2 New Short Poems

IN THE TIME OF SHORTENING DAYS

The crickets have come

to sing summer out,

smooth black invisible chirring

like planets spinning.

I have fed the little rat

who tips the tray--

each of us awake in differing skins,

on a yellow-leaf evening

under white stars

_________________

EMAIL FROM MY BROTHER

Hearing from you is like being operated on

by a blind doctor

trained in church

by the deaf dead.

_________ 

Consultation at the Hospital

 

The doctor said,

"This is what I found

inside her."

An orange

a white horse with one hoof up

Roberta Flack 'First Take' on vinyl

A river, rushing over smooth stones

and a knitting needle

through her heart.

The family sagged to one side a little

like a tent in wind.

The father said,

"You're talking nonsense."

The mother said nothing.

The husband said,

"Are you sure you had the right patient?

   I could sue."

The best friend said,

"Of course you did." 

"Where is the orange?" 

the mother asked.

"I ate the orange."

"There was no horse,"

insisted the father.

"There was a herd."

The best friend smiled 

but was silent.

The husband looked at his watch.

The mother added,

"If there was a knitting needle

through her heart,

she must have put it there herself."

The father waved his hand

and walked away.

The husband said,

"I wonder what all this will cost?."

The best friend asked

if she could see her.

The mother leaned on her husband

and walked away 

carrying her purse

and her bag of knitting.

____________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar. "Magical Realism" 

Music: Roberta Flack No Way To Say Goodbye

Your Only Love

 

A priest arrived by ambulance

to bless our sudden kiss

A doctor brought his bag but cannot

treat such things as this

My jewelry is just colored rocks

like pretty polished hollyhocks

in silver settings gone to curls

the same as any other girl's

but I could be your only love.

A flautist played our melody

in notes so fine and clear

That summer brought her midnights close

so that the moon could hear

the notes, the song so marvelous

the player played so long for us

the priest laid down his holy flask

the doctor blushed before he asked

if I could be your only love.

An urchin took a photograph

of you in uniform

You gave me spice and chocolates

to keep my fever warm

and lucky is the lucky bird

who calls and calls a wafting word

In this peculiar pregnant dawn

his curious and constant song

that I could be your only love.

________

for Word Garden Word List--13 Rue Therese 

Music: Denise King Stuck On You

Starface

Doctor, what
do you think about
ghosts,
carnies,
Gypsies,
actresses,
the unstable,
the under-represented,
the unexamined among us?

Doctor, do you
mind if we talk about it?
Without academia,
pretense,
rancor,
clothes,
and completely off script,
not to mention
entre nous, in confidence, in bed, in your face, in extremis?

I'm sorry for the way I sometimes come off.
I'm like an old wheel on a new car.
One minute we're just talking and then, whoaaaaaaaaa.
It's cute how you throw your arms up to protect your face when you feel
a smile coming on, Herr Doktor.

Doctor, allow me
to introduce myself.
I am Starface, a foreign national,
face-down in the donut sugar,
charming
but
dangerous when crossed,
quiet as a mouse in the back pew at Saint Sophia's,
ephemeral as an angel, holding my cross.
Does it surprise you? The sanctity? The symbology?
Say hello to my leedle fren.

Doctor, listen
here's what I think:
There's books and lectures and all that happy hopscotch,
but I'm wondering...
Have you ever been with a Turkish woman?
Mosques, 
museums,
galleries,
aren't you sick of all of it?
Come home with me, tell your receptionist 
that you're leaving to join the circus.
I will fix you grilled eggplant with yogurt,
and show you what a Turkish woman can do before three in the afternoon.

After, Doctor,
you won't be the same,
you'll be
sweetened,
sated,
fully rehabilitated.
Doctor, what do you think
about ghosts
carnies,
Gypsies?
What is your prognosis
about me,
about this?
Say hello, ahhahaha, my captive,
my crusader, my little friend laid out on the bed like an Orthodox cross
just wild to be kissed!
______

Red

Nick Gravenites: A woman...

