Something Borrowed, Something Blue

 

Santorini Island

Don't talk to me about made-up things,

someday things,

not now. 

I am only half here.

Every time I close my eyes,

I am back in Texas,

twenty-three again,

and looking for a dump I can afford.

You are talking,

but I am thinking

about Santorini Island, a place I have never been,

where the domes and railings

are the same bright blue

as the sea.

Then I am back in Texas again,

the landlord waving his hand,

saying yes, yes,

that can be cleaned/fixed/hauled away

and do I have the deposit and

next month's rent?

I wake again and there you are,

still talking, holding a bible like an admonition

and rattling on about forgiveness.

I wish my dog were here,

He never spoke but was a kind of Jesus.

all love and no faking it. 

In Texas I was hoping he would be okay

in the new dump, 

Downstairs was a tired blonde with a young son

and upstairs a hypochondriacal Mexicana

and an older gay man in a linen suit--

my new family.

I will die soon,

you can have my cutlery and framed art

if you go away right now.

Made-up things, someday things 

bore me, cause me pain. Let me drift

into a grove of Mesquite trees

somewhere in the Texas hill country,

or down a stone walk to a table by the sea

on Santorini Island, where I have never been,

where the domes and doorframes are that marvelous bright blue.

My dog will be there again

after all of this time and searching

like a sentinel

or a Maître d, 

as dependable and fine as the arc of the sun in June. 

Texas bluebonnets under a mesquite tree

-----------------------------

For Dora's Something Borrowed Something Blue at Dverse. Poetics

Green House, Black Trim

 My house is lime green

with black trim

like a garden

for grave diggers.

Surrounding it on rainy afternoons

are rings of brilliant jade leaves

on shiny black trunks

swaying like boxers.

One of the spindles

has come out from the porch rail.

It holds steady, but

I don't trust it like I used to

when the noisy morning starlings

and the raucous ones in evening

sounded and numbered

the same. 

Ode to a Chrome Cradle

 

The Ford Rotunda burning down, 1962.

It was decided

by women who had lost their sons

that there should be no more Sundays

in Detroit.

It was decided

by girls with broken dishes for bones

that all sewing should be done with dope needles

and veinous thread.

It was traditional

for the underground tunnel to Canada

to be filled with shredded tires and bent hubcaps

from fatalities.

In Detroit, the mediums

predict things that have already happened,

going into trance states instantly upon hearing

old Motown. 

It was decided

that love letters be made mandatory

for bums and debutantes whose heads rot softly

like pumpkins.

It was considered good form

for fat golfers to dole out mulligan freeways

through Black Bottom but never the fresh greensward

of Oakland county.

It was decided

in the end, that all elms be destroyed by fungi

and burned every Christmas at Ford Rotunda, disappearing

in tandem, brightly.

_________

The Detroit riots 1967

For Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

Music: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack

Process notes: I grew up in well-off Oakland county, just a bop down Woodward Avenue from Detroit. I still remember being taken to the Ford Rotunda at Christmas when I was a small child. There were live reindeer, and my brother always got a toy version of a concept car. It burned down in 1962. I was seven years old.

In 1967, the city exploded in a riot after the police raided an after-hours "blind pig" nightclub. After decades of being hassled by Detroit police, the people there had finally had enough and fought back. I stood on the corner of Woodward Avenue up in my safe white suburb and watched the smoke rise over Detroit. I'll never forget it, and things would never be the same again.

A Vagabond Hour

 

It was just an afternoon in a blur of afternoons

scattered in a line like a row of troll dolls.

Where is the screen porch where we played

when an hour was long and a year eternity?

Where are the mud pies we put in tins?

Where are those houses, those girls, that summer?

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned. 

On a steel rack at the foot of the basement stairs

was a parade of winter coats in plastic sheaths

crowned brightly by hat boxes across the top.

