Dying Man in a Yellow Suit

 

October, you are a dying man

wearing a yellow suit

voguing down the boulevard

pretending that cane is just a prop.

Step inside the boulangerie.

Sugar melts, cakes grow stale,

but being in the case is like being on stage--

it's "let's pretend" in the sweetest way.

Summer hasn't been kind to us.

There is chewing gum on our soles,

our skin is a disaster, our regrets numberless,

yet we reflect in store windows as clearly as royals.

October, offer me your arm and no one will know

that you are not just being gallant.

With each step, another day ticks away

and when you lie down with me it will be as a near-ghost.

No matter, don't give it another thought.

I am here, once almost-pretty,

my spirit a genuine drop dead knock-out babe

and all yours until November arrives

in its ferryboat, and if you brought no coin

I've got you, allow me, you with the kindly moon in your eyes.

______

for my dear friend Dora at Dverse Poetics: Tripping the October Light Fantastic

Elemental

 

I thought that you would be like water

in summer

even if the lake lay

beyond the brambles.

On a road trip, the heat mirage oases

seem nearer

like objects in the mirror

where I first saw you.

In summer,

birds bathe in the dog dish I set out--

they fly without rising

in that finite sky.

Your dark hair seemed to flow and called me

like a siren

whose face is obscured

like her every word.

I still set out that dog dish for the winter birds

in their need.

Mornings I set it steaming

only to find it frozen by afternoon.

There are things that flow, comforting things

already changing.

I remember your reticence and kick the bowl of ice

coming free, ungiving, falling hard and only once.

_________

for What's Going On--"what cold is"

Music: Julian Lennon Ruby Tuesday

I Gave You What You Asked For

 

I gave you what you asked for--

a funny book which I know now

you surely never read.

I gave you what you asked for--

someone you could maneuver into

saying, "I thee wed."

I gave you what you asked for--

someone to tie the tourniquet

every time you bled.

I gave you what you asked for--

a foil to be the fodder for

the monsters in your head.

I gave you what you asked for--

seven years of love alive and

six more stood up dead.

I gave you what you asked for--

my heart's writing you called "nice."

That's when I gave you all my scorn

and back your rotten rice.

________

for What's Going On?--"Home Made"

Music: Sara Bareilles Wicked Love

A Strange Place To Die

 

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

Across the way at 515 Edgecombe Avenue,

14-year-old Robert Mario Peebles' enthusiasm

for the 4th of July hit just above Barney Doyle's eye,

killing him instantly as he watched infield practice.

He never got to see the game. 

Thirty years earlier, a fellow everyone considered to be

a mean bastard delivered a fatal pitch submarine-style.

Back on the farm, his daddy had taught Carl Mays never to back down.

Ray Chapman never got up.

No, wait, after being hit with a dirty, hard-to-see ball

with an impact so loud that Mays thought it was a hit,

Ray Chapman got up, fell, rose, and fell again on the baseline.

"Tell Mays I'm all right," were his last words.

Ray Chapman was a man with the world on a string.

Good-looking, friendly Ray, playing out one last season

at the sport he loved, was newly married and set up in a good job.

He even got on well with quarrelsome Ty Cobb

who was said to have killed a man in Detroit.

The world was his oyster.

In a New York hospital, Ray Chapman got better, then worse,

then was gone forever. His widow lived just eight more years herself.

Carl Mays never felt he had done anything wrong

on a dusty diamond July 4th, 1920 in Manhattan, New York City.

The Polo Grounds was a strange place for a man to die. 

_________

for What's Going On? An Historical Moment.  

Music: Jeff Buckley I Know It's Over

Birmingham, 1963

 

Russian sage

Russians have taken over our gardening shed.

I see them, surfer-ish blondes and fierce Tatars

ambling among the trowels and bushel baskets,

planting their tri-color flag in the petunias. 

My brother has a train layout in the basement

set up on an old ping-pong table. I invite

one of the Russians to come down and see it.

He turns pale, looks funny, leaves in silence.

I go out to the garden shed with a notebook

like Lois Lane. I flip it open for an interview.

Why are you using our garden shed? 

I stand there with my pad like a waitress.

At night the Russians sit around and smoke,

private thoughts burning under a suburban moon. 

Don't they miss the Volga, the Dnieper?

Then in late June they are gone, leaving

only half a muffin behind like a broken heart

laid tenderly to rest amid the tall, fragrant sage. 

_______

for the Word Garden Word List--Pages For You. 

Music: In The Garden

Refraction

 does light lie?

do these leaves deceive? 

what is green 

but a word for a thing 

we see a certain way

inside our skulls where no green thing grows?

here is my yellow dress.

my yellow hair.

and yellow fields stretching flat and far.

inside, my reasons.

outside, the sheltering trees, 

our house in their lee.

also, your face, the flickering planets, and stars.

i want you, but i want the wind.

you say i deceive,

but what is wanting

but a word for a thing

for which there is really no word at all?

does light lie?

here is the yellow sunflower

and the yellow night-window

but they never

called themselves those things.

here is my silver ring and my yellow ticket--

i love your face, even though you don't believe

and wish me damned and dead because i go.

