There are mystery novels that may be read where all the unexplained will be resolved.
There are walks to be taken that may veer from the road.
There should be time to tease you gently, and, laughing, to be teased.
Recrimination just might de-crimp, given some room, and regret let itself go, at least a little.
As the work week cools, self-castigation dulls, like a saturated fat that turns solid at room temperature—solid and stolid, and relegated to some jar over there.
Outside, clumps of daffodils that have survived spring snow hold their heads sunny-side up.
Just writing that makes me hungry.
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Another drafty poem for April! I know the pic doesn’t quite go, but there it is! Have a good day.
PS – this post has been edited since first posting as I dropped the T from the Title!
This is a poem I posted in April, but took down as some of the imagery felt too graphic, and (possibly) open to misinterpretation. I’ve changed and am reposting below. Sorry for the repetition.
Need
I need to get back to the belief that the universe loves us.
I also need to buy shoes.
I understand that the universe does not necessarily love us in the way that we want to be loved; it doesn’t care if we have a long life or suffer pain.
Don’t get me wrong—it doesn’t want us to suffer pain. It’s just that a universe in which trees split in the wind and stars are born and die with fiery outcries, may not understand pain.
I cannot think about those tortured in the Ukraine and I cannot not think about them.
Even when I don’t want the images—hands tied behind the back, and much more horrible things—bullets through eyes–
It helps to worry about shoes. Almost none of mine will work as warmth approaches.
It’s ridiculous. Still, I imagine trying to run after a young child in sandals, the young child someone else’s but in my care. and I don’t think I can trust sandals.
I dream about—I don’t want to write what I dream about for fear of imprinting it further—
How did people feel in the 1930s and 40’s, the Great Depression, World War II?
My mother, one of those people, once told me she kept wondering when it would all end— will this never end, she said she wondered, thinking that when it did at last end, she could finally start her own life, a life that was ongoing all the time she waited to start it, and is now (as we think of life) long over, always the universe loving her, us, in its way.
Another draft poem for April. Sorry I’ve missed a few days, crazy internet issues that knocked out my momentum (such as it was!)
Note that all these poems are drafts of a sort–of course, I’ve re-written them some, but they are poems that can probably benefit from more thought! And more thought might actually cause me to put them in the recycling bin! I appreciate your understanding!
The darkness feels thicker than regular darkness. I lift one arm to test it, expecting to need a swimming stroke,
only when I type that, it comes out as “warm harm” instead of “one arm,” maybe because I am worrying about a candle that burns down in the kitchen, and the kettle that I have also left to heat on the hand-ignited gas stove.
The unattended candle, kettle, feel foolish, so I imagine wrapping my blanket about my shoulders and stepping down the treacherous-in-the-darkness stairs to check on it all,
yet still I sit, blanket over my legs, listening to the hum of the kettle, the taps of my typing, the farther silence that follows a dog’s bark down a nearby road, and also the slight tinnitus of which I am suddenly conscious, an internal chorus of cicadas.
I look up to the room, amazed somehow that all its physical, unelectrified contents, are exactly as they should be, even more so— the window panes, the chair, the pictures— me beneath the blanket, warm, unharmed,
and, I am conscious now, not only of the tinnitus, but of the great blessings that I have been given, so unearned.
I am almost afraid to think of them, as if some spirit of the universe might say,hey!— and correct the imbalance.
A lantern sits to my side, blowing glitter about its glass, and also about a stiff little cardinal that sits on a twisted wire tree. White-stuccoed gimcrackery that somehow manages an immense beauty simply in the way that it circulates light.
The walls dance with it.
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Another poem for April. Written early this morning. (Nothing burned down.)
Maybe there are things you should be doing, but, hey—it’s 5 in the morning!
You could even make dinner (you know, in advance), but no one will think to say why didn’t you make dinner?
You could do office work, and those times when you give in, smugness coats each email like an underscore.
You do at last make yourself budge from the blanket you save for these dawn hours in a small not-totally-freezing room, and find that the morning moon is in a completely different quadrant of the sky than seems the norm. Seriously! It’s veered way over to the South. (Definitely, South.) But how does that happen?
You could look it up.
Looking it up is the type of thing many people (i.e. your husband) would do, but it’s still only 6:09 and he’s asleep, while you are not even going to let yourself feel embarrassed by your lack of intellectual curiosity.
(Okay, okay: so, the reason that the moon changes position in the sky is that the moon’s orbit around the Earth is approximately 5.1 degrees offset from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which causes moonrise and moonset to vary to the North or South by as much as 28.6 degrees.)
Are you happy now?
Yes.
