Acrylic on canvas panel, 2018, all rights reserved.
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Heading somewhere certainly
June 24, 2018Looking
June 23, 2018
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Pulled apart
June 23, 2018
June 2018; all rights reserved.
“Parkinson’s (Father)”
June 17, 2018
Parkinson’s (Father)
My brain, see, now has to consciously
tell my feet to move.
I mean, he tries a laugh, your brain
always tells your feet to move
on some level, but now
I have to remind them how.
I do see what he means soon enough, as
my father, the opener of all
that needs to be opened, the keeper
of all that needs to be kept safe, targets a key towards a door
as one might aim a dart,
his forearm moving back and forth as if to throw it,
though he pushes–here–here–trying spots about the knob
as one might poke a needle into fabric
backing a button, pricking one’s way to its eyes,
or as one might thread the eye
of the needle itself, poignantly.
But the disease progresses, as territorial
as Genghis Khan, and soon all
the buttons in his world are blocked, refuse
to be battened, will not be pushed,
until finally, his own eyes seem locked
behind the placket of stiff lids.
I see the strain of forehead, the
conscious manipulation of muscle, nerve,
above his pushed chest, until at last
the marled blue of his pupils targets
our own. I love you, he says, the opener
of all that needs to be opened, the keeper
of all things safe.
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I wrote the above a few years ago now, but have edited it a bit and am reposting it for Brendan McOdrum’s wonderful prompt on Real Toads and for father’s day.
The Grass Said to Me (as I thought of Whitman)
June 14, 2018
The Grass Said To Me (As I Thought of Whitman)
The grass said to me
”what is a child?”
I did not know how to answer the grass for I do not speak
in shush or spring-back
or any of the many tongues
of green.
I do not feel that I know
how to regroup,
or how to take a death at my roots
and smile it almost equally
into sun and rain–
But this much I do know:
that when a child crawls across me and grass alike,
we all three
grow more alive.
What grounds us cups us gently (even as
laughs tumble)
while what lies beneath that ground strains hard to listen,
and does, in fact, hear,
for the cup that holds us fits too
about its dark grained ear,
oh yes.
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Drafty poem for my own prompt on Real Toads to write of “what is….” Pic is mine .
Hi all! I’ve missed you. k.
D is for–
April 4, 2018
D is for
I found me in a whole behind the bookshelf, there in the molding, hanging on to a spine of the Junior Britannica, our set covered in leathery red.
The volume was D; I snuck a letter into it to my dog once because I had killed her and I didn’t know how else to send mail to a dead dog.
Of course, I had not meant to kill my dog but, for a child, result is not mitigated by intention.
Fate had thrown me a hard ball. It had not been a particularly hand throw, but it was a base ball, and in that game of catch, the trees blurred green and the grass smoothed to ground where I stood beneath a locust’s grape-fingered shade and I just missed–my hands and glove knock knees (at least for that catch), which meant that the ball hit the trunk of the locust, rebounded to the side, then tagged the small dog as she barked and darted at the back of our game in what was somehow the perfect place in the neck to break it, and the dog’s lithe little body immediately lay limp, and though I probably screamed, my re-creations all seem silent except for my mother who ran out of the house, shrieking ”oh no oh no oh no” and not to bring the dog inside.
So my father and I huddled the little body over to the car me kissing its nose in an almost surreptitious way as I wondered frantically whether you could do mouth-to-muzzle resuscitation on a dog, but somehow felt too embarrassed even in extremity to ask, while my dad in his own extremity careened us to the vet’s, and when the vet was closed, our family doctor, heaving with every gear shift, even as I kind of calmed, feeling, after my lap wet with warm, that surely if the dog peed she must still be alive.
And I said to the little girl in the molding, who held the spine of the D Junior Britannica, “what are you doing,” and she simply said ‘I’m sorry,” which sounded at first as if she hadn’t heard me but meant, I realized then, that she was simply being sorry over there, actively being sorry, being sorry her/my whole life long, and I said to her/me, “but look, that was many years ago,” and she said, “I know.”
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This is actually a short excerpt from a little book I am working on; it is very much a draft. I am posting it today for Brendan MacOdrum”s prompt on Real Toads, which I am interpreting as a prompt about the panoply of things that make us sing (or at least write.)
The pic doesn’t really go with the piece! It’s actually from a different book I am working on! (A children’s book) (I have all sorts of highly unfinished projects!) But anyway, there it is. It is my drawing, charcoal and pastel. All rights reserved.
Morning (Not Quite Sprung)
March 31, 2018
Morning (Not Quite Sprung)
In this house, we hear the stream summers,
but now the burble of humidifier shushes
the dawns,
which still shell us latish
what with the time change.
When I say ”shell’, I speak of opalescence–
not firey bursts of wake-up–old houses built as shields
against weather.
We lie together, bundled oblongs
beneath that pearled arc, waiting to be
cracked open or boiled whole–the days have been
hard lately.
You nest in the covers murmuring
in the blended burble of humidifier and
my elbowed apologies (for all those shifts and sips),
that I’m not bothering you, meaning
stay next to me,
and I say, I will.
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Poem belatedly posted for Shay (Fireblossom)’s wonderful prompt on Real Toads urging the use of metaphoric language. The pic is of a light sculpture by Jason Martin.
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