Para la Madre Diabólica

 She said that my hair

had turned the moon to ash

as if it were hers, a pet cat

mute in the silent sky.

What she meant was

that I had the wrong face

and the wrong voice, always

wandering from its glass case.

I slipped the crescent moon

through my hair like a garland,

then grew it long and wild,

my name at the root and the far ends.

________

for What's Going On? --"Hair"

Bimbo Season

 

Summer and I cannot really be friends--

she is tiresomely popular

with her garish daylight that extends

heedlessly into my delicious darkness.

She's the hot girl, skin-deep,

boring me to death with her obviousness

too loud, too cheap,

queen of the surfer boy entourage. 

If only there were some ceremony

that I could perform

to summon chilly winter here for me,

my old bestie returned.

I would live in a bus with bed and blankets

and a storm outside,

all the windows hung with trinkets

and--weirdly--streaming tv.

Yes, an all-comforts bare-bones hideaway

out in the distant sticks

up on four wheels on a winter's day

with soup and chocolate!

Sadly, here I am with this bimbo season summer,

my imagined paradise

far away and impossible--bummer!

White it out winter,

Come back with your cool quiet and I'll write you a killer poem 

to knock your woolly socks off. 

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Night Road

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

Black Velvet Rose

When I was a child

I made a catalog of sounds.

My fingernail across upholstery,

birds calling to each other in the yard.

The world spun

in oval vespers

from day to night

as wind spoke to trees in whispers.

Why was my voice someone else

when hearing it on a recording?

Why did I wake up so often

to echoing music in the morning?

Now, when I am very tired,

I hear the dead speak again.

A siren goes past in the street outside.

"I love that sound," says the ghost in my mind.

Rain and rivers help me sleep

with a black velvet rose in my dream

and the kind-voiced sweetheart I've invented there

says that dawn, or the devil, may care.

________

for What's Going On? --"Sounds."

Music: J.D.Souther Black Roses, White Rhythm & Blues

Hymn For Homeless Ghosts

 If I could lay hands on a visa 

issued by lost grandfathers--

some kind of ticket scented 

with summer dirt roads--

then I would wear a hat made of dandelions and leave.

The present moment

is just a rented room. 

Poor child, 

yesterday has vanished,

today was born already packing its case,

and tomorrow is asleep in a distant curtained chamber.

It was just a moment ago,

just a breath, when I was

new in the world and believed the world new as well.

Whose hand was on the door

that was closing even as it opened,

wearing the vanishing morning like fleeting fashion?

If I had a passport

made of more than shifting memory,

I would take a hired car

to shores where the waters say,

"Where have you been

delayed so long,

and why dear heart do you ask, through tears, 

                                                     to be told your own name?

_______________

for Six Sentence Stories, "visa". 

Music: Cesaria Evora Sodade

Indian Rope Trick

 As a child, it was always expected that I'd climb.

For the rope trick to work, the jamoora assistant must be obedient,

but I was always more likely to be a burning bride,

going up fast, but on my own peculiar vertical gradient.

In the trick, a rope is left coiled in a basket

at some distance in an open field like a baby at a fire station.

It will then begin to rise like a bhoot as the fakir tasks it,

straight up--it's only disbelief or cartoons that add the ululations.

I was the skipper's little daughter, my father in his linen suit

who read me Longfellow--The Wreck of the Hesperus--

and planted without knowing it, the ghost, the bhoot,

that sank my obedience and scotched the trick for both of us.

When the rope has risen, the child is sent out to climb,

disappearing in the clouds, not answering the fakir's call,

He follows behind with a knife and rose in his smile,

to chop her up, bring her down, and reassemble her after all. 

Do you believe in all that?

Or the tales the Upanishads tell?

Do you believe the Victorian accounts as fact?

And the zombie obedience of jamooras as well?

Of course, the trick is just bullshit.

I disappeared into Ginsberg and Grover Lewis--that's real--

reassembled myself, got high then got straight,

and put my queer shoulder to the wheel. 

________

For First Poems: Door To The Wilder Eye at Earthweal, hosted by my dear friend Hedgewitch. She wants to know what instilled in us "...the  maker's rage to order words." 

Notes: The earliest poem I can remember being thrilled by was Longfellow's poem about the Hesperus. My father read it to me and showed me the book--which I still have--so that I could find it again and read for myself, which I did many times. Later, I found the same visceral feeling of discovery when introduced to Dickinson, Ginsberg (from whose poem "America" I have taken my final line), and my man Grover Lewis, all of whom crashed into my orbit and altered my trajectory by the time I was 18. I come from a family of achievers, and my great love of poetry, music, baseball, and not much else came as a sharp disappointment to my parents. But, the die was cast, and as Emily wrote: "The Soul selects her own Society--Then--shuts the Door"

The Indian rope trick goes pretty much as I have described in the poem. It is probably a Victorian fiction from the time of Empire, but who knows? A jamoora is a child assistant, blindly obedient to the fakir or magician performing the trick. The term can be used simply to describe a mindless conformer. A bhoot or bhuta is a ghost. The Upanishads tell a fable similar to the rope trick, except this time it's a juggler whose juggled objects disappear, then come back down and reassemble. 

