Month: April 2016

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In-Sight


I’ve always been a little far sighted.

I can’t read what’s right in my face

And I can’t face intensely close faces.

It hurts my orientation, my spatiality,

Or maybe it’s intimacy I can’t face,

But I’ve the knack for planning ahead

Far into the future or two moves up.

My sight extends far into the un-here.

Though now, in the waning years, or

Maybe waxing, that is, expanding, my

Sight is delimited, far-sighted and 

Near too, somewhere between; really

Not the middle, mean, or average, how

Ever you measure space-time continu-

Um, more like focal clarity of one layer

While the rest blurs snowy opaque and

Blue in relief like sky, sadness or pearls.

I’ve trimmed off layers to the one visible,

My reality carved from seeds and history.

How the rain obscures sight I don’t know,

But I can see clearly how blindness grows.

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On the Eve of Yet Another


Sitting across the table from my oldest at our favorite eatery, I could not help seeing what others must have seen in me 36 years ago: a tall, lean vibrant girl with a hyperactive, inquisitive mind and over burdened sense of responsibility for the buoyancy of the conversation. 

I love to watch her gesticulating hands, the petulance in her sea green eyes and the force of her concerns and wishes. She is all youth and wonder, strength and conviction.

My own youth is like an old 35 mm flickering reel, some parts skipping in fractured movement. The plot always seems to nearly unfold just as the threads run wild and loose. Just like me to crave the missing cracks, what lies in those stuttered jumps in the movie, however slight and seemingly insignificant.

If I could make a real movie of my teens to twenties, I would splice together actual footage of all the moments, days and weeks of laughter. So much laughter. My friends and I knew how to chuckle and wheeze ourselves into spasms, once we broke the ironic smirks broadcasting our quick savvy and adoptive world weariness.

The range of emotion exaggerated on a face, the wide-open eyes in surprise or indignity, the outstretched fingers flung from the span of taut exasperation palms, I recall to fleeting memories evoked by my daughter’s questioning advice on relationships, friendships and the state of the world.

She asks me who in their right mind would have a kid with our sadly looming future. And at the peak of her voiced question mark, I hear my own 20 year old voice chiming in, silently mouthing the words with her in grainy film footage. 

If I squint my reality a tad, she is me. 

But on the eve of yet another birthday, one of those off years signaling no milestones, no edges to encroaching decades or mid-split 5’s, I find myself repeating to her: “If I could give you one thing, my most valuable gift, I would export the revelations I gained both wasting time and suffering, just to push your learning curve so far back your starting point advantage would increase the laughing years twenty fold.”

Which always draws a blank green-eyed stare of indulgent tolerance.

By the time she gets it, hopefully I won’t be mere flickering light through film base covered in gelatin emulsion. 

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I Missed His Birthday, but Raising a Glass to Bill

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My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.
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Jackhammer Song


An idling chain saw keeps rhythm with my back room dancing patter, 

Squaring tables and chopping fruit, two-stepping rectangle long sides

Coloring clear plastic eye-catching berry reds, blues and bumble-black.

Jackhammers turn my thoughts to you, muscle striata crisscrossing

A bare back strained in full throttle and thrust, arms braced at angles.

Broken concrete, that’s what it felt like after I was, you know, set free,

Like nowhere to stand for fear of falling again, in ankle-wrenching cracks.

But there they are to remind me, the construction workers–building–

Repairing the road, pipes or walls, I cannot know from here inside, hearing

And dancing as if I had rhythm or grace, as if I had time to notice and laugh.

Nail guns most certainly sound like giant mutant Swinglines on steroids, 

Though no paper stacks so deeply to need stapling, no two-bit bound book,

No, not like the one written to the back of my mind on scraps of bent memory,

Built to last, survive trapped steps danced in a backward line, shot-gun stapled

To the tar in my veins slick and crumble, hardened to the yielding roadway.

The steady machine hum and buzzle constant signal hard hat quitting time.

I hear the spooling of cords and wires rubber squeezed shut like garden hoses

Half circle’d serpentine in yard corners dark and dewy til Sunday mowing comes.

Only hard heads too entrenched in imaginary ditches to quit stay up to feed night

While sweat-stains run down shower drains of fixers and makers gone home.

By the time I turn keys, write pages, push pens on paper, close covers cleaned,

Those early rising sun greeting gritty orange vested denizens of asphalt and dust

Will have set their alarms to pillows, snores, grunts and swear to the sucking stars.

And tomorrow’s dance of rattle and ear-shattering drum will resume without me.

For maybe this night the secrets to staying will keep me there beyond the walls. 

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Cradle to Grave


One more I honor and pray will not be the last,

This poem, your day, awakenings to more days

Filled with complaints, facts, lies, jokes and sighs

Those last with mortal grimace and existential pain–

And celebrations.

No one fills your place, not before or after,

None who sits just where you do in my house,

Or my car, no one quite like you who inherited and grew

status, class, gender, race, trait, stance and ethnicity.

You made me.

