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

Santa Anita

 

When I think of you 

                                     Daddy,

still to this day I see you in

                                               overcoat and fedora,

newspaper under your arm,

                                                  breath visible in the cold,

coming down the sidewalk from the

                                                                 train station--

I would run to meet you, overjoyed.

Years later,

                    post-divorce, me a

21-year-old 

                     home from overseas.

I stayed with you

                              and your new wife

that stranger, and you Daddy, 

                                                    you a stranger too

in the unfamiliar sprawl of L.A.

You took me with you to

                                           Santa Anita racetrack

with the beautiful thoroughbreds

                                                            ambling

in their easy gait, the jockeys

                                                    leaning forward

as if already running the next race.

                                                              I was looking

at the odds board and then you were gone.

I waited as the horses with their

                                                         strange wonderful names

finished race after race,

                                           feeling lost, and sad, then angry.

I still regret how I spoke to you

                                                       when you finally appeared

but you took it all with a funny smile. 

                                                                  Years later I realized

that you had gone to call the new wife.

                                                                      You just

couldn't be away from her, for me. 

Daddy, I don't know who you turned into.

My adored father

                               became someone who lived

with plastic over the furniture

                                                     and the Lakers on tv.

Oh for a ballgame with you

                                                 at Tiger Stadium

or another trip to the DIA

                                             to see Diego Rivera's mural.

I would run to you, overjoyed,

                                                     but you are gone,

just a sad California memory.

__________________________

for Dverse Poetics "Left In The Lurch" hosted by my friend Dora. 

Music: The Pretenders Back on the Chain Gang

My Bear

 

My bear

has to be awoken gently.

(We've been through any number

of jarring alarm clocks, smashed to bits on the floor.)

My bear

needs to get up by April

or he's groggy all summer.

Wakey, baby,

I whisper in his cute furry ear.

My bear

is the super in our building.

His keys jingle like

Christmas bells.

He is jolly and waddles to the rescue.

My bear

gets dissed by some of the 

harpies on the top floor.

Then they go kiss

the apes and hyenas they married

who keep Cameros under tarps in the parking garage.

My bear

solves problems by waving

at them with his massive paws.

He groans offendedly

when this does not solve the problem.

Then he tries chewing on it or tipping it over.

My bear

makes the residents' kids

get out of the storeroom in the basement.

He gets up on two legs

and shakes his head no.

Some of them need to change trousers afterward.

My bear

is my bruin castle keep.*

We talk in bed and decide

that if we have a girl we'll name her Ursala,

and if we have boy he'll go to Boston

to play ice hockey.

My bear

knows that I will buy

his favorite fruit preserves

and real honey in jars, not the fake stuff.

We have twelve different

honey dippers

and each wear one ring.

My bear

sits back on his butt like a Buddha.

I wear a bucket hat and a thousand

cuffs and necklaces.

He huffs the air with his big fat black nose.

I sigh and smile.

It's a good life.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Help! A Bear Is Eating Me!

*this line is adapted from a previous poem of mine, "Our Bear."

Music: The Bare Necessities

Word Garden Word List--Help! A Bear Is Eating Me!

 

Good morning class! (bored nasal response) "Good morning Ms. Fireblossom." It's time for this week's Word List poetry prompt! Our source this week is a rather insane and howlingly funny novella by Mykle Hansen entitled Help! A Bear Is Eating Me!  

From the back cover:

JERK WARNING!

Marv Pushkin is pinned under his SUV somewhere in Alaska. He hates Alaska, nature, people, and especially his wife. He loves his SUV, his clothes, his money, his drugs, and himself. Marv Pushkin is such an asshole.

When I read this book, I was in stitches. It's hilarious. Marv Pushkin is a character you'll love to hate. Yes, he's being eaten by a bear from the first line to the last, and what he mostly does is complain and be as disagreeable as possible. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll root for the bear!

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Subject, mood, and style are up to you; there need be no bears or Marv Pushkins at all, unless you want for there to be. But ask yourselves this: if you were alone in the woods, would you rather be confronted by a bear, or by someone wanting you to read their unpublished five-volume set of topical haiku? Either way, just write, link up, visit others and then leave a picnic basket unattended in Jellystone Park. This prompt stays active through Sunday. 

And now, your List:

bear

blubbery

Camero

children

costing

cute

dumpy-looking

evolved

freeway

furry

Godzilla

hospital

luxuriously

meds

Mexico

mints

pills

puddle

retarded

starry-eyed

Only Every Bloody Thing

 

Only every bloody thing

volunteered for offering

against their will, against the grain

against their soul and flesh and name.

Our Mother of the Not Enough

whose kiss is made of chaff and stuff

to starve the cow whose bell is broke

and tell the flame it's only smoke.

Only every bloody thing

whose throat was cut but still could sing

will curse your words and curse your hand

in every tongue and every land.

Our Mother of the Frozen Pond

the awful ice where darkness spawned

a lonely child who had one too

whose scorn is mixed with pity, too.

________

For those, like me, for whom Mother's Day is hard. We are sisters, we are fierce, and we are worthy.

Two roads diverged in a wood...

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

Music: Sly & the Family Stone Stand

Mi Loca Amada

 

The full moon scares me,

and always has.

I become a dropped plate 

shattering along its reflected lines. 

Bless the rainy night,

the wet leaf drip of solace.

Thick clouds hide me

burrow-minded from the mad moon.

My fear of what it might do,

or cause me to do, leaves me w(e)ary.

For tonight I am safe,

there is no moon, but mi  loca amada, no stars either. 

______________

for What's Going On? "The Night Sky"

Music: Snow Get You To The Moon

 

The Water Dove

 

I kissed the dove

who made her nest

in the lonely pool at the bottom of my heart.

Little water-dove

sweet creature, feathered mother,

when I breathe, you flutter, shift, and sigh.

I kissed the foxes

whose meal was lately

in the henhouse where all rain is born.

Little hidden ones

with your silent black feet,

when I cry, you peer out from moonlit memory.

I kissed the gamesman

in the old pink cottage

because he was there, and silent, like God.

I was the little nanny

in the graveyard singing

to the doves, and foxes, and gamesman

peering back at me from the lonely pool 

of moonlit memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Life After Life. 

Music: Rodrigo Adagio