a big pretty kitty, and loves you so? ________ for Artistic Impressions at Real Toads
