waitress poems

WALKING ON WASHINGTON STREET

2006-08-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

All the way to heaven is heaven.
--St. Catherine of Sienna

It's my birthday,
temperature 100 degrees
and I'm walking on Washington Street,
when it occurs to me
that I will never be loved enough.
Never.

And what's more, I will soon
grow old
and no one will see me
through my veil of skin.

Then from nowhere
I recall St. Catherine's words.
And though I still don't know
what heaven is,
I know with absolute certainty
that it exists
because right there
in the midst of the heat
the confusion and fatigue
I've passed through it
on Washington St.

It's my birthday,
temperature 100 degrees,
and for one bright moment,
loving, just loving
is enough.

8/02/06

An Opening

2006-08-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

In the body. When you’re young,
it’s only sex,
the blinding distractions
of light. Now hospital scenes
intrude--

My uncle Frank
stubble-faced and weak
after surgery for cancer
of the larynx
sneaking a smoke
in the bathroom.

Or Katie, the friend we envied
for her perfect body.
After what they called
exploratory surgery,
I stood in a room bleached with sun
and watched her sleep,
hands folded obediently
on her lap.

In memory, I stood like that
for days,
just studying those hands.
But in truth,
it was only moments
before her eyes snapped open
revealing the secret
of her fate,

Of mine.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, 1968

2005-12-14T07:28:00.000-08:00

When she hears her son
has died in war,
she goes to the kitchen,
fills the sink with
water and suds and

begins slowly
to wash the dishes.
Plate after plate, she

pulls them from the water,
washes them,
then lets them go.
She wishes she could remember

everything she's scrubbed
in the last twenty years--
baby bottles cleaned with
stiff burshes, spoons

and bowls and cast iron pots.
It's like breathing now--
Inhale--wash. Exhale--rinse.
Only this grief is new

and not knowing
what to do with it,
she drops it
into the warm grey water.

But she already knows:
This is one well of dishes
that will never be emptied.
Wherever she goes

she will remember
all that she tried to wash away,
all that stained her--

the milk line in the glass,
the half eaten vegetables,
the blood, the blood.

WOMAN IN A DARK BACKGROUND, Matisse, 1939

2005-12-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

We know the hour.
A book laid aside,
she has given in to
the somnolence
that overtakes us all
when the sun turns coy
in our window.
Unguarded,
she lets us see
what a sketch of her nakedness
cannot reveal:
the thighs grown slack,
resolute cheer
of her bright-bowed shoes.
Beside her,
a vase of purple flowers
leaps and flares.
But dreaming the story of her life,
she takes no notice.
Forever she will be
as we are:
a figure with a mirror to her back,
revealing to others
what she cannot know herself:
the bravery and silliness
of the table
she has laid with care,
the darkness her body
both defines and denies.

THE BLACK BELL

2005-12-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

The priest comes in his gown
dressed like a black bell,
but silent, silent.
And you lie in the hospital
that white country where
you can ignite like a brushfire
and nothing will burn but you.
He comes after the nurse
drains samples of blood
into long tubes, siphoning
the color from your hours.
He comes after your husband,
your son and daughter
have gone, leaving their pale flowers
everywhere.
He has risen up from your childhood
holding the Communion wafer
between his fingers,
so flat and white it glows.
But when you try to
throw off your fevers and
move toward him,
he withdraws.
Not yet, not yet, he says,
still holding out
for a full confession.

