“In love there are two things–bodies and words.” Joyce Carol Oates
And her rejoinder to me: “Our two bodies are our words–hello and good bye.”
Never Saw You Coming (Yes I did)
NEVER, no
I never expected you, never saw you coming, not at all,
but there you were, wearing all the wrong clothing:
horizontal striped collared button down shirt, like
colored bands ringing a thick, redwood tree trunk.
Middle aged folk fallen prey to time and gravity
don’t wear bold-colorful advertisements to widening
perimeters, especially for one with no boundaries,
sexually speaking, of course, not morally or politically.
And logo’d button down polos reek conservative bean
counter, occupation-ally bound to count kisses, time and
orgasms, sans deductions for the unholy of holies among the
fiscally, vaginally vigilant.
And there I was, a raven, coated and shiny like wet ink newly
splotched on your parchment paper computer screen, dark
and waiting to be lit, turned and transformed beyond the
shadowy picture created in your imagination, confessions
and slick-wicked liquid words sliding thick viscous
through your keyboard fingers, just like we wrote, painted
pictures in sentences spelling out, enumerating, if you
will, voracious mimicry, want and want some more, only not
wanting all that just can’t have, not then, not now, but
something else arose, grew from our impossibility, your
straight laces strung tightly, fronting the devilry in your
daydreams, drooly lasciviousness set free, not freely given.
Yeah, we really did it for each other, whatever it was that
needed doing, and still do to both no one’s and yet everyone’s
surprise, including us who love so much so little of the
time, no time all the time, we who live separate lives
lived in broad daylight secrecy, while we storybook
pieces and patches of once upon a time we were other
people than we are and were then who could be us now.
You often ask, “Who knew you’d still be around?” And
“How could I have known? I didn’t see you coming.”
No, we didn’t see each other coming but we sure do now.
Gemini’s Birthday Song
A Gemini morning, humid, Eastern heat-spilled impatience and placenta to the floor,
Happy birthday to you
A baby double minded, twice as sure of his kingship poured from his womb-like throne
Happy birthday to you
Onto polished bamboo floor, flat-rolled expanse from bedroom to corridor then veranda.
Happy birthday dear Gemini
Whose royalty slips past a princely generation, crown-less, buried beneath rice paddies?
Happy birthday to you
A squandering son, spendthrift and sensual, carried epicure’s pleasure palace to the abyss,
How old are you now?
Never the same, depleted, arrested at shore along middle class havens harboring mediocre
How old are you now?
Table wear and linen unrefined, delicacies grown bloated, mutational and cloying starchy
How old are you now, dear Gemini.
Sweet-salty in heavy-handed cookery, fraudulent design and mockery, a chef’s despair.
How old are you now?
Proud May’s retreat, your promises half-fulfilled pool like soaking wet wool slogging
For he’s a jolly good fellow
Footfall’s dawn soft pacing to a slipper shuffle, grey questioning the doubtful days.
For he’s a jolly good fellow
A heyday haunting lingers along fleshy palms, midriffs and necks, a puffy sight.
For he’s a jolly good fellow
Back-look now, mid-life, sandwiched between regret and hope–a dual mind–
That nobody can deny
Celebration calls a prince-of-the-day to candle-caked song once more.
Credit: Gemini on Pinterest
Tomorrow it will rain
Tomorrow it will rain and clean us.
Tomorrow the winds will blow, the
Seagulls cry and the oceans below
Swallow us deliciously deep inside.
Tomorrow it will rain sorrow’s smile
Amniotic wide soothing wild comfort,
As prickly mist-spray freckles faces
That gather and drip in blind rivulets.
The forest hounds heard it first again.
Tomorrow’s earth welled in tears will
Return us breathing wet gilled gasps
Coughing air empty as the promise
Of flight in flapping wingless arms to
A raging sun’s scourge to proud men.
But tomorrow’s rain will drown sins of
Stories told and re-told, lies in truth,
Til we too believe the cause-effect, a
Cumuli soothsayer’s scientific stream,
Meteorologist, fortune-teller and god,
Tomorrow it will rain and clean us all.
Taraxacum
A metamorphosed dandelion lay intact in a vast grassy field
Where children played in muddy boots and soccer cleats,
Where footballs landed in small arms no bigger than a pigskin
Punted by big-shoed daddies tossing at small footed brothers.
The sun beat the grass and sent the hornets flying as players
Passed the ball with scuffed leather knotted Adidas and Nikes.
Even after the beach folding chairs and rainbow shade umbrellas
Came Dragging across fields drying from the morning showers,
She stood straight peeking above the tallest blade, puff and stem,
One lone lion’s tooth floret-filled seed head unfazed, full bloom
Miraculously untrammeled, an uncrushed testament to fortune
And delicate obedience to the will of a higher chaos than ours.
Jousting the gods
The old man complains once again that he’s dying.
My immediate response kicks in: “You’re not dying.”
The main thing is to speak in monotone reassurance.
“You’re not dying,” I repeat. “I’m not ready for you to go.”
