“Summer Music, For my Father,” “Caught,” and “Color as Language”
The setting:
Notes in a measure of motion
with dissonant zinc-white daylight splashing
and dancing upon the path
as the horizon softens to a bluer hue, and vanishes
“No X-Men in LA” and “Missing Rehoboth”
Where are you? the seven-year-old in me
asks as I watch the screen fill
with frenetic red and orange,
billowing gray, curtained black.
Storm, come and still the winds.
Jean Gray, divert the water.
“Disappearing Home,” “Shopping With My Mother,” and “A Little Fiction”
We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.
“Polyglotony,” “Quadrophonic,” and “Photogenia”
Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing
weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating
“Starting from the Middle,” “Heap of a Human,” and “First Love After”
Life came out of me
a gush of red
Moon-pale I waited those eternal
stretched seconds
for my
arms to be filled
with you.
“A Quiet Black Wedding,” “The Broken must find the Broken ,” and “So Many Lengths of Time”
These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release
a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.
We have come apart, the skin of us slide
to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free
“First Man,” “Deal With It,” and “The Socks”
Empty as the space
on the back of my neck
where the phantom of your
hand rests just
outside the confines of
my comfortable reach
“Nocturne,” “Flint Ridge Overlooking the Klamath River,” and “Aubade for Lisa”
The night is a black dress
draped over the arms of a couch, she whispers
stars plucked like cherry blossoms.
A smokey hush fills the room
“Dissolution of My Father,” “My Mother’s Faith,” and “Crying: Process”
You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.
“the wish,” “imperatives at the lake,” and “sister song”
after all this busying of body, resisting rest
like a toddler hurling her blanket through the night,
after all these efforts manifesting goals, dreading
rejection, willing perfection like a cheerleader
“A Duplex Only Turns 43 Twice,” “Accidentally Down and Out in Dublin,” “Here and There on a Triple-Helical Journey to the Islands and Highlands of Scotland”
More insatiable than the desire to hoard,
Your fans say death’s a foreign coincidence.
They also say a forgotten coin’s never
Spent, but its odyssey costs us a day.
In 42, you slid like theodicy.
In Get on Up, you put an omen’s plaything
“A Short Talk on Pain,” “The Same Old Scenario,” and “lips stained with what they have tasted”
A short talk on pain?
No, no. I don’t think so.
Let’s change the subject.
Let’s deflect our attention.
Besides, what is there to say?
“My Mom Would Repeat to Herself Over and Over Again,” “I Think I’m Just Going to Go,” and “Life-Fighting Machines”
this too shall end.
This too shall end.
This too shall end—
from a place in the basement corner bedroom
beneath boarded-up windows in the back of the house
where she hid from the noise of an Alaskan summer solstice
of driftwood bleaching, refused to watch the harbor pier
“rebirth,” “more herself,” and “Surrender”
willed by the rain
washing over me.
slow at first,
it filled the bank.
drowning in emotions
I built a dam.
“Thran,” “Janus Stood Aside,” and “Screaming Eagle Uncorked”
Romania is a different culture
It has high mountains
Low valleys
And Roma wandering the roads
Byways and small lax villages.
“Poem for Glockenspiel and Didgeridoo,” “Sunrise Bloody Sunrise,” and “Take Your Son to Work Day”
As sticky as syrup-soaked gruel
eyes closed with dreamy leftovers
eyes closed tightly as if seamstresses
sewed those viscous visions inward.
“Headstone,” “Berlin AM,” and “Venom”
You are cold,
to my palm,
to my cheek,
cold to my tongue.
“Blumensprache (or Self Portrait as Purple Thistle),” “My Words,” and “Noir”
Because my head is full of one hundred flowers.
Because dandelions were taken; ditto orchids
(each a bookend on the hardy-to-fragile spectrum).
Because I don’t compete with or covet the rich
and shallow soil but trade in the depths of mingled roots.
“If we couldn’t get it right the first time, then let’s forget it,” “If the balancing act was uneven, then let’s tip the scales,” and “If deconstruction is a love language, then let’s burn it to the ground”
Lying amidst terra cotta
shards, in backyard rituals
we stared at a bleaching dot
of sun, hoped tanning might
remind us of no—bad—days. I told you
“home was looking at you,” “My Apologetic Elegy,” and “My Father And The Souvenir”
Home is a mold, that I cast upon you
in the shape of this poem, that fits only you.
Home was the way you described every color:
hunter green, sunset orange, and midnight blue.
“Being,” “After,” and “Hunting”
When I was a child I went out to the long hedge
along the back of our property. I could crawl
in under the leaves and branches to the middle.
“Basking” “My Valentine’s Day,” and “Indian Summer Twilight from my Balcony”
basking in the words
of a poem set aside, long forgotten
the warm glow of verses once familiar
comfort like a soothing bath
taking you back
to another time and place
“Streetlight,” “Sudden Branch Syndrome,” and “Clock”
I would wake and watch
from my bedroom window
as the snow fell in a waterfall of white
under the glow of the streetlight,
a suburban beacon shining
on my narrow side road.
“Journey Through the Realms of Night,” “Mind-full-ness,” and “North”
Two days after the moon was full
I walked as in a dreaming.
Over the black seas I yearned to be,
Where the old stars were still bright and gleaming.