Janis Joplin: yeah?

NG: A woman...

JJ: yeah?

NG: A woman...

JJ: yeah?

NG: Just makes me mad.

JJ: Aw man....sheeit.

--"Ego Rock", from Joplin In Concert

While i was in the hospital
being the world's shittiest caterpillar,
you bought me
JOPLIN IN CONCERT
the double live album i coveted bad.

you were leaves on a high breeze.
i was a silk grenade.
we were young once, weren't we?
in Birmingham
so far down the rabbit hole, the wrong way down the telescope.

nothing from then is still the same.
i kiss the feet of the Goddess who arranged *that*, but
the desire i had to will wings out of my body
and rise is still there,

just like
JOPLIN IN CONCERT
and though i rarely play it,
i see the red cover
and there you are, smiling still, and standing right in front of me.
______

for Bittersweet Melodies at Real Toads.
 

213B

In this wing, on this floor, in this room ("my" room)
I assume she must be a woman,
though I'm not sure and
don't care.

She is wound and stitched like a baseball.
She has soared, and fallen,
rolled and stopped.
She is Icarus, that precious dumb-ass, with hawk-heart and glider balsa.

Put this on her (his?) chart:
I love her. All of my poems, scratched out left-handed through a
fog of medications, are fragments of the cosmos,
stanzas of burst confetti stars,
and oh,
oh,
how I do go on.

All night, she alternates between coma and suffocation,
drawing moth-nurses at 3 a.m. to the light that is her.
They coo, stick, shock and revive her,
and though stumbling residents up to their eyeballs in vending machine coffee hold the paddles,
it is the nurses who coax her back like sirens on some rocky shore.

She is Ulysses. She is Gina Lollobrigida, Madonna and Sylvia Plath.
How can I sleep in such a crowded room, which expands like a heart
with her every dream, her every sigh?

Dawn comes, and the murder of dark birds that is her family arrives.
They cock their heads and strut along the top of the divider.
"Are you going to finish that?
The jello?
The July issue of Redbook?
Life itself?" 

If I could handle weaponry right now I would scatter them,
but a pen is all I have--
that, and the raw, almost painful devotion I have come to have for her.
Doctors and friends shake their heads.
"You have to want to get well." 

Oh mercy, look at me. 
If she lay her beautiful bandaged head on my breast,
I would grit my teeth and not scream;
I would pet her and whisper to her like a velvet bell in the House of the Holy Concubines
and then I would pass out, from joy and pain.

They want to transfer me to another floor, to a place
--they say--
where I can get the type of care a woman like me needs.
They talk to me as if I were crouched on a ledge, twenty floors above the parking lot and threatening to jump,
but I am simply in love. Is that so hard to understand?

(End note, written during a break by Cheryl Durban, R.N.)
Patient transferred to psych this morning, but left behind these notebooks full of uncommonly beautiful poems. The roommate's name was on the first page, but roommate is PVS and family says the books aren't hers and to throw them away. Alert janitorial; I can't be the one to do it.)

Pearl Harbor

What you did before?
Can't do it anymore.
Shoulda done it when ya could've, say all the dark mothers,
whispering from the walls. 

Lookitcha.
Fat as a battle ship, slow as one, too.
Girrrrl.
Unh unh unh.

All that time, the Zeros were flying,
there you were,
lazy as an umbrella in last night's drink.

Now you're a mess, damn.
On fire and sinking,
feel like shit all the time, and might lose that breast. 

Steam for the mouth of the harbor,
and tell that stupid band to shut up.
Who the fuck are those guys in the planes, where'd they come from?

So many questions, you're so inquisitive! Let me try to answer.
No, this isn't a drill.
Yes, those are real bullets.
No, you never did anything to them; they don't even know you.
Yes, they're trying to kill you.