THE NAP AFTER THANKSGIVING DINNER

2005-11-25T09:05:00.000-08:00

After the table has been cleared of its clatter and glass,
it starchy comforts, fattened grudges...
After the toast has been made and the often abandoned God
lured back to preside
over another restive and imperfect feast...
After hours, years, a lifetime of travel,
the precarious balance of weariness and hope
that tossed you up in this moment,
among the pocked and glowing faces
you call your precious own...
After the dark wine has flooded your veins,
and the sacrificial bird been
gleaned of its pale flesh...
After the drone and passion of distant games
have pulled the men to the living room,
and drawn their roar, their deepest sigh...
After the coffee’s been poured around the table
where the women whisper and scoff and slice more pie...
After a sweet smoke on the grass
where the first chill of the season
penetrates your thin sweater, your narrow city shoes
and fills you with half-forgotten longings...
After the phone calls from distant towns,
bland wishes and crackling silences renewed...
Then comes the hour of reckoning: the nap:
the torpor and satiety of twilight,
a blanket pulled from your childhood closet, thick slumber.
This is an hour that is not discrete, its own,
but a distillation of every nap you ever stole
after every heavy meal
when you battled emptiness with bright scenes,
lucid voices, the undeniable rise and fall of gratitude
inside your every breath.

FIVE PEOPLE CAUGHT IN RAIN

2005-11-21T18:54:00.000-08:00

1.

A man who wobbles through town
in a bike filched from your childhood
a wooden crate affixed to the back fender
containing an old toothbrush, a plastic
fork and spoon, a pair of heavy gloves...
Stenciled across the back
of his army jacket,
a bright script: JESUS LOVES YOU!
wavers in the rain.

2.
A woman in a purple jogging suit,
dark tendrils
inked across her face like tears...
She left home twenty minutes ago
thinking she could run all the way back
to the house of her youth
and everything would be in place:
her favorite tree, the swing out back,
the face in a silver hand mirror
aslant on her bureau.

3.& 4.
Two men bent in supplication
as they lug the day’s supply of beer
back to the Blue Water Motel
where they’ve been camping out for cheap
in the off-season...Taking
the unexpected, the unstoppable,
the lacerating as their due,
they bow their heads to the rain
and continue their blind walk home.

5.
And you--yes, you!
the one who thought
it would be a good morning to walk
to the library, believing as you do
that words will save you
if only you can find the right ones...
But instead, you find yourself
out here in the rain
with a man who carries everything
he needs in a crate,
with the drunks who transport
their daily despair
in a sodden cardboard box,
with a woman who holds
the unforgettable secret of her youth
in the breast pocket
of a purple nylon jacket.

ON THE VERGE OF RUINING MY LIFE

2005-11-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

I drink too much red wine,
drowning in its brilliant color,
and let the wrong men whisper to my blood,
their voices low and crooning.
Whole days pass when I accomplish nothing.
Over and over, I promise reform, then
find myself leaning over another blue drink
staring into dark eyes to see what develops.
The next day my head is a garishly lit room
where I wait for the hour
when I can collapse in shadows on the couch,
blind with self-recrimination.
But even there the forbidden stalks me...
Frank Sinatra singing Fly Me to the Moon on disc,
a cat with a tail like a plume of smoke
tiptoeing over the piano keys,
his touch so light I’m not sure
if I heard the notes he scattered
or just imagined them.

(A very old poem. Hopefully, at this point, I'm not on the verge of ruining anything.)

MARIE WITH A BROKEN HIP

2005-11-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

Ninety in a month,
though everyone but Marie knows
she’ll never make it.
With blood leaking
at the base of her brain
a stomach swollen and malign,
Marie pronounces it
“nothing serious,” and plans
a party in the spring.
She spits out the creamy drinks
laced with vitamins
we offer through straws.
Still each night Marie rises
from her bed, escaping
Houdini-like from the contraptions
that anchor her in place.
Sure that someone needs her
in another room,
she strays through halls
in a nearly hollow nightgown,
listening for the clear voice that
summoned her from sleep.
What comes next are
the inevitable falls: a cracked rib,
stitched forehead,
and then the broken hip.
In the hospital after surgery
she writhes in sleep, but
when we weep for this old friend,
Marie’s eyes snap awake;
she startles us with the smile
that still defines her life:
“Come here,” she whispers
drawing us close so she
can relay her final secret:
It’s really not so bad.

YOUR SHIRT

2005-11-08T18:34:00.000-08:00

When you hang yourself
in the closet
at the end of the day
you are

not silk but
cotton--
grey, a
faded plaid with
white lines streaking
through
like the rib
cage of a bird, like your
breath
when it lives
there. Disembodied,
you are

finally visible.

