The World According To Madame Zygansky

Madame Zygansky put ideas in our heads--
that much is true.

But to say that she turned us into what we became,
is to say that one woman can feather the crows,
toss them into the sky,
and turn day into night, like a parlor trick.

Investigators,
keen-eyed sirs,
wearing ties that your wives switched out this morning
in replacement of your own unfortunate choices--
question us,
fall in love with us,
betray those wives.

Solve nothing.

We were girls born as a lesson in biology,
mailed by our mothers to Madame Zygansky's doorstep,
aeropost, naturally.

Arriving as witless nightjars, we underwent a lustration
inside our tiny birdskulls.
Madame Zygansky sent books into our brains like secret police,
and music through us to denounce the gray futures
escaped with every second spent under her tutelage.

Dance with us, detectives.
If you keep your little notepads tucked between your palms and ours,
you may still be able to keep our faces--
and the sound of wing beats--
out of your dreams tonight.
Otherwise, in the morning, you will have to report and jail yourselves,
fondling the bombs we gave you as the trains take you away.

Madame Zygansky put ideas into our heads,
cobalt blue on ivory white, with a few flecks of black.

If she turned us into what we became, we bless her for it--
Only a Gypsy knows how to feather the crows
and toss them into the sky,
her flock alive and aloft, with all directions open.
_______

for Kerry's mini-challenge, and dedicated to teachers everywhere.
 

 

Fearless Journeys Into Foreign Lands

In my 20s, I loved the newsstand.
Neatly stacked out-of-town editions might have been
pillows for my future lovers, just arrived, or
stepping stones across a river, never the same one twice.

Daddy would have been proud, seeing my devotion
to the early street, the Sunday supplement and the sports final. 
All of my poems, then, were papier-mâché,
and I wrote them around the crumbs from French bread,
and between bottles of Milwaukee beer.

These days, I have become a homebody,
but when I press my face to your skin, 
I always smell newsprint along with shea butter and lavender.
Part of the pleasure in loving another woman is the feeling of being on home ground,
as easy as raiding your own kitchen in the dark.

Still, love is always a fearless journey into foreign lands.
Even though I practice a daily discipline of advice columns and horoscopes,
having learned the language of you the way a novitiate learns about faith;
and even though I find home in your hair, your eyes, your voice,
you will always be feathered with a thousand pages that I somehow missed.  

So, here goes:
down the hatch, take that turn, trust that guide.
I love you,
fearlessly,
and always in the manner of front page news.
______    
          

Come To Me

Come, though I have no claim on you,
and you have none on me.
The first wet snow arrives tenuous as a schoolgirl's crush,
and yet, there it is, on every edge of the still unfallen leaves.

Along the rail fence, and in the saucers of the flower pots,
pale and perfect as stationery just bought,
is the signature and sign of what you are to me.
Everything that was there before, remains, but changed in spirit, subtly.

There is no way to explain the ineffable,
or my simple wholehearted pleasure at what is given and become--
Just promise me that you understand,
and that, one more time, you'll come.
_____

for Grace's mini-challenge at Real Toads.

Meat

The Meat Monkeys boomed death into my mother.
No more warm,
no more milk,
no more rough tongue.

They put the hard ring around my neck,
and pushed me behind the strange gray grass that cannot bend.
The Meat Monkeys taught me useless things:
Jump through a hoop.
Sit on a perch like a bird.
Go here, do that, learn some monkeytalk.

Whip. Chair. Hungry.
At night, I dream of forests full of loose dinner.
Here comes my Meat Monkey, strutting.
Meet my claws, teeth, anger.

Learn some tigertalk.
______

a circus tale for Mama Zen in 89 words.

Book Review: "Manson"

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Having read the same author's "Go Down Together", about the lives of Bonnie & Clyde, I knew that Jeff Guinn can write, and he doesn't disappoint here, either.

This book goes all the way back, and reveals the truth about Manson's childhood, which was bad, but not nearly as bad as he would claim later that it was. He seems to have been a bad seed from the start. By taking the reader step by step and year by year, Guinn shows how Manson's patterns start early and only continue to get worse and more destructive through his lifetime.

I think everybody must wonder how he managed to exert such total control over his "Family" that they would kill for him. Guinn shows, follower by follower, how this happened, and what the horrifying results were. Searching out young people, mostly women, who were "bent, but not broken", he used a combination of pop psychology, LSD, and sex to break them down and then rebuild them as true believers.

As someone observes near the end of the book, nobody who came close to Charlie--including such disparate people as Dennis Wilson, Gerald Ford and Manson's own mother--came out undamaged. Recommended. 



View all my reviews

Peasant Face

I have the broad peasant face,
plain as pie,
that seems only to lack babushka and shawl.
Such a woman as me should live a hundred miles from Kiev,
looking up, seeing
sun, then moon,
sun, then moon,
a million times and then some.

Who is the white angel, the blonde daughter of a czar,
who whispers in my good ear?
And who is the dark angel, the changeling from a doorstep,
who whispers in my other, as I dream?

I have the broad peasant face,
plain as pie,
that seems to close like a cardboard suitcase.
Such a woman as me might sleep a hundred miles past her stop,
all the while seeing
sun, then moon,
sun, then moon,
a million times in fascination.
______

Fire Blossom

flame from friction--
i'm the backdraft baby from the oven mother.

she kept painting herself pot belly black--
i was born pink as a sea shell,
but the contact left me red--

red haired,
red tempered,
a real red headed stepchild struck sharply in the dark.

little marvel that you, dear later love, followed my smoky scent,
and, talons artfully crossed behind your back, declared me bright.

mommyless me,
furious turning-to-ashes me,
set your creative curses in my ear like diamonds,
and said, ah, my head is become a jewel.

like every pigeon of a huckster/devil/killer,
i thought it all came from you.

i was a bird looking with one eye through my heat-cracked varnish,
and oh how i sang for what i saw.

now i'm older,
my ledge is full of bones.
it looks like dance when i move around up here.

what i finally learned,
after loving you,
leaving you,
figuring you out,

is that the darkness in you that looked like home to me,
was just the product of my own burn.
i'm the light, motherfucker,
and you are only

headlights
sweeping, filling, blinding for a pitchman's moment--
and then gone, not even dark,
just non-existent like you were before i ever lit up your smile.
________ 

 for Susie's challenge at Real Toads