What's that last question you asked, dear?
On purpose? Bless your heart. They came out of the Sunday sky, that's all.
_______

Stunt Double

She calls sometimes--that's how I know she's in on it.
Her voice is nightblue and crushed strawberries;
when she calls me "baby", my true and sure gets a shiver up it.

Her stunt double makes coffee, takes the car,
fucks me, says we have to talk.
I know it isn't her.
I know the bloom from the stalk.

Stunt Double feels the cold in my kiss;
cries real tears from the plastic bottle in her head.
Stunt Double spreads her arms, says, "How'd we ever get like this?"
Like I know her. Like let's pretend.


I wait for the ringtone, a drop of honey from the bee that's gone;
nightblue and strawberries, helpless at her softest command--
there it is--I answer--a sinner for Gilead's balm,
when the Stunt Double comes in from the next room--


your phone held in her palm.
______

for Karin's "A Whole Lot Of It Is In Your Head" challenge at Real Toads.

Brain injury can cause a person to think that everyone in their life has been replaced with "doubles" who look just like their loved ones, but aren't. It's caused by damage to the link between visual processing and emotional response. If someone calls them on the phone, they recognize them, because it bypasses the damaged part of the brain. On the other hand, one can be in perfect health and know that the other person has checked out of the relationship.

 

The Cat Who Spoke

Missus Doctor Figg-Millett was dusting her husband's study,
dusting, in fact, the skeleton of a re-articulated cat,
when, without really thinking about it,
she complained aloud about not having a staff.

"Fuck you," said the fleshless feline.
"I have no staff either, and it was quite a useful one.
Look at me now. How can I love? Eat? Spray?
Your husband is an idiot.
All humans are idiots.
They value the branch but burn the leaves,
prize the package but throw away the contents.
So, fuck you and the good doctor, too."

Cats rarely mince words.

Doctor Figg-Millett arrived home from his practice to find
Missus Doctor Figg-Millett had taken to her bed.
"Are you ill?' he inquired uncertainly from the doorway.
"I want a cat," she replied.
"Nonsense. Cats shed."
"Fuck you," said Missus Doctor, shocking him with the unwonted curse word.
Then she added, "I want a lover,
and some opium. Maybe even an automobile."

Cats and women have often been seen as similar.

Doctor Figg-Millett hoped that some broth and a cessation
from reading novels might ease his wife's malaise,
but as the days passed, she shat in the potted palm,
and destroyed the curtains in trying to climb them.
One afternoon, she gave herself a climax,
then stared at her fingers in astonishment.
She even remarked that women certainly deserved the franchise,
and that's when Doctor Figg-Millett had had enough.

How he fell down the stairs is anybody's guess.
No one really credited Missus Doctor's claim
that a cat had tripped him half way down,
as the Figg-Milletts owned no cat. 
Yes, she did gesture with her cigarette at the re-articulated tom sitting upon the doctor's desk,
but really, how absurd!
"It can say 'fuck you'," she added,
and then seconded the demised feline's alleged sentiments herself.

That night, the various policemen complained to their wives
about the whole unpleasant business,
and the wives listened in demure silence 
except for a certain Missus Elroy MacDougal, who requested a cat.
_______

Delirium

I was raving again, wasn't I?
Look at the face on ya, it must have been choice.
I never used to have these fevers,
not until I slept with Lady Liberty, back in France,
with her tablet propped like a painting against the plaster wall.
Oh, I was yearning to breathe free,
and to be in the arms
of a very tall woman;
She had copper-colored hair then,
and had never seen America.
I took my clothes off, lay back on the hotel bed and said,
"Here it is, babe."

Now look, I may not be in a position to give advice here,
but you should smile more.
Even once would be nice, because
you're making me nervous wondering what I said.
I used to drink, yanno,
no ladylike sips either.
I could tip a bottle back and lose whole nights down the rabbit hole.
Goddess only knows what I mighta done, those times,
and I'm glad I can't remember it all.
Mercy comes in all varieties.
One bird-bright morning, I decided I didn't want to die,
and so I swore off, but Jay came and did the heavy lifting.
I been Catholic ever since.

