The Submarine Edvard Grosk

The submarine Edvard Grosk is a tiny pocket of air and humanity,
folded around itself--
an oblong envelope of warm life,
a kind of metal pita making extreme depth and enormous pressure survivable.

Aboard this vessel is Blonde Katy, the sailor's friend.

There is no official roster on which her name is recorded,
and yet, she is there,
gloriously naked beneath a rough green blanket,
on a bunk mid-way between the sun and the Earth's fiery core.

There are things she will do--
things not just anyone can do, 
things that make the windowless months less nightmarish.
There are islands,
stars,
beautiful prayers offered from blameless lips,
but do any of them exceed Blonde Katy's soft skin in life-saving magnificence?

Like the submarine Edvard Grosk, she was born in Gothenburg,
or was it Oslo?
Whatever the case, she was a rider beneath her mother's ribs,
a miniature ship in dry dock,
until she came down the greased skids as a water baby,
meeting her natural element and taking to it thereafter;
Blonde Katy, swimmer in the clear pure sweetness of a maritime calling.

Is there any priest, any beautiful figurehead,
who could claim hearts the way that Blonde Katy can?
Why, the captain himself relies upon her.
Her long fingernail trailing along his absurd hairy stomach is more telling,
more revelatory, than any computerized graphic or sophisticated sonar available.

If God were to pluck a burning star from the Pleiades or the Southern Cross,
and hold it in the darkness of His palm,
it would uncannily resemble
Blonde Katy aboard the submarine Edvard Grosk,
164 fathoms beneath the surface of the sea.

Finding yourself there,
one Divine whim away from being flung into oblivion,
would you kiss her?
Would you sleep with her,
though you be male, female, or companionway rivet?
Would you quibble over trifles, or bleat about nonsense like fidelity
or the future?
You would not.

Blonde Katy would be your reaping angel,
and the submarine Edvard Grosk your glorious flaming chariot
bound for Home,
Heaven,
or some other as yet uncharted destination that you would know by feel
as if you were a nautilus ecstatically discovering its ideal shell. 
________

Georgia

She first noticed Antonio when he stepped out of a mob,
holding roses for her;
a bloom for every head in the rabble.

She took him on--
her personal little rooster.
He made love to her as if in timelapse--
an ardent insect skittering adoringly along her body.
She could have kept him in a jar, or a desk drawer.

The war came, then.
The sun went off-kilter, tilting drunkenly into the further reaches of the canals.
What use, anymore, for filmmakers
or their gaudy chattering treasures wearing ridiculous gowns,
smiling automatically at the invading armies?

Her last film was a dark comedy
released with subtitles and smuggled to the West
only to languish in a storage locker,
unwatched,
as round and unheeded as the lessons of history
in its circular tin container.

Her rooster was never meant for difficult times,
and he became tubercular--
within a month, he drifted through the bedroom curtains like a ghost,
and took to living with a flock of crows
as their underling,
but yet, he was flying, wasn't he?

She missed Antonio
and the competition of auditions and readings.
Feeling bitchy and out of sorts, she joined the underground.
Wearing berets and trench coats, they taught her to handle a rifle
and to shoot fat-faced officials through the heart.
It was her ingenue days all over again.

Antonio and the now-faded diva met again after the war,
on a single occasion,
at a hotel in Suwanee, Georgia.
She ordered gin through a heavy accent,
and he flipped his good wing, tiredly.
After a silence, they both spoke at once--
"Do you remember..." they began, and then laughed.

It was, by then, the only thing to say,
and it was enough.
_______

In The Eggshell Of My Mind

In the eggshell of my mind,
we had stolen this other chick's car--
one that went to the automobile graveyard decades ago.

I was driving.
It was a stick-shift.
We could see a small strip of pavement through the floorboards,
as blurred as we were, stoned immaculate.

No one ever did for a tee shirt what you did for that one.
it isn't that you were so voluptuous--
no, you were as you are now, slender as an umbrella handle;
but we were young,
and you were perfect.

Your breasts were the size of large oranges--
I knew this because I had studied them like scripture
only the night before,
and with the urgency of the starving.

All this while--
all the time we were driving, 
falling off the sides of bridges, 
lips together like a canning seal--

I was sleeping,
softly breathing the night in,
and then out again,
filling it, Goddess-like, with the stars that are us--
or, at least,
as I imagine us, now.

Just before dawn,
I was arrested.
They wanted to know about your hair,
and whether its blackness could be used to feather cosmonauts
as they dance, weightless, like we do.

They said to show them my hands,
and when I showed them my hands,
fields bloomed and the elk ate these blooms.
They were astonished,
but held me all the same.

Would you hold me, all the same, 
you with your Gypsy blood and your hands that hold a bottle
or a crucifix
with the same sure confidence and 
the smirk you save for holy moments?

They will kill me, 
these police with their reports;
or they will wake me,
and what will be the difference?

You and I will be older, 
gone down the river of time.
Look at all our mistakes!
I love them. I do. Better than any of the things we thought were important.

I wish these fools would let me go back to sleep, or just make me disappear
the way they are known for doing.
I won't tell them about your hair,
no matter what they try.
I won't tell them that my hands knew the little bumps that rose
around your nipples
in the afternoon
when responsible people were sober, and someplace else.

