(c) 2008
Lauren drew egg shaped bodies
One thin border separated the spheres
from white, unpopulated backgrounds.
With the painstaking exactitude
of a three-year-old who has not learned
to use a straight edge
Lauren drew hair lines, perhaps pins;
or arrows penetrating her boundaries.
I scoured for form and function for realism
and could never grasp that her art,
one step up from scribble,
sprung from the body-heart,
a primal architecture
not from head,
ould not get her
metamorphosing explanations
of these dramatic arms,
sun rays reaching and reaching
like multiple voices
from the heartof egg bodies.
Lauren said, “This is you”
handing Warren an egg.
It was too easy to assume t
he lines were a study of his beard a
nd we joked about this egg—at least—
not being bald.
For weeks Lauren drew radiating eggs,
strewing sheets throughout our apartment
prevalent as clouds above our parking lot,
common, not commonplace,
like the repeating patterns of ferns.
I imagined each was another
portrait of Warren,
that her wariness of his company
was appreciation
until the evening she blurted
she didn’t want him visiting
whenever daddy was away.
Lauren upturned her bowl of salad
over his head and giggled.
Warren’s head at last
was mimicry not model,
the bowl-end of the egg
green leaves like wilted,
un-carefully placed straw,
and her reaching out
was in a language even I understood.
June 20, 2009
June 15, 2009
Gothic
(c) 2009
“We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender.” ~O’Donohue
The human soul hungers for beauty with boundaries:
stars enclosed in a cosmos, a slant of sun
on a path overhung with oak, and unions
book-ended by tenderness, not torture.
So it is that when Rachel at work tags me for tea,
spills my story half a decade later
my story which started in beauty
but beauty whose price like irises and rhododendrons
stinking in a musty vase was rot,
a union that cleft ragged craters across my heart
and where rivers too fast and furous to ford call home.
The human soul hungers for beauty with boundaries:
stars enclosed in a cosmos, a slant of sun
on a path overhung with oak, and unions
book-ended by tenderness, not torture.
So it is that when Rachel at work tags me for tea,
spills my story half a decade later
my story which started in beauty
but beauty whose price like irises and rhododendrons
stinking in a musty vase was rot,
a union that cleft ragged craters across my heart
and where rivers too fast and furous to ford call home.
Rachel set my story within her own frame
and came begging
as if I’m a lower-cased Jesus
laying on hands to cast-out doubt,
or like I am her personal high school lit teacher
contextualizing Rumi, Moby Dick,
and the Scarlet Letter all at once
in a twenty-minute block of time,
interpreting why she feels like an appendix
to an over-wrought tome.
Forget the charm of the spine,
the filigree embellished cover,
Readers craving veracity
know she’ll never comprehend
that deceitful language.
Her phantom is a plagiarism of love.
Spiders, it is said, master disguise,
blending in to look like flowers.
Some dangle sticky strands of silk.
Those which appear to walk on water
merely manipulate surface tension.
Many eat their mate, even while mating.
This incubus of ours mimics the African spider,
the only animal known to select its prey
based on what the prey has eaten.
Like me, Rachel has eaten grief.
She has been gorging on it for years.
Big, sloppy slices of mommy’s rejection,
heaped, steaming bowls of daddy’s abuse.
None of it tasting right, but we’d recognize
that taste anywhere. Our faces wet with want for it,
like loud-mouthed babes, never quite certain
if we should run to or run from,
only assuredly voracious, clamoring
for prevaricators willing to dish out
more poisoned milk, until we are bloated,
all the deceits we’ve eaten in cruel mis-measures
of our resplendent worth.
After losing her toddler and six months later
her anger un-managed husband,
Rachel is engorged with grief.
To anything eight-eyed Rachel is a ripe, red, bit
of inconsequential meat.
I don’t want her here, soliciting my advice.
Doesn’t she know this flays me?
