Category Archives: Poetry

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.

unexpected

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the fog is lovely, unexpected tonight, loitering as it is prone to do elsewhere-not here though where where it expresses disappointment with the local poets-no metaphors? No cats, no shrouds, no pithy imagery, usually at least a simile or two-Who shrug, apologetic, who doesn’t love a good fog?  Proffering  this instead-early model champagne Cadillac sedan with at least a dozen teddy bears-in the passenger’s seat, the generous back row, lined up neatly, patiently waiting, waiting for the Someone who put them there, seatbelted so that even when the vehicle is motionless, parked, they are prepared for the crash, the collision the

Full force of this unexpected

Fog.

Only a fictional girl 

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Only a fictional girl would walk into the house and not notice the prurient magazines by the front door, alighting instead on the cookie press  in the  kitchen grandma rolling out the dough after it has been mixed, pressed, shaped into a ball and refrigerating overnight derelict old phones and cameras, a stack of games she played with him in her (fictional) childhood, his competitive streak annihilating any possibility of comradery only as she revisits the rooms in the house like so much like a real house on a street so much like a real street 

Where a fictional man once lived 

Preaching to the dead

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First, pick my chasuble with care: war paint, cowgirl boots, stretched-out pale-pink tutu from the racks upon racks at the resale store, brand-new for the girls who did not need them anymore,  all donated to science or the graveyard where I go to pace and splutter out some fractured  litany about a beat-up pickup truck, iterations of a lost father, lawn furniture strewn  above the tree line, the same forgotten first name of both Sikorsky and Stravinsky, and this jittery alter-ego who swings wild, shouts loud, raises hell as though bones and memory and words could be as easily strung together as that-to breath life into the dead as they fit their joints and hinges back together, back to life, the way an ordinary man rises from his bed, rubs his eyes, dons his pants and his shirt, walks out into 

Light

Leaves in water

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for so long now I have seen Ophelia’s clothes each time I scoop leaves from the bottom of the pool, of the well, of the teacup of memory she comes back to me with a plaintive song about the boy whose soliloquies broke into a thousand words over water, hovering over the surface of the deep, almost a song until you cannot swim, touch the bottom and feel only tangled leaves, no solid ground to stand on if only she could get herself…well-to a nunnery, of course…high walls, soft voices sorting who or what is safe if not the boy, the beautiful boy with all his talk of infinitives of being….being, just a leaf in water, weightless until it begins to rise over her incendiary last infinitive thought-to be or not to be.

Rocket Girl

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you float for a time in the “even so,” casually, miraculously, inexorably growing limbs and features and organs, that all-important beating heart.  No one tells you meanwhile in “Houston…we have a problem” or that the problem is something you  cannot (would not)

unmake you

/girlness /not boyness, your binary /identification /of /gender 

Will be enough to terminate the mission

… when all along you have done your best in the beautiful floating weeks of the “even so”

You matchless irreplaceable girl-in-the-now, girl-for-a-moment

Until mission control

Aborts, aborts

Letting you

tiny dancer, rocket girl

Go.