Gardening Who told you flowers are most beautiful right before they fade? Liar! Riotous color and profusion-- then slow fading and going to seed-- unless the gardener is there to snap off their pretty heads
Tag: poem
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When I’m Gone
When I’m Gone Bury my bones by the corner of your house At night, when you’re asleep I will dance my skeleton dance What nightmare will dare come near you Past the music of my bones?
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The Man Who Nearly Drowned
The Man Who Nearly Drowned From that time on, his stories grew stranger Of the time he met the talking crow And the pine tree full of dancing girls And the green city that lay in the lake Which could only be reached by holding your breath And believing, which nobody did but him And then he could no longer go out alone To stand on the shore and stare at the lake It’s one thing to talk to the talking crow And another to walk out and sink like a stone While the bubbles behind you rise towards the light And to pick out a hint of green in the dark They’re moving him now to a different state Where the ocean’s green grass and the city’s bright steel And the girls all dance on a certain street And the light in his eyes is a stranger’s pen As he sits very still and hears in his head The familiar sound of his rushing blood And he thinks of the folly of trusting a crow And believing a thing that won’t stay on the ground As the wind brings no smell of the sea
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Authority
Authority is a nineteen-year-old boy with short-cropped hair and stubby fingers and a uniform and a gun he is watching a woman his eyes wide she is younger than she looks squatting by the metal fence what is the worst that can happen if he ignores her what is the worst that can happen if he acts he shifts his weight like a nervous student one with an important test the teacher forgot to attend and what is she doing neither laughing nor crying her whispering is too soft to be called singing
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After Blake
After Blake I wanted to see his tree full of angels, To follow him outside, To find the edge of the curtain, To pull it back and watch the dancers Rehearsing – faces filled with Beautiful concentration – On the joining of bones, on the smooth Perfect fit in the socket, The miracle of the hip, the ankle, The delicate swiveling wrist – No, I am the only one Thinking of bones! Behind their closed eyes Is only music –
This poem now also available to watch right here, and a visual version of the text here.
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The Empty Palace
The cow, the hot sun,
the statue of the man
who died in a duel,
the things I'm not allowed
to say, the dusty bench,
the fountain, the park
empty, the hospital empty
gleaming marble and gold,
the people allowed to cry
on TV and the people
not allowed to cry,
the grand steps, the arch
of heavy stone, the rooms
filled with slanting sunlight,
not a soul in sight.Another quite old one to share!
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Like Vines
Like Vines We climbed out the windows to reach the sun, Pushed our fingers Into mortar, dug down and found No substance there. We wriggled our toes between bricks And they crumbled, Dust on the heads of the people passing Far below. We stretched ourselves towards that heat And burning light Until the world flared white before Our eyes, And something wet began to flow Across our skin, And from our blisters, something new Began to sprout
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The Basket Woman
The Basket Woman She wanders slowly along the streets In a blue flowered housedress. At every Mass and funeral, she appears, Her mouth moving soundlessly as a ghost. She presses a picnic basket to her side, Large and plain and secret, but we know. The basket is for babies and for children. Who has disappeared? Who has “moved away?” We peer out from behind fences, Afraid to catch a glimpse of her. In church, we whisper, trying so hard Not to turn around. If she sees… So we go on playing four square and jumprope, Hoping she’ll take Charlie, who called us fat, And she stands on the corner, clutching her basket, Whispering to it too softly for us to hear.
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In the Dark
In the Dark In the dark, they are indistinguishable, So, in the dark, they are all her. On a good night, when she makes it To a street light or a bus stop, He can make out the flash of red hair. She wears it differently now. She wears it differently every time. It says, I’m not yours anymore, What I was for you I will never be again. And it gets tiresome, her constant Walking away, false busyness, And he’s tired of playing cat and mouse, Hard-to-get, chase me, chase me, Close enough to hear the thump-thump rhythm Of her shoes, and then To feel her soft and pliant hair.
My notes: back at the summer Peninsula Writers conference at Glen Lake, we had a presenter who, if I remember correctly (it was so long ago now!) posited that a writer couldn’t (or couldn’t successfully, maybe) write about a character that they didn’t have any sympathy for. So I wrote this poem as a sort of exercise in that direction – as a poem where I don’t sympathize with the person whose eyes we are looking through. It’s very interesting to try to put yourself in that position, to understand without sympathizing? I don’t know how well it worked, but this was the result.
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Nighttime Reverie
Nighttime Reverie When you look up, it seems the trees Have been filled with dark birds, Twitching their tails, bobbing up And down in silence; across the scene Glides a figure from some old story, The kind told on nights just such as this, Where a man is sent far away, farther Than letters reach; where a woman waits For him, patiently, impatiently; Her family sits around their table, their faces Flickering in candlelight, voices hushed; She’s gone again, sitting underneath A certain tree, collecting the black feathers The birds pluck out and drop to her. It takes ten thousand feathers, what she is making, Which is either a dress or wings or maybe A new body. But when she tries to count How many feathers she’s been given, it seems They fade into the night itself.
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Girl Without Wings
Girl Without Wings She runs along the side of the road, Her arms outstretched, fingers fluttering, And she knows that she can fly. What is holding her back is not gravity, Which can’t be all that great; she remembers watching, With her family, as a man leapt across the moon. It can’t be fear, either, because she dreams Of swooping down to trail her fingers in the lake, And when she wakes up, she is happy. It must be, after all, the length of her legs, Flashing white between wool socks and wool skirt, Too short to lift her into the currents of air, To propel her fast enough into the wind to rise. But she promises herself that it’s okay, really, Because one day, very soon, you’ll look up and she’ll be gone.