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The moon, in fact, set way to the South today, and was full, or almost full. I did not get a photo of it though, so here’s a pic from my children’s books, The Road I Like. (The pic doesn’t really suit the poem, as this poet is, thankfully, no longer a commuter!)
Have a good day. (And check out The Road I Like!) (Also, the moon!)
I could not sleep last night after reading about what happened to a body in Ukraine, before that body died.
There’s sickness here too (if not the same.)
But it’s Easter and I get up to tune the computer to boys’ singing about the resurrection.
The songs make me weep almost instantly, as all my dead rise to greet me.
I weep both because of my certainty that those one loves are never lost, and because of my longing for that certainty,
weep too for the suffering, and the wish for the healing of suffering.
And then the day begins, limpingly. It doesn’t really feel like Easter, until, between the feeding of animals and almost burning someone’s cream of wheat, I turn to a soprano who knows that her redeemer liveth,
and find in the beauty of her voice, her smiling but determined enunciation, a saving grace,
helped along by the sun shining through clouds, and a texted photo of a baby in an elephant dress, being held to stand—
They do not take away what happened to the body that I read about, or what happens to any body,
but they say that there is love also, even at the doorway of loss, love that rises again, though it may need to be held to stand.
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Happy Easter, Happy Passover. Another drafty poem for April. Wishes for All Good.
I think of my grandmother, who, after laying out the pie dough in the pan, the fruit, the lattice interlace—in my gloom, the laying out of that limp dough feels almost like flesh—but it was not like that at all—the gloom is not in the memory but in my current self—
the point is that after my grandmother composed the pie, there would be the extras– the snips of dough she’d cut from the pie’s perimeter, and all those lopped corners left on the floured waxpaper—
She would roll those in her hands into a ball. then roll them with the rolling pin again, and I would take a glass and carefully press out circlets, which we would place on a separate baking sheet, sprinkling with sugar, and those little round cookies would be more delicious (at least to my childish taste) than the whole darn pie—
As you grow old, you sometimes feel that you yourself are all those bits, your limbs as akimbo as angled dough, your mind, your life, a bunch of edges that are bridged by extensive byways, strips of tenuous connection that narrow and grow wide—this that led to that, that led to that that led to this and this and this now—
I think of how my grandmother imbued it all with sweetness, shape— how one might do that—
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Another rather drafty poem for April. Pic and poem mine; all rights reserved.
Oh, mystery novels of old whose plots escape me so readily that I can re-read them so steadily, with even greater mild delight in the details that bring to light the epiphanies to come (ah, I remember now)— how the hero/heroine will sum up all the side stories, save the complicated day—
Oh little time capsules with a couch, sinkholes of possibly otherwise troubled hours—-little bowers of wrongs righted (and so cozily!)
I can even walk, reading you— and if someone talks to me, say completely unselfconsciously, “huh?”
The man is angry; his face looks like it just spat a slur, the face looks that way a lot, sneer-shaped, chin a smear—seriously, his chin is blurred in its firm set, like the tip of something spray-painted on a concrete wall.
How do you smooth such a face? With cash? With fear?
How do you whisper in a way that it will hear: you were a baby once, you will die some day, you are causing terrible suffering.
Can you only threaten, tell the face it too will suffer?
I don’t know, I don’t know.
Can you remind the face of beauty? That it belonged to a baby once, a child (this feels somehow important); that geese fly in incredible Vs; that an unwounded sky pearls wonder.
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Another draft poem for April. The pic doesn’t really go with the poem, but I don’t have a lot of drawings of angry faces, or couldn’t find one on the fly. I’m not sure that this picture depicts the figure in the poem, but it felt okay to use. All rights reserved. Take care.
Bone marrow patch blinks firefly green through the undies, saying, still here…here….
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Still don’t know if I’ll manage a poem a day for April–Poetry Month, but here’s a try. The patch described above is given to counteract immuno-suppressive aspects of certain chemo therapy drugs. All rights reserved. Have a good day.
Somewhen a car roams,
the shape of my torso already
ghosting its hood;
stairs I will have fallen down
await,
a stream slips around the sometime rocks
in my pockets;
the sea breathes me.
They all speak late at night, sotto voce–
They think that I don’t hear them.
(They know that I hear them.)
(They count upon my hearing them.)
In the cone that is a too-bright light lit late,
the car hood blinks, the stairs shrug,
the stream blushes – the sea too feels sheepish–embarrassed all
by how they need me
to make them into fates–
embarrassed all of them, but not so embarrassed
as to simply let me be.
******************* Another would-be poem for Sanaa’s prompt on Real Toads about late nights. It is difficult for me to return comments till this weekend, but will.
ManicDDaily 
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