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?”
I think about time and picture a stream bed, in which I put my hands to catch something—the water? Sand? Minnows—
All I get is glow— my hands wet in the flow—you can’t stop time, hold it— even when you wade right in—it only makes your whole body shine (maybe) for as long as you can stand the rush.
But often, I avoid thinking about time, as if that might make time stop. I spend hours, whole days, weeks, in a little moving box that tries to blank out time, blanketing its windows (my little moving box has cut-out squares) but time doesn’t stop just because I’ve not thought about it—
And then I picture time as sand, endlessly falling sand—(that comes, I guess, from hourglasses) and why I wonder, do I imagine the fall of that sand to be endless?
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Another draft poem for April. As always, pic and poem mine. All rights reserved. Stay well!
When my mother was very old she would push back her hair from her forehead.
Actually, the white hair, ascending from a widow’s peak, was already trained back.
But she would pass one hand over it again and again, talking of how she loved her mother to do that when she was small, and how comforting it was (she had recently realized) to rub the hair back herself.
I find my hand at my forehead in the pre-dawn darkness, reaching for a pass over my hair, but I do not find it comforting—
though I too loved my mother caressing my forehead when I was little, loved laying my head upon her lap. This was usually in the car—we did not have car seats then, and it was a time when she was still.
Even just thinking of it, I can remember the cool warmth of her hands, her lap— that’s how it was, cooling and warming at once as we hovered above the roll of wheels and road.
But this morning the feel of my hand at my forehead freaks me out; I cannot be so like my old mother not now, not yet. I pull the hand back beneath the covers and even when I tell myself to just try it, try it again, I cannot make myself lift my arm.
Give it twenty years, (if lucky.)
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Another draft poem for April. Not sure about these things. Sometimes I cut them in ways that they are probably not comprehensible to others and that’s terrible; other times I feel like I go on too long, and lose clarity in too much explication. Agh!
Take care. (As always, pic/poem are mine; all rights reserved.)
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.
I haven’t seen the moon for days now. Not true—I caught a crescent the other night, a flash through glass, and stepped out into the cold to hold it, making a note of where to look the next day, next night.
But since then I cannot find it, no matter the hour or direction.
I miss it—the moon what one has In an unpeopled place, that curve and trace of curve, that glowing ghostly solidity.
I haven’t gone out much in the pandemic, and now hardly want to.
But I do want the moon, the company of the moon.
When you see it you can’t help but think how beautiful the world is, how much you love this world–
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Another poem for April (and also, for the moon.) Take care! (And if you have time, check out my books! Especially the new stories!
(As alwarys, the picture, such as it is, as well as the poem, are mine; all rights reserved.)
One reads about the Ukraine: this one first shot in the elbow, then, later, so mangled that all that lets him be found is the broken arm sticking out of the ground.
You could write about the arm not willing to be silenced, but the fact is he was a whole person.
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Hi, a poem of sorts based on terrible news coming out of the parts of Ukraine, such as Bucha, that the Russians occupied and left. It’s a draft poem, that I’m leaving as is, not because it’s a good poem, but because the subject matter is such that it feels ridiculous to try to be artful. The drawing is from my “archive,” a copy of an Inuit piece, I believe, in the Met.
This is an old house that births wasps. Also, memories. But also, wasps—
Dozy wasps, drones in the non-modern sense, dazed, who, when they fly, float as if airlifted by some balloon of forced air heating.
I try not to kill them, to gently sweep them with the edge of the envelope onto a flap of free calendar, though they tend to cling to the envelope, which I then carry, pressed next to the calendar, to a door, that I carefully open, then whoosh them away.
I do not not kill them out of any particular affection for wasps. (Yes, they can sting.) I just find something sweet in the not-killing.
I find that sweetness even in the time it takes to not kill, especially in the time it takes to not kill, even when terribly busy.
The taking of that time reminds me of who I want to be, how I want to be, how I want to be remembered.
No, they are not honey bees, yes, wasps, still, whoosh, sweetness.
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Another sort of draft poem for April. Have a good day!
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.
In Pablo Casals’ recordings, you can hear him singing along with his cello—a gravely hum accompanying Beethoven and his bow—don’t even get me started on Glenn Gould—
Great musicians aren’t always great singers, yet there is a delight we take in their voices, the presumably unconscious drone seeming to show how much they love the music, that they are playing rather than performing, their whole self the instrument.
I suppose the hums could be considered “unmindful’, and yet I wouldn’t mind living like that, singing softly, singing along.
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Happy April! I don’t yet know if I will write a poem a day for this month of April poetry, but this one came to mind today.Pic and poem are mine; all rights reserved.
I am told that when my grandfather went back to Sweden, after fifty years gone, he pointed up to the sky.
“Same sun,” he said, and his brothers, looking up, nodded, knowing they’d have that sun—even as they did not see each again.
There’s a morning moon today, brilliant, though just past full, and I think of my grandfather, only now I think “same moon”, imagining it shining over the world, in swathes of abandoned sky above the Sudan or Rajasthan—the way the moon glows over a desert— through grey black screws of smoke in the Ukraine, a hard chill in Red Square, by the dome of the Capitol, my hometown DC, and reflected in so many tides of so many wine-dark seas.
I can see it too in the cores of trees that have fallen across this road, the trunks sawed through, pushed to the side, the rounds at the wood’s heart bared—
and in the oh’s that a baby’s mouth forms, rooting—this picture in my head—
I knew my grandfather, but can’t really remember him (or only as I’ve seen him in photographs), he having a heart attack when I was making my own oh’s, those of a toddler—
There’s so much suffering in just having a body— yet, people add to it, heap it on, as if to cause suffering in others somehow allows them to control it in themselves—
same sun.
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Another draft poem—yes, it could use more time! But writing and posting quickly is lifting me up right now and I hope of interest to you. Thanks. (All rights reserved in poem and pic, as always.And sorry that I am using drawings from my own archive–they are not always exactly right for the poem!)
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