I don't see the
shirt but
the spots you've
worn away, the
awkward bones, the turns
that

came without warning
leaving the
inner threads
naked--not torn just
open, durable strands
of
thickspun nerve.

When you hang yourself
in the closet
at the end of
the day and
bury

what's left in the
old skin--white
sheets, our
heap of comfortable,
often washed dreams,
I open
the door and

put on that shirt,
the old touch--
familiar as cotton, soft as
breath. And from
the inside
I feel it again--

the heartbeat, your
movement--
persistent as
the darkness that grows wild
around us.

First appeared in Poetry Northwest

DINING OUT

2005-11-04T14:46:00.000-08:00

After visiting you
in the hospital, I dine alone,
the only party of one
in this bistro
where even the silverware
comes in pairs, in groups,
in clattering crowds.

I want to write a note
on my linen napkin
or the check, the stark
and gleaming table top
to explain that I'm alone this this time
not because I'm afraid
or abandoned, or lost

in a strange city,
but because today
riding the elevator up
to your white room,
I crowded in close enough
to smell the make-up and aftershave
my fellow passengers wore

to mask their sorrow.
Coming down, I rode alone,
my own sorrow folded
neatly in my purse,
while a sharp silence
looked over my shoulder,
unimpressed

by the clamor my life makes.
Tonight I take that silence
to dinner.
I drink martinis and feel it
spinning drunk inside me,
feel it laughing at my
polished manners,

hiding behind my teeth
when I talk to the waitress,
a smiling young woman
with a thick yellow braid
that shines like a snake
coiled around her head
and into itself.

NINE DAYS OF CLOUDS

2005-11-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

Home from the hospital,
you lie in bed studying the sky
as if you expect to see a scar
erasing itself in the distance.
I want to take out my crayons
and deepen the color,
rearrange the clouds like lawn furniture
so the sun will stop tripping over them.
I want to sketch two green trees,
three flowers, and one plain white house
the way children draw safety.
And I wouldn't forget the mother and father,
sprouting between the flowers,
stick figures in bright colors
who smile and wave in approval.

But for nine days, there's been
nothing but bowls and bowls
full of clouds
spilling over the landscape
and into my drawing.
I tell you how much I wanted
to be a child for you,
able to distill the world
into priimary colors and simple lines.
And you laugh, already feeling stronger.

Later, after supper,
we will walk out toward the field
where the black trees
open like fans
and you will point out clouds
deepening into purple,
formations you have seen
resembling oxen, eagles, women
who are not afraid of the dark.

First appeared in Dark Horse.

SNOWMEN

2005-11-01T10:57:00.000-08:00

Already, Mother, you have come to
the snow scene. You, who
I still see as strong and brown-limbed
in a sundress
now come to visit, pale
inside layers of handknit sweaters
from Iceland or Peru--
distances I hunger for,
countries you will never see.
There are bits of grey ice
you cannot shake from your hair,
certain fears that have drawn
shadows on your face.
But there is beauty too--
the drifts that slope against
our old house, the curve
of your hand holding a teacup.
Do you remember the snowmen
we used to make
when I was growing up?
We gave them my old scarves, the
felt hats you wore when you were young
and worked in the city.
The glorious time, you called it--
or did not call it--but I knew anyway.
I always imagined the snowmen alive and sad
at the end of winter
as if just before mud season,
melting, one eye missing,
they realized who they were.

THE SURGEON

2005-10-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

Tonight in the dark I run my finger
down the scar that divides you in half.
You go on sleeping as you did at twelve or thirteen
when the surgeon, who spoke to your parents
but never to you, opened your chest
and admitted your heart to the room full of ordinary things:
the green haze of fluorescent lights, polished floors,
the hungry gossip we use to define our lives.
I wish I cold have been there that day
to watch as your heart with its malfunctioning valve
fixed as methodically as a carburetor.
I wish I could have seen the secret room inside your chest
cracked open and searched for treacheries.
I would have stood above you
and sewn your right side back to your left
with strong black thread, your heart in place
beneath my hand. I would not have faltered.
But for twenty years I waited to touch the long scar
that divides you like a highway.
For twenty years I waited for this night
when I, having taught myself the boldness of surgery,
could open you and fill you with the things I know:
my stories, my lies, the precision of my touch.