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In The Portrait Gallery
In The Portrait Gallery They stare at me, unblinking, their cracked eyes sometimes calm, sometimes crazed. They are always facing me, or turning towards me; they have been waiting for me, it’s true, and it seems so cruel that when we finally meet they have nothing for me, that their eyes don’t light up at long last, they don’t complete that turn or stand up from that bow or finally, finally let their cracked lips turn into a smile, open a little as if to speak, even frown or grimace and draw their eyebrows down as though what we did mattered, just a little, and we would know whether to be proud of our buildings and our bombs, the rising murder rate in Baltimore or the latest Pulitzer-Prize-winning author or even the fact that, for the first time in my entire life, the Tigers have made it to the World Series. What better brother or sister are they waiting for, then? Don’t they know that they, too, are slowly fading, their colors dimming, their skin flaking away? In a few months, they will be taken away, covered in shrouds and stacked in dark rooms. In their place will be great silent spaces, photographs of mountains in black and white, strange angles of telephone wires against clear skies, things that are expected to say nothing.
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Twelve Months Without Rain
Twelve Months Without Rain Only in feeling, of course. Really, it had only been one, And not so unusual for summer. But still, she felt it. Looking out the window, The car was getting dirty. And on the television, A couple parted in the rain. She only heard it. Sunday, Pastor Morgan spoke Of the forty days and forty nights. She wished she could be so wicked.
Originally published in Dunes Review, V. 12 Iss. 2 (Winter 2007/8)
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Monkey See
Monkey See I’ve heard some learned people take the view A thousand monkeys at a thousand keys, With time and food and nothing else to do, Could hammer out to be or not to be. And what would you do if you had the time? Break down and buy that typewriter you saw And hammer out the rhythm and the rhyme To tell the world of what you hold in awe? And each time, just a word or letter wrong, The sound not right, the rhythm slightly false— Or someone else already wrote the song, And your small tune was his most famous waltz. If all the world has heard it all before, Then tell me who you write your verses for?
My notes: I very rarely write formal poetry, so it’s probably not a surprise that this was for a class. If my memory is right, it was one of my MFA classes on formal poetry, but… I don’t remember much more than that! It’s a sonnet, quite traditional, and although I don’t think formal poetry is my strength, I’m a bit fond of the ones I wrote in that class. It can be fun, to paraphrase Robert Frost, to put the net up every once in a while when you’re playing tennis.
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Chaos Theory, or, The Earthquake
Chaos Theory, or, The Earthquake The whole house shuddered when she left. For weeks, she couldn’t be avoided: Echoes, aftershocks, the windows Trembling in their frames. Is there a point Where all movement stops? Or do the ripples Move back and forth Forever? Exactly one month After she walked out the door The floors cracked, walls fractured, Roof beams sagged and buckled. Next door, the neighbors didn’t even wake; If it hadn’t been for the news, They wouldn’t have believed him. Surveying the ruins, his neighbor smiled. Once in a lifetime, he said, And you were around to see it.
My notes: This is another very old one. Believe it or not, we do every once in a while get an earthquake in the midwest! To get a sense of them, though – the biggest and most recent one in Michigan was 4.2 on the Richter scale and happened back in 2015; they are not exactly what you think of when you hear “earthquake” in the news.
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Home
Over the fireplace, a painting,
A round-faced woman, smiling,
Hands folded in her lap,
Her dress stiff with lace
And her husband on her left,
A fine brown jacket, a bright gray vest.
On the mantel, a misshapen mug
Of blue clay, with no handle,
Baked perpetually half-melting
And a Christmas card three years old
With dancing penguins and old news.
Trinkets, too, gifts of pinecones,
Wooden apples and a pewter Sphinx.
Even the pieces of a broken Easter egg,
Promise you’ll never throw it out!
Solid blue and dancing with stick lions and giraffes.
It’s impossible now to tell which were which,
The heads and bodies, lines all mingled,
Pressed up against each other,
Refusing to be alone.Here’s another old one – I can’t remember now whether it was in college or graduate school that I wrote it.
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Metaphors
Metaphors I’m beginning to think that they’ve all been used before. The fireworks of the neurons that fire in your brain, the hands that flutter like wings and crack like bark, even the stars that shine in your eyes. Everything new is ridiculous. Should I say, your hands are flapping like carp drowning when someone reaches down to pull them into the air? That the fine lines on them are like tin foil that, once used, can never be smoothed out again? Maybe these metaphors work, somehow, maybe they’re just nonsense: your eyes are like the power indicator on my tv antenna. Controlled by a little plastic dial? Bright and surrounded by darkness? Keeping me awake at night? It all falls apart. There’s nothing else to say but this: There is a man. He looks sad. I saw him, lying in his white bed. When I saw his eyes, I thought, he must know something awful. But after all, I am no closer to it, I will never be any closer to him, than this.
Originally published in Ruminate magazine, Spring 2014
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The Statue Garden
The Statue Garden The storks are shaking the dust from their wings They were stuck so long, preening, Their stiff necks bent towards the sky And cracks run up the sides of the lion As its limbs grind against its body Until the stone falls away in chunks That litter the soft grass And are ground again into the dirt Like a city disappears into the desert While the deer jump suddenly from the fountain While the lion leaps into a hedge-shadow And the storks hop and flap and are gone
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The Tricks She Played On Her Biographers
The Tricks She Played On Her Biographers Sitting up late at night, She writes letters to herself - How well her old friends are doing! And how the petunias might look Outside her window The Colonel tells her how fit she looked And what wonderful turkey she made; They must do it again next year… Although her sister has never been fond of him, And tells her so She folds them up into thirds and quarters And seals them with strange signatures, Draws flowers on the back of one From Nellie’s little daughter Sue Who cannot spell her name She puts them in little boxes in her closet, Behind the dresses that no longer fit, And smiles to think someone will find them - How strange it will seem to them She had a life
