All my injunction are sinuous at 3 a.m. Will pay tomorrow for this singular inability to sleep now for the child is sick and I must watch over her.
Vigil, promise not to go.
Calvarium 8
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Category Archives: Poetry
Calvarium 7
After the helicopter crash I strove to get to him in time but not hard enough. Our progress was halted for hours on the bayou highway between Lake Charles and Baton Rouge by a jack-knifed produce truck. Seemingly no injuries besides the greens while in Alabama my father lay prone in the ICU, bandaged skull, sometimes blood seeping from the gauze dressing.
I never saw him like this. By the time we got there he had moved on to the next thing, loosing the coils of mortality and shaking off any talk of rehabilitation.
The undertaker told us that if we wanted to see him again in any respectable fashion (my words, not his) a hat would be required. So we spent most of a day darting in and out of haberdasheries looking for cowboy hats. He was a cowboy: he deserved a cowboy hat.
But the trick was size-the lingering signs of his fatal fall meant his head was swollen, maybe even still haloed in gauze? It had to be a proper 10 gallon, XL…I had begun to think I would fail him in this final quixotic endeavor when we found an eclectic store that had beach t’s, jeans, souvenirs, and…cowboy hats.
It was cream colored, the largest size. They cut it in half so that it appeared to recede effortlessly nto the pillow.
Covering everything.
Calvarium 6
The boy-man on the Tarmac in Manaus, Brazil middle of the day on December 27, 1987 was wearing a Talking Heads t-shirt, and the girl inside the plane thought Talking Heads in the heart of the rainforest? Small world, then disembarked to a claustrophobic gift shop, lined as it was with fertility statues and shrunken heads. And jewelry made from river stones, each one small and beautiful and perfect: irreplaceable held in the palm
of the hand.
Calvarium 5:7,8
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Calvarium 5
- 2 doz. cupcakes
- Tea lights
- 2 doz lei
- 2 doz gift bags
- 12 feather boas
- 12 pirate swords
- 2 gal milk
- Birthday banner
- 2 packs juice boxes
- 5 pizzas
- 12 assorted party crowns
- 12 pink tiaras
As the children come into the party room they see the treasure box by the door overflowing with odd vests, second-hand dresses, scarves, hats, helmets, shields, tutus, capes (of course), foam swords, and they don these things, perhaps serially-changing from knight to ballerina to carpenter
Seamlessly
Because they are children
And this is their kingdom.
Calvarium 4
At the beginning of the black-tie fundraiser (325-1675 dollars a plate, depending on your commitment to “the cause”), the organizers have a basket full of random names, (where did they come from? Who were/are these people?) to the current batch of servers-take one and pin it on they say, so they do and for this night they are foreign to themselves-Renata, Consuela, Xavier…instead of Pam, Ashley, and Rob… They have to remember these temporary identities when beckoned or chided by the plate-holders. As when, mid-dessert, a tray falls, sudden show of violence, shattered porcelain, all those scrumptious (expensive) eclairs.
Wasted.
Calvarium 3
Three players, all brothers, familial resemblance in their eyes, the curve bones of their faces, halo-ed hair, lean in. All intent on winning the game of choosing–rock! paper! scissors! Shoot!! The mantra, the litany, the eventual victor, unaware of what can be broken with all these ordinary things.
Calvarium 2
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
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
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.
Carrying Light 