I won't tell them that I loved you,
and love you still.
There are some dreams that are the more beautiful for not being tangible.
Take a letter,
though you are not here;
take my heart,
though yours was never really mine.
Take all the gorgeous things I dream,
before they bash my brains in.
It is the least you can do
for the sake of our souls lost in the ether
like Fox and Carrot-Top.
_______

Note: Fox and Carrot-Top (or Lisa and Ryzhik) were the "Soviet Space Dogs" who made a sub-orbital flight in the summer of 1951.

"stoned immaculate" is from "Texas Radio & The Big Beat" by The Doors.

This is for Izy's Out Of Standard at Real Toads. She says to take three words from a job we hated, and use them in a poem that is NOT about that job. I once worked at a specialty grocery store, many years ago. My words are eggshell, oranges and canning. I might add that I showed up for work drunk as a seaside whore one day, and so my words could also be stoned, bottle and mistakes. 

Sea Change

I was a gatherer of rhythms and tides,
weaving the unspoken into every wing.

I knew the language of the high grass, and was wife to the Sun--
I was opened and lined with light;
in return, I bore the whole green world from within myself.

I gave everything to the flow of currents,
until I was nearly erased, a shore-stone smoothed and smaller.

I let myself lie in the curve of the lunar crescent, then;
I became a kind of egg; a cocoon. 

See how I am now gathered and spread, myself,
on a loom of silvered night-water--

Sea-changed, I kiss only the Moon. 
I am both mother and child, a surface rising.

I embody what some have called betrayal,
but what I know is just the cello-round within me, humming.
_______ 

for Margaret's challenge at Real Toads

Night Sky With Ashes

The earth in summer
loves nothing as she loves the night sky;
and though that dark beauty presses skin-close,
stretched out upon the length of her for hours at a time beneath the moon,
here is the harsh truth:
she can never really have her--
not now,
and not ever.

The warm earth waits until her bones go cold,
and the moon adorns the night sky's river shore hair with years of waiting;
they manifest as ashes, silvering the black.
Such unrequited longing has a name, and its name is
Night Sky With Ashes.

The bone-earth waits,
holding white lilies for her lover and herself,
in a kind of hopeless dawn known best to those
who will never have their heart's desire--
not now, though her bloodbeat slows, dying, because of it,
and not ever.
__________

The Woman With Five Hands

She had five hands, this bible-dark babe next door,
and though some called her "freak",
she was not that. No,
she was an ordinary marvel, much as we are,
us goddesses of the neighborhood--
doing what we will, when left to our own.

Two of her hands, such slender-fingered hands,
such that we all felt a little breathless when she would
smooth her windblown hair back,
were used to do the devil's work--
depending, of course, on which devil's
kids were in school til three, or husband gone
til god knows when, maybe forever--
a devil's work is never done, so they say.

Two of her hands were used to pray,
and when she prayed, the saints themselves sighed
and crossed themselves, forgetting to answer back.
Saint Sebastian no longer felt the sting of the arrows,
and Saint Cecilia lost track of her breathing right in the middle
of her hymn to God.
Prayer can be, should be,
a two way street, and she lit up the lines
at her very first whispered word.

One hand left,
an idle hand perhaps, you'll say.
This hand traced its lineage back to her Romanian high-wire ancestors,
knife-throwers, artisans of every stripe.
She told us once, laughing, that past midnight,
this hand became possessed of magic and did the most astonishing things,
all of its own accord.
I don't know about that,
but what I do know is, she knew how to crook it--
just so--
angled toward true north,
and when she did, on those fine afternoons,
I no longer had a choice, and just like her devils and saints,
I came,
calling her name as if the window weren't wide open
and the seasons, at her bidding, changing gloriously on a dime.
_______

Book Review: "The Good House"

The Good House by Ann Leary

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The Good House" is narrated by one Hildy Good, a real estate broker who is descended from one of the Salem witches. Following an intervention staged by her adult daughters, Hildy has recently returned from rehab as the novel begins. Publicly, she no longer drinks, but after discovering a cache of wine in the cellar of her home, she makes close friends with it, getting (she thinks) quietly smashed most evenings.

As Hildy perfects denial and rationalization to an art form, we find that she is not the only one in Wendover, Massachusetts, who doesn't want to give up her jones. There's new arrival Rebecca (my favorite character in the book), who feels more affinity for her horses than she does for her blowhard of a husband. She goes to local headshrinker Peter for help and he helps her right into an affair. He thinks better of it eventually, but he should have known that some women just will not be ignored. That's amore, dude.

Add to these, a grimy ex-hippie fix-it guy, the local alpha girl with her developmentally disabled son who relates best to the family cat, and an array of New England nut jobs and characters, and you've got a wicked interesting stew, to use the local parlance.

This is not to say that this is some light-hearted romp. Although it is very often funny, it's also, by turns, poignant, heart-breaking, and always well-observed and true. It's not easy to watch Hildy lose her grip as her personal gyroscope swings in wider and ever more drunken loops. She may be deluding herself (if not most of the people around her) and she may be a fantastically unreliable narrator, but "The Good House" paints such a vivid and absorbing portrait of one New England town and its inhabitants that I absolutely and enthusiastically recommend it. I came within a whisker of giving this five stars, and the only reason I didn't was purely subjective: it's almost *too* real. I'm a recovering person myself, and some of this brought it all back a little too vividly for (my own) comfort!



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