I slept with a woman once who kissed the crucifix 
that I used to wear on a pretty chain around my throat.
Every word I spoke was holy,
and my love was holy,
and I received her like Heaven does the saints.
Lookit me now, hoo boy.
Restrained for my own protection,
coming out with Goddess-knows-what in my delirium.
I knew a woman once who could fix cars,
she had dark hair and blessed fingers.
If only I could lie on her lift right now, and let her tinker with me;
I just know I'd feel better.
But, noOoooo, here I am with you instead.

I think I know what I must have said,
just by the starch in your bedside manner.
It wouldn't be the first time;
it wouldn't even be the first time sober.
Cranked up with fever, I bet I said,
"Love me, babe, like I love you.
I can make ya happy,
forever true."
Before the day is out,
and despite what y'all say to the customers,
I bet I'll be a funny story in the staff room.
I just wanna know,
is this a Catholic hospital?
I'd feel forgiven if it is.
A girl can't be a priest, but she can be a saint,
so, in certain things, I have aimed high.

Long after that French encounter,
after the fevers began,
I took up poetry
and got kicked out of seventeen countries.
Me and Emma Lazarus ended up here,
as tempest-tossed as they come.
After a while, my third-hand Renault broke down,
before I even got out of New York,
but I met the chick mechanic because of it.
Even a blind squirrel finds a diamond sometimes,
and when, wearing nothing but my silver cross,
I looked out of the window of her walk-up,
I saw Lady Liberty and I'll admit, it gave me a sweet satisfaction
to see her out there in the harbor holding her torch
and turning green.
_______
 
Photograph by Margaret Bednar, from her post of January 21st, 2012.  I have written this poem for, and linked to, her Play It Again Toads #5, at Real Toads.

 
 
 
 

Zulu Cat and Her Many Disciplines

I was at my doctor's office,
in the waiting room,
gestating the latest creature within me,
when the door opened and she invited me in.

Her fern plants swayed as if we might soon be plucking doubloons
from chests heaved up on the surf from storm-sunk galleons.
Did I mention that my doctor is from some island?
Off the coast of Spain?
Majorca, I believe.
Maybe Easter Island,
because I have sometimes interrupted her at her carvings,
and had to stand there under the withering stare
of some ancestor or other.

My first inkling that she was in a rare mood
came when I noticed that she had become a cat.
A gray cat, specifically,
or was she tortoise shell?
The light kept changing, due to the swaying ferns.
She meowed, but I plumbed her meaning immediately:
she was in the mood!

Now, you will argue that I was irrational,
deluded, hallucinating, or worse.
I tell you, I am as precise as a court reporter.
I relate only facts, 
repeatable data from the snow globe of my therapy.
How I love the little cabin inside it,
the fireplace,
the polar bear rug!

Setting aside her Zulu mask and disguise,
my doctor demanded of me a tribute, a token,
a task to be undertaken,
if I truly wanted to be hers.
(In a therapeutic setting.
Under control of protocol.
In the name of science!)
How incredibly thrilling it was,
to see her jump onto the desk and switch her tail!

I crossed my legs,
I looked shyly down,
then up again,
my head tilted to one side,
my tongue playing at the corner of my lips.
I was a woman singularly eager to dispense with boundaries,
and to publish my name into the text of her desire!

Coyly, she asked me my name.
Constance, I told her.
Beelzebub, Candy, Electra, Spuddy, Spock,
anything you like, babe.
She wrote them all down.
Tell me about your dreams, she said.
You. They are all of you.
Tell me about your mother.
You.
Tell me about your father.
You.
Imago?
You.
Fetish? Obsession? Idee fixe???
You, honey. All of them.