____________

for Sunday Muse #204

Cricket

 A bold black cricket came in from the night

with a message wrapped around his leg

I offered him bread, my body, my bed

and an indigo blue Russian egg.

He had only the song that crickets know

taught them by their dying mothers

He played it on the silk and scar of my skin

and told me there would be no others.

My hair is blond, his body was black

and hard as the truth in a mirror

The night was warm, the dawn too quick

and the last time drew one season nearer.

_____

for dverse creepy crawlies. 

Three Short Poems

"Jones"

Jones
finds Empty
and fills it
with lonesome lies
in a fake truth suit.
There were better Parts Unknown meant for you.
_____

"Chop Shop"

Chop
this shit
into lines-
it still won't be
poetry, baby.
You have to pay to learn that foreign tongue.
_____

"Mercy Clouds"

Look--
water
ripple-topped.
Gone tomorrow
with the mercy clouds.
Kiss me now. The sun will warm my suitcase.
______

for Fussy Little Forms--tetractys. 

Suicide happens when a person's emotional pain exceeds their ability to cope with that pain. But there is help. If you are in trouble, pick up that ten ton phone--tomorrow can be better, even if you don't believe it right now. National Suicide Prevention Help Line: 1-800-273-TALK.

"Goodbye...my friend. I didn't know you, but I've been places you've been." (Tim Hardin)

 

Remember

Remember the Alamo.

Remember the Maine.

Remember yourself, in my dream last night,

tilting your head the way that's done

when the next word is "no."

In our bed, Santa Anna's Mexican army.

At the breakfast table, saboteurs asking for the Tabasco.  

Sunken steel and mud missions know

how it was and

how I remember you.

______ 

a 55 for my BFF.

 

I Have Eaten Stars

 “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I have eaten stars
but they brought their own gravity with them--
their own geography with them--
and now they unbalance me, so that I lurch and roll as I fall.

On the surface of the sun, 
everyone is blind and everything is done gingerly--
every effort undertaken temporarily--
taking a million generations just to create a gesture that is gone in an instant.

Uncross your fingers and kiss me.
Meteors remember, but are too thick and stupid to talk--
language eludes them and they are as celibate as nuns.
I would forsake all liturgy if you would only be God's recollection and bless me.

I have eaten stars
but their light is checkerboarded inside my skin--
their light diffuses until I am dizzy and that is when
I lie and tell you I was home all day,

wrote nothing and

sold your name for a song.
_____ 

for Kerry at Real Toads.

  

Eduardo

At my husband's funeral, I was the ghost, not him.
I couldn't find the grave;
it was a crowded place, with the living and the dead
and I was alone, except for
one friend
but he
was not my friend, he was a rooster who didn't mind a mad hen.
 
Sometimes, high in the mountains,
a freeze comes,
or low under the vineyards
the Earth rolls with a nightmare--
either way, the birds leave.
Either way, something shears off inside itself, and this I
could understand.

At my husband's funeral, I howled my throat raw,
as unthinkingly as if I had been born shrieking grief.
A heart moves blood stupidly,
like an ox pulling a cart over a cliff;
gee and haw until you're cross-eyed, the sky opens and turns dark
for the heaviest bird the same as the lightest.

When it was over, I kissed my non-friend the rooster
on the cheek. 
I thanked him for not letting me be there alone.
Maybe being kissed by a screeching ghost scared him
into genuine gallantry,
or having missed his dinner weakened him,
but he only squeezed my hand and said, "Senora..." as softly as
a rose petal descending on 
the lid of a coffin.
______

This poem is taken from a dream that woke me up.

 

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Don't worry, Pookie.
There are no dinosaurs on the beach here,
no longboats crammed with Vikings,
no Roman legions trying to conquer the sea.

Wear your flip flops.
Take your paperback.
I made you coffee, because
I am as loyal as Sancho Panza, and as unobtrusive as Dulcinea.

I'm glad we came here.
Once, as a child, I went rolling down the dune--
someone took a picture, and in it there is nothing but me and white sand,
so that I seem to be falling through pure light.

Emily Dickinson is dead, though she's spoken to me since.
John Lennon is dead,
and my favorite dogs, too.
My mother is dead,
but Pookie, there's me. There's you.

No pterodactyl will come pluck us from the beach.
My brother won't come, and make it up with us.
No old lovers will rise out of the surf and say they're sorry,
but there are starfish
and a nice sunrise.

Here is your coffee. Your book. Where is my beach hat?
Let's not miss another wave.
Let's get out of here, like flirts in an old movie.
Let's be silent, let's do Pure Michigan.
Let's hold hands and make out and not act our age.

Let's BE HERE NOW.
Let's be beach bums, feeding the gulls;
forgiving how we got here,
forgetting the way back.
_______

for Susie's challenge at Real Toads. Photo at top by Douglas Salisbury.