 

Handsome

 Nobody thought he was handsome except for me,

the sharp-elbowed stick girl with the camera around her neck.

Always, he would show up on the street early,

a midnight cat sliding in on private grooves, to sit and wait

on the curb for the other workmen and the Jonah bus 

that swallowed them away.

If I could've, I'd have built him a church,

with Host of egg sandwich and coffee black or white.

I'd swear I saw him take out a rosary one diesel-rattle dawn

and it was strung with candy skulls and baseballs.

I imagined his prayers were colorful foreigners wandering 

in warehouse downriver drab Detroit, hated by strangers, loved by God.

After an absence, getting off gin and bad poetry,

I returned to find him gone, the bus stop shifted, the lone tree down.

The starlings had lost their home, me my jones,

and my camera stayed empty for a year after that, like an unfed stray.

I asked a girlfriend once, "Remember that guy, the different one

we used to see waiting?" Ugh, she said, that one. 

Like I said, only I thought he was handsome, like rain, 

like new work boots pawned.

_______

 for Word Garden Word List--Dave Kelly.

Isla de los Fantasmas

 

On the Isla de los Fantasmas, the keeper's wife

spends dawn searching out exhausted birds on the pebbled beach.

She comes to them as if she were light itself

and believes herself to be light itself

but she is as broken as they are.

Realizing this, and wishing to compensate her for her kindness,

they transfer to her their laments, worn around her heart

like dolmens of sound. Within each one, she dies.

With each dawn, each bird, each song, she dies.

The wind is the keeper's wife singing.

It is not the currents of sky or water that exhaust the birds.

It is the endless impassivity of the surface they cannot bear.

Their wings are the pages of hymnals

their bodies are the bindings of hymnals

that can only close at last on the Isla de los Fantasmas.

The keeper's task is to keep the enormous eye of the light

emptying itself out at the water, and the weary birds.

The light comes to them as if it were the keeper's wife,

and believes itself to be the keeper's wife,

but she is down on the pebbled beach, in her dolmen, singing.

_________

for Sunday Muse #219. 

Isla de los Fantasmas = Island of the Ghosts

a dolmen is a table-shaped tomb made of large flat stones

August & Crickets

 

As a girl, I carried the cage I was given

and searched for the bird with the duende call,

its heart spread thick by a grandmother's hand,

there in each prayer and then not there at all.

As a girl I was given soot in a basket

and told not to sift but to husband it close

then sent to a seaside cliff via landslide

where the mayor of filth gave himself the last dose.

O bird! O sky! O flesh made of lilies,

grow light on the bones of the bird on the stalk

of my sorrow, my bloom made of August and crickets

transformed in its throat to an arcing flock.

As a girl I was given a purse with a ticket

to a room with stucco walls and a bed

where a woman crawled from the wreck of the fire

and stood by the window, my bird on her hand.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #172.

Green

Green as the cat's eyes reflected in the pane

separated from the season and the sparrows in the rain

Green as the moss on the shingle near the sky

as distant from the sparrows as November from July.

Green is the dress I'll wear when I die

and watch my spirit rise in the green of her eye

indifferent to my dying, indifferent to the way

the blades green up and mock her from half a breath away.

________

for Sunday Muse #149.

Greening The Jade

There are wheels on cobblestones

outside the windows of her words.

There is a sailor's parrot on a velvet swing

and strands of colored beads in the doorway to her room.

There is never any summer, no noon to white the wall

and so she'll understand if what you told her wasn't real.

A Persian's ears are there to warm her hands

indifferent to the wheeling way she feels.

San Francisco gray as gulls' wings in the morning

or Barcelona in the lazy afternoon

are in the jeweled clip that holds her careless hair back

to ease her eyes to catch the moon.

Don't say you're sorry, don't sing softly in her stairwell

where the echoes' angels fade.

She always knew that open windows let the rain in

to blue her dreams and green the jade. 

________

for Sunday Muse #139.

From Ashes

From ashes, 
roses,
carnations,
mint.

My trunk of failures overturned
by your need,
and my humbling sorrow.

What is plenty, in a desert?
The bowl of your need I filled with double portions,
secreting my heart in the stitching of a new shoe.

From ashes,
roses,
carnations,
mint.
From distress, alchemy--
lead turned to gold.
______

for my son Joe--we have always been there for each other; light in dark skies.

and for Friday 55, hosted by the best poet I know, who I'm proud to call my BFF, Hedgewitch.
_______