Tag: loss

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First Cut: Poem 15

First Cut–
 
Perhaps my father was the first,
 
with his absence,
 
except for the rare storms from his daytime slumber
 
to terrorize us into quiet so he could sleep.
 
I once got caught in the cross fire of his flying hands.
 
I was not yet 3.
 
My older sisters squealed and screamed him awake.
 
But I was too naive to run.
 
Before that, he was the myth my mother made us believe
 
about fatherhood and tender love.
 
First Cut II–
 
Another one I summons from memory caves
 
was the gorgeous boy
 
with the ass long shiny silk brown hair
 
and tan flawless skin sunk into Italian brown eyes.
 
I was 13 and he 15.
 
He paid me attention, walked with me at night
 
on a quiet moon-lit road named Candlewood as we
 
murmured our intentions, our future married selves
 
–or I did.
 
I couldn’t believe he was interested in me, a brainy
 
average-looking girl with the wrong kind of hair that refused
 
to hang long and straight from a middle combed part.
 
And a week after that walk under the old gibbous moon,
 
when I told him I wanted to marry a bodily lover,
 
he failed to appear, non-responsive, ghosted–
 
and I cried the cliché with a painful heart, torn
 
and scorned, never to be stabbed the same again,
 
my pillows my week-long companions in sob-town.
 
First Cuts–
 
Though others made Caesar of my heart, dagger
 
hurlers and stabbers, I remember them vaguely.
 
Not like the first cuts, the baptismal soul’s sarcophagus.

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On the Heath: Poem 13

Alone on the Heath, a purple flower
where there once was dry reedy sand,
you, friend, rode the train to dusty plains
with me–and slept through shifting tides
along California beaches, we two, strangers
to this land, and no less to each other.

I watched your sleeping breast rise and settle,
like the rhythm of our first freedom days, lazed
into adulthood, we seekers of flame, depths
of our soulful hearts, walking poetry, youth
alluring to each other–comrades–and evil too.

I saw you leave that day, through cloudy eyes,
music, sand and weed drifting us alongside
our own nature, me, cautious and calculating,
ready to loosen within my comfortable shoes, and
you, riddle’s answer to: What is freer than free?

Air.

Who has stolen your breath, my flower?

Sleep.

Your forever frozen face stills time in its place.

 

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Daddy Deep

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What sound makes hollow deep?

Not quite sound at all,

It is a missing knock, 

Soft and insistent,

Knuckles weak.

A buzz of silence

Just about where the t.v. 

Lies blank and mute.

A sneer faded to black

And a joke told 10,000 times

With a missing punch line

Or vaguely remembered,

Souring the laughter.

Questions unrelenting and inane

Will one day go unanswered

Not for lack of interest, 

Raised eye brow, 

Rolled eyes, but

For want of asking.

Some day the house

Will die without you,

Emptied of its anchor

And upturned root.

That day will gut us,

No doubt, but not today.

Not this day.

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Losing one more time


Let me wallow in the warmth of losing you one last time;

like sleep, let me wish for more.

Let me pumace dead skin of my heart layer by layer–

again, this time for sure.

Polished, it shines to the pulse of another now

though never too late

it is, but how

to let you slip past me in one more rhyme?

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In keeping

  
Walking away

into the folly of night

my eyes followed your heels

as they lifted and lightly pressed

against the notion that keeping is outside

when everyone knows losing means never having.

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Autophony: The sound of living inside a mother’s dementia

  

I scrapped together a few writings I blogged over the year and produced this piece that was published yesterday.

Tripping on sounds, I hear birds outside my window, muffled, over the swish-throb of a heartbeat in my ears, a pulsing slightly alarming and soothing all the same. I also hear a dish clanking outside the closed door of my room, emanating from the kitchen where I imagine my mother is sitting, skeletal and serene in her wheelchair, gazing off through the filmy stare that inhabits her face now. The cataracts of her mind’s eye reaches some unknown space outside or inside her head that swirls and lulls the cerebral juices to twitching stillness, her jerking to and from that space in split-second recognition of a face, idea, song slice or voice. I imagine her waiting like the baby bird with beak wide open in anticipation of its mother’s nurturing tongue, depositing the meaty worm of egg or pear. She is spoon-fed…continue here.

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Mossy Love

  
Unlike the lascivious thrill seeking a staid life,

heel shadows squeezed in pavement cracks,

one replaces the gaps, pure continuous spill,

fills pores of emptiness, salty sea of exertion,

a satiety unknown til now, she, moss-ful mind.

I miss the way you walk alone apace with love.

 

credit:  http://ih1.redbubble.net 

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Time Travel

Travel Hangover–

Pouring damp memories over dying embers, 

anticipating the pop, sizzle and hiss of regret,

I refuse the temptation to stir the ash,

re-confirm the smolder hides no live fire.

Driving a rented van packed with her–

obstructed the view of road left behind,

held fleeting glimpses, speeding past blades

grass, roller, razor, “Did you bring knives?”

A mother reviewing, checking, fretting

the details whirring ahead to the horizon.

Unpacking the view clear, opened us up

to ponder, muse the hours in notes, little

cares, rehearsed sentiments, deficiencies

repeated with silent knowing nods, all said.

I play the game of focused movement 

to wile the hours, trick time to obey, my eyes

follow, attached to the point out there as all

else spins and races, rattles empty spaces ablur.

A splinter swollen sore and angry, riotous red

throbbed through a chipped thumb reminds me

I waited for you on wooden slats in the park

while you twirled a dizzy dance of fractured tune.

I stifled an urge to call out, make you notice,

but the stretching sound that circled us then

that moment I was churning in your disregard

of the world, of me, of the beckoning children

could not blanket the distance between us,

the one I carried up to your bed, squared 

to the wrong wall on the wrong floor in a room. 

  
 

Sharon Olds  

I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)
 
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, 

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the 

red tiles glinting like bent 

plates of blood behind his head, I 

see my mother with a few light books at her hip 

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the 

wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its 

sword-tips black in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, 

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop, 

don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman, 

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things 

you cannot imagine you would ever do, 

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, 

you are going to want to die. I want to go 

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body, 

his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I 

take them up like the male and female 

paper dolls and bang them together 

at the hips like chips of flint as if to 

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

 
credit: maphappy.org

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Professor of Cups

  

Professor of cups picks off the dust from chairs
and washes the filth from sieves and tunnels
when once she polished prose and persuasion.
 

Professor of swedish fish, marshmallow bits,
coconut hairs and pillow cushioned seats, she
bleaches the silverware shiny sterile grade A.
 

Professor of mourning the days of harrowed fear
salting agonizing dread and jittery legged angst
when dirt dwelled only in systemic sly dealings.

 

photo credit:  https://pondermortality.files.wordpress.com/

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Stitched Poem of Lost Word

  

A word came to my mind today in chimes

where wood reeds stood sand tall in pairs

like lovers spun in airy tales of olden times

when hearts sang of heather seed prayers.
 

But the word flew past as echoes’ remains,

rang void vacuumed sound inside the gaps,

hollows down from which arise sad refrains,

and compressed steely safes, worded traps.
 

No words came by today in orange branches

only windy specks prickling chapped cheeks;

a sun stole glitter flecks on roofs of mansions

and barren pop songs dribbled old lyric leaks.
 

Language lost mourns words gone dry before

a poem’s purl through a keyhole’s open door.

 

photo credit: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/

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