Flamingoes all pink and proud
at the Junior Museum & Zoo.
Kids & grandparents all aflutter
flocking to public feeding time
in a fluff-and-strut club of cute.
no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business
Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly
Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals
awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.
Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least
hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations
infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory
Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.
The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.
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
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.
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.
Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing
weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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?
No, no. I don’t think so.
Let’s change the subject.
Let’s deflect our attention.
Besides, what is there to say?
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
willed by the rain
washing over me.
slow at first,
it filled the bank.
drowning in emotions
I built a dam.
Romania is a different culture
It has high mountains
Low valleys
And Roma wandering the roads
Byways and small lax villages.
As sticky as syrup-soaked gruel
eyes closed with dreamy leftovers
eyes closed tightly as if seamstresses
sewed those viscous visions inward.
You are cold,
to my palm,
to my cheek,
cold to my tongue.