Leeched so deeply pain triggers time-bombs,
and I’m off rooting memory garbage for scraps of shit
I pretend to hold at arm’s distance;
photographs a woman with mettle would burn,
dissonant letters touting both annihilation
and transcendence that at its best is forgery
lifted straight from True Confessions
I devoured in grade school.
When death shatters a soul,
artifacts are that soul’s scattered remnants,
forming an ethereal cathedral housing memory
to perceive and preserve our lost.
What if there never was a soul to what we loved,
nothing beyond dross and slag?
Like a hologram divided a thousand times
each scrap a complete image,
only it is not voice-mail or e-mails or favorite ties
but us women burnt with voided images
of the nearly inescapable grief of our childhoods;
all our thwarted aspirations, neglected needs,
our potential lost, never knowing
exactly who we are or what we want
until all that remains is ruins.
In these recursive acts I find
some awakenings are followed so immediately
by surrender there is no between.
And Jesus, there it is, April’s Destiny,
the Blog of a professional victim.
With a malignant optimism that can only be born
of a childhood so harrowing it strip-mines all sense of dignity,
less than a year after I finally left him
she returns to drink his endless string of humiliations
boasting of her strength
which even we amateurs recognize
as mis-identified endurance.
Flowers thrive in tropical and subtropical climates.
Nonetheless, in the barren Arctic
conditions one can only describe as harsh,
with shallow, sterile soil,
a small number of flowering plants
with the slightest amount of encouragement
hang-on tenaciously in brief, remorseful seasons
squeezing out nourishment where they can.
Fossils indicate huge populations of flowers
moved on or died off. I can’t help but imagine
that if those remaining flowers had choice
like I, to uproot and move, they would.
The first time around April hung on marriage promises
a decade out and a decade back.
Pimped and porned, head-strong in masochism
and martyrdom, she fucked who she was told to fuck.
Even after we’d met and I told her to get lost
she wasted her retirement funds on Cruises and Rolexes.
She bought him a base guitar; I sat next to him in music theory.
With three children in tow, she moved forty miles to live closer.
I moved in.
I’m not saying she did anything wrong.
My own grasp on morality was subjected
to magical thinking, like Fata Morgana’s mirages
of safe harbors and well-defined coastal lines,
where alternating warm and cold layers of air
distort light, color, and distance.
Early Arctic explorers recorded islands or mountain ranges
that did not exist, going so far as to let them block their path.
Unrequited love, like delusions
serve well enough as prison bars.
In a Halloween house holograms frighten us.
Penn state researchers demonstrate
in their deconstruction of a model “female” turkey,
at little more than sticks and an empty head
turkeys are as aroused as men with pornography.
We are creatures of habit,
repeating failed plans of action,
only harder this time, louder,
exerting fanatical will
rather than trying something different.
What looks to us like a suicidal run of lemmings
is scarcity so life-threatening, that with poor vision
a desperate search for sustenance risks everything.
In a balanced environment lemmings thrive.
May we discover acts of redemption
in-between awakening and surrender
find that it is we who are doing the constellating,
not the stars or heaven.
In the grip of destiny and illusions,
we are hungry ghosts to whom nothing sticks;
even our most meticulously crafted lies have gaps.
In the circumpolar regions insects crawl.
We’ll never know whether or not
they forget they have wings,
whether they yearn heights,
or desire to dart swiftly among lily stalks,
Like us, a frigid environment
saps the energy to fly,
until at last the highest beauty we recognize
is a vase full of flowers that died
the moment they were picked.
and came begging
as if I’m a lower-cased Jesus
laying on hands to cast-out doubt,
or like I am her personal high school lit teacher
contextualizing Rumi, Moby Dick,
and the Scarlet Letter all at once
in a twenty-minute block of time,
interpreting why she feels like an appendix
to an over-wrought tome.
Forget the charm of the spine,
the filigree embellished cover,
Readers craving veracity
know she’ll never comprehend
that deceitful language.
Her phantom is a plagiarism of love.
Spiders, it is said, master disguise,
blending in to look like flowers.
Some dangle sticky strands of silk.
Those which appear to walk on water
merely manipulate surface tension.