And we have nothing more to say the rest of the way.
Our third or fourth trip to disease harbor, we pray.
The edge we negotiate each day exhausts us both,
He teetering to the right and me pulling him back left.
We battle each under the armor of our own skin, an
Aged man and his aging daughter jousting the gods.
Red is the Color of Pride
He gave me that look, the one
Half pity half smirk,
Like sympathy, cringing and
Glee all at once.
I recognized that look, maybe
Gave it to someone sometime
Myself, but tonight I was the
Target of derision; “Just kidding,”
He said of course, after insinuating
I was not acting my age or regressing
To some teenage former life. He
Mostly likes me, I think, not one to
Put me down, but there it was.
And I was struck with a hint of
shame, or something close to it, in
My smudged jeans and t-shirt, the
Swept back unkempt hair, and
Stained sneakers, and this place, I
Know I need to let go of, just take
That leap, brave the chance of more.
Uncertainty: this sudden pride, I lost
Not long ago and never missed til now,
not even noticing its disappearance,
Undeserving and unwarranted, so now
After tonight’s blush–pride–have
I fallen backward or forward?
A Child Grows Weary
A child grows weary and crooked in her
furrowed family’s embrace.
Unhappiness long etched lines in their faces,
Trace gashes from daggers honed by meaningless jobs,
Repetitive steps, thoughts and temple-rubbing or hair
Pulling to fill gas tanks and pantries,
Emptiness in the earning, gathering, and slipping
Through grated fingers, past throbbing hearts’ content,
Devalued and alone, lost in dreams of stopping,
Just ceasing: road-miles, emails, phone calls, pulling here
Pushing now over there, back there again, counting up, down,
Eager for a weekend collapsed– to create a moment,
Build a tower, topple a sand castle, and rub sea granules
through the sensitive skin dipped between outspread toes.
A child might misunderstand her father’s misery, her
Mother’s edges on especially rough days.
A child might suffer, sliced and bled,
Her joy punctured by worry, burden and weighty
Unbelievably unknowable interminably slow sinking
Beyond her breath-leaking life raft.
Photo: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother
Road Trip
Travel jumpstarts wonder.
Leaving the usual haunts along the same paths to and from work, market or eateries, draws out the dormant words, smoldered sparks awaiting flint.
Nothing but changing scenery piques alertness, imagery and observation so profoundly.
I eat nature.
Travel bits piece large land masses speeding roadside to tiny impressions, ideas and memory fragments, creating a large mosaic of tile-words.
As I write, I fly over the Pacific on my way to Seattle to meet a connecting flight to Spokane, where she awaits.
More likely she waits for my call: “I’m here.”
She and I will drive the distance Google reports as 19 and a 1/2 hours, but I know better.
Last June, we drove her to Spokane for school.
She left school–and Spokane–in December to come home and heal.
Last week, she finally returned to the life she began to make there before the unfortunate detour, the accident.
Her head.
She, who took me to a radical feminist art show last April, who sometimes wears a “cunt” pin, who sports Klimt’s The Kiss line drawing of two women tattooed above her ankle, and who smirkingly cranks up Taylor Swift’s “We are never getting back together” on the car radio, will be my car companion across three states homeward.
Road trip.
Just like last year, the rain astonishes us, its violent insistence.
And again, the greenness of green, the way rain pelts the tinny Honda framed windows reminds me of crackling gum chewers, and the nod to engineers knowing that windshield wipers need three or four speeds, these three I recall in a whirlwind road-swallowing marathon beside a semi-conscious travel mate.
She peered into satan’s screen for 23 of the 24 hours.
But she never could figure out how to find the nearest vegan restaurant to the five freeway in downtown, perhaps too daft from sleeplessness or not acquainted with practical phone features as much as the camera, social media apps and texting.
I grow older in bounding leaps, too old for freezing, middle-of-the-night rest stops along two-lane, farm-house roadways without gas stations for 94 miles and cramped, compact car cabins designed for legless sleepers.
It could have been the blue moon.
I drove and drove, sidling mountain edges; through snowy pines and meadows, rain-soaked forests and cloud-burst flashes drenching miles of almond trees squared off in rows blurring into golden heather fields dotted with black Jerseys ruminating time and space in their masticant jowly bovine stares prescient with the soon-approaching L.A. traffic psychosis.
And home.
Only my biceps carry the road residuals: the mindless painful wheel gripping in the desperate fight against gravity’s theory.
Thanatos’ grip
While I watch the apple un-peel, fix
Itself, I linger in null space,
Avoided aftermath, just between
Speculation and the deed is done.
I’m re-tired, now dogs barking in
The night’s just one more sign, like
Leaky bladders and bland food, apples
The exception. Pings, dings and
Pop-ups neither move nor inspire me to
Seek, dread or despair any longer.
Words dare me to, but fail to enamor, not
Like sleep, food or crapping does in
Human reduction to thin necessity, like
Light, an illusory mass beating us down
Pressing us in struggle, your God against
Mine, Eros ahead falling to Thanatos’ grip.
In the gaze of the other 