With that, she stopped being a cat, and returned to being a woman.
Doubloon? she said, offering me one.
I took it and bit the edge. Real gold!
She beat her spear against her stretched hide shield:
boom boom boom, like our hearts!
She had a Rorschach birthmark on her thigh,
and I kissed it as if it were the Blarney Stone.
Hypnotize me, baby, I said.
Already done! she assured me,
and from the things I went on to say to her while I was under,
she is clearly the marvel of the swinging watch,
my counter-transference chica 
with the cool cat claws and the sexy librarian smile.
______

for my BFF Hedgewitch's word list challenge at Real Toads!

Managed Care

Do not be alarmed at the pace
our doctor plies his noble skills--
one potion cures, the other kills.

To heal is not a game, a race--
a dance between the grave and flesh
with partners green with rot, or fresh.

Accept the process and embrace--
the literature we gave you;
the surgery that can save you!

Depend on skill, dumb luck, or grace
negotiate another breath--
your enemy is not us, but Death!

The Reaper waits, or nears apace.
Patient in aspect and of mien--
takes possession or leaves unseen.
______

This is an invented form called a Constanza, which Real Toads has inflicted on me this morning. How do I hate this form? Let me count the ways: I hate that all the lines are four feet in length, making a sing-songy quality almost impossible to avoid. Over time, I have come to enjoy a lot of forms, but this one felt like trying to play tennis while wearing a straightjacket. (Some say I would look good in one!) Let's shed the jacket, and try this again...

Just a little bit longer, if you please.
Sit down. Read a magazine!
(They go back to 1983.)

The doctor is a very busy man.
He will do everything for you that he can.
Fill out this form.
Learn the French horn, try a language or get a college degree

while you wait.
From Mail Order State.

Come in, come on, stand on this scale!
Oh my goodness...
all we get are
skeletons and whales!

Any complaints?
Catarrh?
Were you hit by a car?
Put on this gown, then sit down.
The doctor will see you if you'll just shut your mouth,
sit here and wait through his rounds of golf.

Knock knock! Hello!
And how are we?!?
Oh yes. Oh my. Oh dear. I see.
I think we can dispense with dreary tests...
Have this prescription filled.
If it doesn't work, come back, we'll drill.

Pay up, pay now, pay through the nose!
Your co-pay is more, your coverage is less,
and all gone to receivership
of Mr. Death, our C.P.A.

Have a nice day!
_______

  

Frankengirl

There were thieves in the delivery room--
they stole my face.
Later, in the doctors' lounge,
my mother's obstetrician lit up a Parliament,
waved his hand and claimed that the wind must have done it.

The wind, emboldened,
blew through my head where my face should have been.
"Where is your heart?
"Hand it over," it crooned, as if it were a demented nanny.
I hid inside nightmares
until the room got too thickly blue for visitors.

Soon enough, my mother ditched the damned neighbors and attacked.
I rolled myself into a ball and kicked myself away,
though the rigged tilt of that house always brought me back.
I went through faces like a deck of cards,
all of them wrong,
all of them trailing shame like black kites.
I liked to play Fire,
and soon we went through addresses just as quickly.

So now you ask me, all these years later,
"Is this your face?"
It is a face.
Why don't you kiss me and find out?
If there is a cave-in, just stay where you are and breathe shallowly;
You may be all right, 
because I only have so many matches,
and there is no telling if the wind will whip all the way down there
to the scream-place where I left my jagged mirror shards 
lined up and waiting like euthanized dolls.
_______

For the Real Toads mini-challenge. Art by Kathryn Dyche Dechairo  

The Healing

I spread five fingers and five seasons came;
I kept the one that had no name.

I closed them 'round the stepchild month;
She felt like love when love is done.

I stuffed the lost one in my mouth,
And spoke things scratching to get out.

The Gypsy wrapped around my eyes,
And by blue evening I was blind.

She wormed her way into my ear,
And whispered quite like you, my dear.

She burrowed deep into my brain,
Sweet and sharp like blade and cane.

But when the sweet bitch found my heart,
She bit and sealed the broken part.

_______

Optional musical accompaniment.