Many eat their mate, even while mating.
This incubus of ours mimics the African spider,
the only animal known to select its prey
based on what the prey has eaten.
Like me, Rachel has eaten grief.
She has been gorging on it for years.
Big, sloppy slices of mommy’s rejection,
heaped, steaming bowls of daddy’s abuse.
None of it tasting right, but we’d recognize
that taste anywhere. Our faces wet with want for it,
like loud-mouthed babes, never quite certain
if we should run to or run from,
only assuredly voracious, clamoring
for prevaricators willing to dish out
more poisoned milk, until we are bloated,
all the deceits we’ve eaten in cruel mis-measures
of our resplendent worth.
After losing her toddler and six months later
her anger un-managed husband,
Rachel is engorged with grief.
To anything eight-eyed Rachel is a ripe, red, bit
of inconsequential meat.
I don’t want her here, soliciting my advice.
Doesn’t she know this flays me?
Leeched so deeply pain triggers time-bombs,
and I’m off rooting memory garbage for scraps of shit
I pretend to hold at arm’s distance;
photographs a woman with mettle would burn,
dissonant letters touting both annihilation
and transcendence that at its best is forgery
lifted straight from True Confessions
I devoured in grade school.
When death shatters a soul,
artifacts are that soul’s scattered remnants,
forming an ethereal cathedral housing memory
to perceive and preserve our lost.
What if there never was a soul to what we loved,
nothing beyond dross and slag?
Like a hologram divided a thousand times
each scrap a complete image,
only it is not voice-mail or e-mails or favorite ties
but us women burnt with voided images
of the nearly inescapable grief of our childhoods;
all our thwarted aspirations, neglected needs,
our potential lost, never knowing
exactly who we are or what we want
until all that remains is ruins.
In these recursive acts I find
some awakenings are followed so immediately
by surrender there is no between.
And Jesus, there it is, April’s Destiny,
the Blog of a professional victim.
With a malignant optimism that can only be born
of a childhood so harrowing it strip-mines all sense of dignity,
less than a year after I finally left him
she returns to drink his endless string of humiliations
boasting of her strength
which even we amateurs recognize
as mis-identified endurance.
Flowers thrive in tropical and subtropical climates.
Nonetheless, in the barren Arctic
conditions one can only describe as harsh,
with shallow, sterile soil,
a small number of flowering plants
with the slightest amount of encouragement
hang-on tenaciously in brief, remorseful seasons
squeezing out nourishment where they can.
Fossils indicate huge populations of flowers
moved on or died off. I can’t help but imagine
that if those remaining flowers had choice
like I, to uproot and move, they would.
The first time around April hung on marriage promises
a decade out and a decade back.
Pimped and porned, head-strong in masochism
and martyrdom, she fucked who she was told to fuck.
Even after we’d met and I told her to get lost
she wasted her retirement funds on Cruises and Rolexes.
She bought him a base guitar; I sat next to him in music theory.
With three children in tow, she moved forty miles to live closer.
I moved in.
I’m not saying she did anything wrong.
My own grasp on morality was subjected
to magical thinking, like Fata Morgana’s mirages
of safe harbors and well-defined coastal lines,
where alternating warm and cold layers of air
distort light, color, and distance.
Early Arctic explorers recorded islands or mountain ranges
that did not exist, going so far as to let them block their path.
Unrequited love, like delusions
serve well enough as prison bars.
In a Halloween house holograms frighten us.
Penn state researchers demonstrate
in their deconstruction of a model “female” turkey,
at little more than sticks and an empty head
turkeys are as aroused as men with pornography.
We are creatures of habit,
repeating failed plans of action,
only harder this time, louder,
exerting fanatical will
rather than trying something different.
What looks to us like a suicidal run of lemmings
is scarcity so life-threatening, that with poor vision
a desperate search for sustenance risks everything.
In a balanced environment lemmings thrive.
May we discover acts of redemption
in-between awakening and surrender
find that it is we who are doing the constellating,
not the stars or heaven.
