Monthly Archives: July 2017

Calvarium 2

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Old time-y barber shop, corner of a once prosperous downtown, old fellas talking about the game on cathode ray TV mounted on the wall.  Men coming and going, sitting, standing, paying tips with crumpled dollar bills. So many versions of the naked pate, the scruffy, and the wispy comb-over.  Knife to chin, razor to scalp, going through this mitzvah of voluntary loss as that ancient metaphorical talisman turns on its axis outside-red/white/red/white ribbons of our old, shared story of triage.  Triage or else.

Calvarium 1

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the girl-woman in the kitchen takes her time, cracking the dome of the speckled egg with patience and surgical precision, holds the broken pieces together so that only the white can slip through, the round, intact yolk cradled in the serrated halves of a thing once whole and intact which could have been another thing entirely or…an omelet, a quiche, the whipped interstices of meringue, or these lovely macaroons scooped dough into her piping bag from the sterile bowl on the counter, suburban kitchen, tinted carnival colors, creamy in the middle.

Cathedral in the water

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I see the two hapless, arbitrary, even hypothetical plastic children’s toys descending to the depths, their lovely, efficient tunics, interchangeable hair helmets, ridged plastic arms and hands thrust out marking each fall deeper through zones of habitable waters-here, the last hint of light, here the very last marine mammal, here the beginning of cold and dark and heavy as words we have never know the way he did-“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  All because something that was always supposed to be

Real

Alive

Heavy 

Has gone missing-reduced to light metaphor and toy architecture, the constant illusory ability to cup thin streams of water in human hands…I am losing you, losing you, mostly hypothetical plastic figure of a child, while at the bottom rests this drowned world–drowned streets, drowned trees, inky human figures curled in fetal positions inside this drowned

Cathedral in the water of

big infinite sea.

Could have been a song

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I told myself pretend it is music after all the women’s voices are poignant, the story they tell is haunting-haunting the way a song might haunt you words very simple, sung to a child go to sleep, child, go to sleep, miles and years and day away from the moment you will remember for the rest of your life-a knock on the door-changing everything.