Mend

(c) 8/09/2017 

I wish you knew how to mend

your own shirts lost buttons,

thread a needle-eye like a poor camel

heaven bound, work the shank with twine,

tie up the four-hole, binding points

of entry and intrigue. Your first button

at four, buttoned and unbuttoned,

everlasting as taxes, then death. First,

place the button onto your tongue,

like a Eucharist wafer. Imagine it is the body. 

I wish you knew what it was like to go to church

before one could buy Holy supplies

and chat with god online. The tender button

has spiritual dimensions. The bottom smooth

as fine porcelain, the top curved, or convex,

nubby, or shaped like a flower,

an animal, a bow-tie, a rococo masterpiece.

I wish you knew before buttons were molded

of plastic like everything else

they were formed from Gaia-earth elements,

from wood, shell, antler, bone, ivory, stone, pottery.

That growing in skill, growing bored,

growing commercial, man conceived buttons

of metal, glass, papier Mache, and cloth.

Still, how uncommon the common button

that leaves everything done and undone.

Next, press the needle into your thumb whorl

until you can tell point and eye by touch.

The needle should pass through silk without mark.

Taste thread ends for fray or stiffness.

Blind the eye with a finger, a spot of flesh

and aim. Thread. Double. Knot. 

I wish you knew how to measure twice, cut once,

to fix before things go wrong. How to mend to last.

The Small Pod

(c) August 9, 2017

Vanilla notes in biscotti,

on my cologne-spritzed wrist, lathered lotion,

the bedroom and the kitchen of memory where I beat

eggs and butter into cookies, always tripling

the quarter teaspoon of amber, yes.

Vanilla notes are lush, are every boy

I longed to kiss, every unrequited, every forbidden

love punished. The spilt blood of Princess Xanat,

beheaded in the forest, becoming the tropical orchid.  

Yes, to the black shriveled fruit, the little pod.

Yes to the intensive labor, the root and leaf rot,

the harvesting that has no set season, that never ends.

And the tart shot of a blushed apple plucked

one from a hundred in their unified rush to ripe

it is the pragmatic boy too clean, to common,

and still good to taste. Yes, to the resisted lemon.

And yes, to lilac which cannot be distilled.

It grows in the backyard memory, a wild

thirty heady days each summer. Yes to cheap imitations

to deodorant and candle, yes to botanists,

to planters and thieves.

Rain water and freshly mowed grass,

a single rose without thorns, yes, vulva,

a door opening. An opening door.  

Long Ride to Starkweather, 1962

(c) 2017

 Wheat.
Corn.
Wheat.
Wheat.
Dirt.
Alfalfa.
Wheat. Wheat.  
Station wagon passes on our left,
this musters a three second stare.
Against the side view window
a Bumble bee splats. Half its wingless body
shredding in the wind.
Wheat.
Corn. Wheat.
Alfalfa. Wheat.
Wheat. Elm Tree. Small white house.
The red-birded whirligig is not swirling.
Sheep.
Corn.
Wheat.
On-coming truck, cab flat-faced as a pug, hauling chickens.
One chicken. Two chicken.
Feathers. Dust
to dust.
We aren’t there, yet. When? When?
Wheat.
Wheat.
Alfalfa.
Wheat.

Tourist in Ocho Rios

(2017)

 

In a caged cell of ocean filled

with juvenile sting ray,

I submerged, ordered myself breathe.

Flooded with anxiety, hyper

ventilating, I jerked back into sky.

The fourth attempt I trusted

that apparatus tooth-clenched and strapped on.

I sucked in air, thick

as tobacco smoke in my lungs.

Through murky gray and a plastic lens,

no surfeit pirate gold tucked among rock,

only sting rays undulating gray wings,

and fish the size of silver-dollars.  

In the dolphin pool, I treaded water awaiting

their rubbery press. A pair.

One foot on each dorsal fin, I hitched a half-length

of their compound, a demigod’s chariot,

whitecaps billowing behind. A failed,

flailing victor’s V, I collapsed into their wake.

In the photo see that though we were instructed

to hook hands to vest, I was scratching

the elongated chin-chest of one dolphin like a cat.

That camera temperamental; four minutes that dolphin

with its beaked, mawkish grin nuzzled my cheek

as if it truly liked me. I kissed it. Kissed it

with small filial kisses for a lost cousin, cooing

until my daughter yelled Get a room, Mom. 

I bought a cane reed bracelet, hand-braided to fit

from a man dark as cocoa, sugared with ganja.

In the park, not so much to sell bracelets

but prophecies in patois. He saw past

my piker skin, my present tense, evoked

another time, Yoruba perhaps, where Jah

enthralled my chimeric heart. Magical. A resistor.

He pushed my shoulder, you know this.

And I felt it too seductive to believe him.

Hypoteneunce

(2016)

Tuesday is the diligence of pencils.  Thursday is papers piled

and filed irregular as gopher mounds. Friday is a clock. 

I measure time no less than time measures me. The verdict:

habitual innocence. What I am told is not always what I feel.

Do tell, genius can solve a quadratic equation. That time

I plumbed second degree was unsettling; I felt approximate, 

felt subtended. Without habit, I resume ignorance.

I never factor in the motives of superficial muscles. Still,

I heed knives; I rebuff stones and sticks. I protect my back.

Saturday’s crowds and clowns by Sunday are an excursion

of recalcitrant bones. The defrocked clock the sky.  

That moon, like everything else, has a core. I’m not the only one

frustrated by a rock heart. Soil cannot litigate against deluge.

The ocean contains salt while fresh water collects

in a depression. Patience, and these memories, from one: another.

Know what I feel: sediment settles everything.