In the grip of destiny and illusions,
we are hungry ghosts to whom nothing sticks;
even our most meticulously crafted lies have gaps.
In the circumpolar regions insects crawl.
We’ll never know whether or not
they forget they have wings,
whether they yearn heights,
or desire to dart swiftly among lily stalks,
Like us, a frigid environment
saps the energy to fly,
until at last the highest beauty we recognize
is a vase full of flowers that died
the moment they were picked.
May 05, 2009
Rise To It
(c) 2009
Sometimes to rise to it is to rise against yourself,
against a history of least resistance, paths so easy
they must have seemed right, now furrowed
and pocked like timber roads, useless beyond
their original intent. It hurts watching you rise
between rock and bone only to bottom,
dragging what, woefully, seem exaggerated
promises and plans as though they, too,
were encased in concrete.
I can not keep asking you to rise.
Your inability to surface and stand
can not be any simple measure of love,
but there it is. It is.
So many of my own desolate nights
I have thrashed myself like I am Jacob
wrestling Jacob’s angel, finding neither
the face of god or forgiveness.
Inner angels and devils consume me
until I beg myself to just quit breathing.
Embracing the end is not any kind of embrace
for the living. So I’ve come full-circle
through fairy tales and myths to accept my place—
the wise witch who offers guidance
through the chthonic flux, the queen-goddess
who insists three things. For you alone
more princess-as-prize than Medusa.
I have gone so far to hand you the sword
and the mirroring shield. Why will you not rise to it?
I am almost done hoping you are a chrysalis
about to emerge, not so much a hero, but a man.
How much longer can I rise to you?
Sometimes to rise to it is to rise against yourself,
against a history of least resistance, paths so easy
they must have seemed right, now furrowed
and pocked like timber roads, useless beyond
their original intent. It hurts watching you rise
between rock and bone only to bottom,
dragging what, woefully, seem exaggerated
promises and plans as though they, too,
were encased in concrete.
I can not keep asking you to rise.
Your inability to surface and stand
can not be any simple measure of love,
but there it is. It is.
So many of my own desolate nights
I have thrashed myself like I am Jacob
wrestling Jacob’s angel, finding neither
the face of god or forgiveness.
Inner angels and devils consume me
until I beg myself to just quit breathing.
Embracing the end is not any kind of embrace
for the living. So I’ve come full-circle
through fairy tales and myths to accept my place—
the wise witch who offers guidance
through the chthonic flux, the queen-goddess
who insists three things. For you alone
more princess-as-prize than Medusa.
I have gone so far to hand you the sword
and the mirroring shield. Why will you not rise to it?
I am almost done hoping you are a chrysalis
about to emerge, not so much a hero, but a man.
How much longer can I rise to you?
March 06, 2009
Summer Black and Blues
(c) 2009
I liked to sit in the weedy, tiered rockery next door.
Sometimes Steve would pretend picnic with me
but usually he and Allan played war and I read
using one hand to block sun’s glare,
the popsicle melting in my mouth as much as possible
so I could turn sticky pages with the nearly free hand.
The north rockery was fenced in and crowded
with long-needled pines, fiddlehead ferns uncoiling
childish fingers like unanswered prayers,
dank loose dirt and dark, though spring’s pussy willows
nearly made walking past forgivable.
Our rockery to the south rumored heather, roses
and hydrangeas underneath years of neglect and ivy
choking even the rocks. And so I sat
in Steve and Allan’s yard on the middle tier,
where even someone standing on their deck or mine
couldn’t see me listening to bees drone and reading.
Their father, an army or navy man,
more often gone than home;
that summer afternoon he rocked alone on his deck,
his whole body engulfing an old guitar
like the capital letter C, or a binder clip.
He sang for all I know about love or peace,
because in my memories all songs were love songs,
and there was nothing else I wanted so much as peace.
When I moved up from the rockery to the step three down
he stayed curled into his song, as mesmerized as I.
I was invisible and far too young to feel in the pit of my body
still this was as close to perfect as perfect would ever be.