One yellow box had a silhouetted carriage on the lid

and we swooned at the idea of suitors arriving 

as we stood tip-toe on a fold-out stool, snooping.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

Best friends, families, afternoons, troll dolls

all scatter, our solid center become fragile 

bric-a-brac. Today a package came, and in it

a yellow hat box, and in the hat box, the scent

of my late aunt's house, my childhood, and an afternoon

in summer 1966, perfectly preserved and vivid.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

________

for Dverse MTB: Boxing Clever to The Bop.

One day I received a package containing a book (which I changed to a hat box in the poem). The book was inside a plastic sleeve, and when I took it out and opened it, I was instantly back in my aunt's house as a child. I think the book had been kept at some time on a shelf where someone had used the same furniture polish as my aunt used. In any event, I buried my smiling face in the pages and breathed in that long-forgotten scent.  As for the troll dolls, mudpies, screen porches and coat rack with the yellow hat box on top, that was all stuff that I remember from childhood.

Image at top found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Grateful Dead Box of Rain

Stone House

 

There is a stone house

with a soft bed

on a metal frame.

The sheets are sky-stolen blue,

the blanket tartan.

I have the feeling I was

a child there, or died

or held someone with love

or was held.

The air is fragrant

like a meal just finished

or being prepared.

I feel sure that you are there

in the next room

or arriving or remembered.

I wrote this poem

yesterday or some other day

or will write it soon.

Now the door is open.

Come in.

_______

Music: Cat Stevens Into White

Impossible Riddles

 " After last night's storm, the tulip petals are strewn across the patio where they mortally fluttered" --Church, Jim Harrison

I woke around 3am again this morning. 

Someone had been talking to me

pushing pebble words through cotton teeth, 

posing impossible riddles,

or,

I was in love with someone already vanishing,

or

something important was expected of me that I could not do.

At 7am I set out seed and peanuts

for the birds and whomever may appear,

maybe even myself, in a new body

not made of seed and feathers.

Everything hurts and I am always tired.

I am as soft and ridiculous as snow, 

holding winter's hand by instinct, leery of warmth, gray as January.

Here come the jays and starlings,

crows and cardinals,

like clockwork.

I watch them from the window and remember a day years ago.

I am both there and not,

here and not.

Dear eager raucous birds, 

will you be here again tomorrow?

Will I?

_______

for Dverse Poetics: "Songs of Unreason"

Babushka

I remember those times--
the August bird on the hollyhock,
the one-eyed landlord,
the angels reposed between the cobblestones--
when we had everything and wanted nothing
except a ticket out.

What else would we have done, in the City of a Hundred Spires,
but sing as if every lamp post were a tall stem,
and we the warblers in diklos and babushkas,
hearts as tiny and strong as the astronomical clock?
"New York!" was all that fell from other lips in moments between notes,
though none of us had ever been.
Only you and I still loved the dumpling and the sugar cake. 

In those days, we heard the horse hoof, the wagon wheel,
the ships with their deep bass calls that shook the docks. 
And you, my double and my simple bloom,
the favorite soprano among us all,
loved to watch them, loving the motion they made,
while all the time staying stock-still,
holding your breath--and my hand.

I remember all my family's things wrapped in patterned cloth,
the Orthodox cross above our church when I saw it for the last time,
in early winter, with only sparrows on the steps, and no music.
My father had our ticket in his coat pocket
and my mother silent at his side.
For many years, in Chicago, we made pastries and pies
for strangers, and in time
all the children spoke English and sang only before ballgames,
eating hot dogs and forgetting.

They call me Ba-boo-shka, and smile.
"She never left the Old Country," they say, but how could I?
I once licked crumbs of sugar cake slowly from your soft lips
as you stayed still and the whole world shifted. 
How could I ever love Chee-ca-go, having once, in warm summer,
loved you? Tell me that, little songbird.
________

babushka--a head scarf. Also, an old woman or grandmother.

diklo--a head scarf denoting a married woman

The City of a Hundred Spires--Prague

the poster--by Alphonse Mucha. It refers to the Moravian Teacher's Choir, 1911.

for Fireblossom Friday: That's the Ticket.