Category Archives: Poetry

The Countries I Have Lost

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A country, just like a single old-left-foot-house-slipper can be metonymous.  This-for that, quid-pro-quo, how-did-I-ever-lose-you?-metonymous. Hit me at 2 am, sharp intake of breath too hard to connect it all with proper punctuation metonymous.  I once accidentally cut your hand in a car window metonymous.  When I met you I thought you were the crazy one metonymous. Lost in Pittsburgh a million years ago metonymous.  With you the reason for years of silence had to be different metonymous.  

The countries I have lost all have proper names, stable addresses, no missing slippers.  Us-and-them, before-and-after countries cheerfully conventional, intentionally respectful, naturally leery of the once-familiar mendicant whose metonymic wholes have been for good or ill

Irrevocably set free.

The Cowboy of Lost Things

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his button-down shirt matched the color of his gun and his ten-gallon hat matched his jeans as he brandished his weapon with bravado in the the store-of-lost-things on the corner of the city named for the patron saint of them, poor Native Americans, at some point the irony of namesakes and saints’ days and lost things must have haunted them the way it haunts me as the Nissan with the cat inside next to the bustling night school faces its own lost place on the street named for flowers where a brown bottle will spread its broken pieces like water pooled on the edge of the sidewalk, so close to art, so close to lost on the very edge of the world 

Mum’s Day 1998

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they will say focus on the positive they will say at least you gave her a good beginning they will say we have 25 families waiting, better than you like this is some kind of beauty pageant for adoptive families? 

…which was a weird lie of sorts…maybe there were 25 families …maybe 5000…in the end it was only necessary to know that it was never about the hypothetical 25, always about the avaricious pair, or pairs, -on-the-ark-come-two-by-two pairs of caseworkers, pairs of administrators, pairs of lawyers, pairs of accountants, coupling, uncoupling back and forth around a central lie, a few broken laws, and Entropy, the Mother-god, chained to the loss chained to the chaos of the loss…of her babies.

What was it 

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what was it, mute, inanimate object perched on the counter in the messy late-night kitchen as she finally sweeps up the spilled beans, tosses them out into the night, contemplates both what usually lurks there and if they will grow, sprout, tangle up into vines, vines to block the sun, spin to the clouds where the approximate-rhythmic giant dwells, mocking science, mocking long-dead Darwin, Glutton-clubbing, maggot-and-squirrel devouring Darwin whose mortal life has coiled to dust but whose immortal one is hot, vivid, fierce

Survival of the fittest…

Meerschaum Rings in an inky sky

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The last ember in this summer fire so resembles the unblinking moon tonight a slitted serpent’s eye obscured behind smoke-ring clouds spun from the hookah pipe of a caterpillar  long-gone-butterfly, God of flight pulling forth a clear phonology from nightingales who form signal fires with words of love and danger for what is in the night.

A lexicon for grief

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how many words for snow

how many words for rice or rain or storms

We humans and our specificity

Yet no words for listening 

Hearing you

Being there, holding on, loving you 

Looking into….

Oops!  Already well into 

Greeting card territory

When what a body needs is those…those

Ladies in the black organza 

Wailing in the streets.

Where are they?  When we need them so?

All those things we need them to

Do

Be 

Say, not say, feel

a new vocabulary 

Esperanto for grievers

Words for here I am with you (ret)

Just being here for you (ghurt)

You are not alone (hyop)

Breathing here with you (fppt…)

There are empty rooms and rooms for more

Make more. More for all the ways

I will be with you in silence

Letters strung together for the careful listener

Unspoken I am with you

Through the storm.

To my esteemed humanist friend,

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I confess

I was angry at first 

At real atrocities ignored and

fictions so promiscuously embraced

But then I thought heck

So what if she mixes her metaphors? Or fails to tally the cost 

Of a world unmoored by love?

Instead 

I have this one

Abiding, hypothetical

Question-

Haven’t you ever been afraid that this triune omnipotent

God of love 

Might be just like 

Dustin Hoffman in the penultimate 

scene of The Graduate?

Pounding on the outside

(yes, the outside)

of the church, calling your name as you

Marry the wrong guy?

And if you do-

(what if you do!?)

Who will be there

By your side on the bus to forever?

Feminism for ordinary stones

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After giving the human mothers ample time to choose

The-would-be-has-been-will-be-stone-mover turned to this sea of

quiet rocks

Paced among them

Raised his arms wide

And spoke words of life over them-

Sing, cry, stomp, holler, embargo, resist, advocate, articulate…raise 

these your newborn voices

for all these

very little girls 

curled without defense-

half-a-billion muted, crucial

Question marks

as each loses

one simple, brutal

Round of rock-paper-scissors

in this place we have marked “private”

then left alone.