Even now I’d be sitting there if my father hadn’t
slammed open the door, yelled
godddam girl, git yer ass home, slapping
the back of my head for bothering the neighbors.
Men hit. That’s what they did.
Mother’s were far to cruel to hit,
and so Didi, like Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Rose
warning their kids to wait until your father comes home,
saved up every punishment, every reprimand,
and once when their father finally had leave to come home
his anger boiled out into the yard for all the neighbors to see.
Instead of a belt or a thin branch cut from rockery bushes
he wielded a blunt two-by-four, chasing Allan
who in that moment was possibly the fastest
first-grade runner I’d ever seen, face wet and red,
screams loud and long enough to follow me for decades.
I wanted my useless father to wedge himself like a boulder
in-between Allan and his father, wanted Didi to pull enough
out of her limited English vocabulary, wanted somehow
the nerve to do anything besides cowering in the rockery,
smothering my face with my own hands, unable to turn away.
I liked to sit in the weedy, tiered rockery next door.
Sometimes Steve would pretend picnic with me
but usually he and Allan played war and I read
using one hand to block sun’s glare,
the popsicle melting in my mouth as much as possible
so I could turn sticky pages with the nearly free hand.
The north rockery was fenced in and crowded
with long-needled pines, fiddlehead ferns uncoiling
childish fingers like unanswered prayers,
dank loose dirt and dark, though spring’s pussy willows
nearly made walking past forgivable.
Our rockery to the south rumored heather, roses
and hydrangeas underneath years of neglect and ivy
choking even the rocks. And so I sat
in Steve and Allan’s yard on the middle tier,
where even someone standing on their deck or mine
couldn’t see me listening to bees drone and reading.
Their father, an army or navy man,
more often gone than home;
that summer afternoon he rocked alone on his deck,
his whole body engulfing an old guitar
like the capital letter C, or a binder clip.
He sang for all I know about love or peace,
because in my memories all songs were love songs,
and there was nothing else I wanted so much as peace.
When I moved up from the rockery to the step three down
he stayed curled into his song, as mesmerized as I.
I was invisible and far too young to feel in the pit of my body
still this was as close to perfect as perfect would ever be.
Even now I’d be sitting there if my father hadn’t
slammed open the door, yelled
godddam girl, git yer ass home, slapping
the back of my head for bothering the neighbors.
Men hit. That’s what they did.
Mother’s were far to cruel to hit,
and so Didi, like Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Rose
warning their kids to wait until your father comes home,
saved up every punishment, every reprimand,
and once when their father finally had leave to come home
his anger boiled out into the yard for all the neighbors to see.
Instead of a belt or a thin branch cut from rockery bushes
he wielded a blunt two-by-four, chasing Allan
who in that moment was possibly the fastest
first-grade runner I’d ever seen, face wet and red,
screams loud and long enough to follow me for decades.
I wanted my useless father to wedge himself like a boulder
in-between Allan and his father, wanted Didi to pull enough
out of her limited English vocabulary, wanted somehow
the nerve to do anything besides cowering in the rockery,
smothering my face with my own hands, unable to turn away.
February 08, 2009
Untitiled and probably incomplete
Sometimes at night I hear
disconcerting dreams moan in the empty, blank space
above my clown-round head, moan the low growl
of tussling cats, or growl like neighbors on that thin side
of clumpy plaster heaving and catching gasps
and good-god I'd rather not hear that, not alone,
exhausted, plaster swelling like one more
shuddering heart flaking dust, or opened palms
pushing the wooly-thick blackness in on me,
until I feel compelled to vow unwarranted silence
or chastity, broken on my next good day.
Some days I'm still ruminating long past noon
over the last nights disconcerting dream
like it was an unsatisfactory last meal,
wondering why I faltered when I flew, why that celebrity--
reenacting his warrior role--took a bigger beating
than even Hollywood would have allowed,
and why it all should stick in me like sewing pins
pulled deep by the magnetic gravity of melancholy.
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