One day you will unmake me just like the sun and earth,

My fiery Death whose smoke will awaken the ravens

Loosen charred Regret and Steam, neither life companions

On my walk, my rise and fall, blossom and decay, my stain

After you.
 

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You’re the knife

Eavesdropping snippet of the day:

“I don’t why it is, but every time I see you I picture the blade carving into bloody flesh.”

…

…

…

Silence (enough said).

 

Credit:creepy pasta.wikia.com

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The Heart of Empathy Speaks


I fell in love with foreign languages from before I could speak,

From Mother Goose nursery rhymes chanted to childhood,

Singing me through my days in silly lilting jibberish tolling tales–

Mesmerizing wispy wild figures sticking thumbs in plum pies

Or eating mystical morsels named curds and whey on a tuffet.

Then in college, I pined for the secret to unlock the hearts of 

Spanish, French and Russian poets, painters and culture magicians.

I cracked the code to some, forming strained lipped sounds,

Writing winsome words in chipped or open gullet accents  or

Symbols to sounds unmade, unimagined and click ticklish

until I could not remember my own tongue.

But after college, language tore at me, ripped me up

And left me dull, licit and languishing in legal triangles,

Endless geometry of angles, degrees and lines.

The law sandpapered language across imagination’s landscape,

Smoothed my edges in deeper, rounder archetypal paths, pregnancy, 

Until I lost Octavio Paz’s meter sanded out in childrearing recipes

Swapped with Guatemalan nannies.

Pellucid sentences peeled off like shredded wallpaper skin,

Their luster gone with a youthful jaunt, hop, gleam and trigger,

Flashed in skipping stones, falling in love and hopping fences

Round speedways, parks and wood clearings where music moved 

Us, loins and feet to primal noun-less, soundless speech, 

Just to see,  get a glimpse at lip-sung words beyond the barriers, 

Risking liberty and future, impelled by lusty mischief and rush.

Back then, I had to hear them sung in tune-ful missives keyed only to me.

And now, the remaining hash of come and gone, bright and dark, transforms

Acidic intestinal stew to sorcerer’s clairvoyant elixir: my gut tells me.

Among the clamorous hate-filled speeches and cautious creeds non-offending,

Blasted in soldiered lies and political stomps, and on uncivil, anti-social media,

The gurgle steels me listen to us, be your pain, own my heated core as if it were 

The world’s sole lingual ignition; the ravenous merging urge to swallow me up,

The kind you write in erotic type and imagery possessing, owning my pulse–

These are mere smoke signals, the wink-less language of I know you as I am.  

In the aftermath of lived language, word dross, let us, you and me, tutor empathy,

The Esperanza of human kindness,  re-remembered swish and slosh in thickish silent

 womb–connected to another’s rhymes and rhythms, as the song. 

 

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Babies in College

 
 
Today a student handed me a note purportedly written by his mother, excusing him for leaving class early a couple of days ago. I teach college English. In the 20 plus years I have taught, this was a first.
 
In the last 2 years teaching at the same college I have taught for 16 years, my plans for at least one class per semester have been interrupted to remind students that they are in college. They don’t have to be in class like they had to in high school by state law, though it is probably a good idea, especially in my class. I do lots each class to justify my existence–that is, graded assignments and answers to eventual final exam questions–and missing a class is not recommended. 
 
However, students who must miss class are assumed to be adults responsible enough to find out what they missed and resourceful enough to recoup their losses. Big assumptions. They still ask me questions like, “Did we do anything while I was gone?”
 
Though less disturbing, I cannot count how many times students ask me permission to leave early, arrive late or miss class altogether. At first I believed they were simply not mentally out of high school, where their attendance was strictly required though their attention to the class while attending was not so strictly required. I can only assume so from the in depth, lengthy text messages I have received from my children while they were in class. Many students have confirmed the same, and judging by the persistent, nearly obsessive habit of texting or gazing into their phones–activity banned in my class–I believe the phone habit is a long-instilled layover from high school, or merely the product of living now.
 
Ironically, high school mandates attendance but not attention while college is just the reverse. Since I teach freshman, their education includes breaking the high school habits and convincing them that they truly are free now, free to succeed or fail–whether I give them permission or not.
 
I’ll admit that my jaw dropped and my face clearly had “wtf?” written all over it when I read the penciled note on a sticky note sized paper that asked to excuse her son for missing class the other day. Have I gotten much, much older recently or have my students gotten much younger? I am now convinced that the number of coddled college kids have increased and they have a tougher time growing up, thus the odd permission requests and absence notes. Or is it simply time for me to retire?
 

Credit: http://www.babiesonline.com

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All the king’s horses

  

She loved horses. 

Everything about them 

from their velvety lips 

to the wisdom burnt black into their eyes. 

Her childhood memories of horses never left her until…

He told her that night he left 

with only a duffle bag and a tennis racket, 

he was not one of the king’s horses or men, 

and she was no Humpty Dumpty, 

though she surely needed fixing.

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