IN OCTOBER

2005-10-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

Old women in head rags go out
to sweep the steps
of gray buildings.
But the fiery leaves
circle and taunt,
refusing capture.
Look quickly!
down the street
a rider in an orange cap
pedals his bike
through an arc of light
and is gone.

CU CHULAIND'S JEALOUS WIFE

2005-10-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

Beside an unproductive cranberry bog
he camps out for a season or two,
a defector from wars we do not know
dressed in the tatters of his own defeat.

In fall, when the boys sneak down
to the crimson marsh to smoke a joint,
he comes out of his shack, a small fire
dangling from his mouth. And sipping his
final comfort, he discourses on love.

As always, it’s about Cu Chulaind:
Did you know, he begins,
his voice a dark seduction, the chieftain
loved his wife Emer so much
he captured the brightest birds
and brought them to her room.
Until the day when beautiful Fand
poured the drink of pure forgetting.

The drink of pure forgetting! Cu Chulaind
roars and weeps,
as the boys, who cannot understand--not yet,
drop their joints and run
from fervid eyes, and quaking voice,
from Fand’s inviting thighs.

Alone once more, he swallows another fated pint,
as he haunts the dysfuntional bog,
filling its murky waters with a thousand years of travel,
a thousand nights of weak lament.

How long, Cu Chulaind? he wails.
How long; how far; how deep?
How many years must he drink down,
how many countries travel
before the birds are all set free?

BETTY THE CROW AND THE DANCING SCIENTIST

2005-10-20T11:04:00.000-07:00

Last night on PBS, I saw a crow
with a name (Betty, like my aunt
who paints landscapes and never
forgets my birthday)
demonstrate the intelligence of
birds. She bent a wire to make a tool
so she could retrieve food
from a cylinder. And when
they took her tool away, she made
another! And another!

The scientist who proved
Betty's intelligence was a young
black man. Handsome, too.
But it was ballet that gave him
the discipline to study birds.
Ballet and that school in New York
where they made the movie Fame.

Part of Betty's story involved
actors from the movie,
leaping over banisters and
singing about immortality.

Another part of Betty's story involved
a handsome young scientist
dancing Salsa around a blue living room
with a ceiling as high as the sky.
Dancing and believing
and dreaming about crows
with names like Betty.

A BALL OF RUBBER BANDS

2005-10-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Someone has given me
a ball of colorful rubber bands
for my office.
redyelloworangegreen--
a hard round ball of rubber bands.

Back when I had a use
for rubber bands, I would
leave them on the door knob
in case I needed one. Now all I
can think to do is toss
the bright ball through a window
on bad days, heave it toward
the sky on good ones--
a spinning globe of
redyelloworangegreen.

It calls to mind an ex-boyfriend,
who wore a flesh colored band
around his wrist.
He said it was to remind him
of something important,
but would never tell me
what it was.

Now I pull a bright red band
from the knotted ball
and put it on my wrist. Maybe
it will come to me--
the secret I never knew
in a red rubber band
uncomfortably tight
on my wrist bone.

HER HUSBAND, TRYING TO IMPRESS ANOTHER WOMAN

2005-10-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

Though he has never been there,
he knows the rivers that cut through
her Ontario childhood,
understands the way their mysterious arcs
subtly define the music she writes
for guitar and flute, and how the cold sun
of those isolated years
still slants across her days.

Would you believe that as a teenager
he collected all of Laura Nyro’s albums;
and when she first found herself
in the loneliness of a city girl’s wail
on that still Canadian farm,
he was there, too. Waiting. Knowing.
Humming in the distance.

If she just gives him a chance,
he will tell her about the books
that changed him, and how each of them
subtly foretold the story of her life, the snow
that spills into her music. Even now.

While her husband and his wife sip their wine,
leaning into the silence of bygone winters,
he presses forward on the couch, his eyes
enormous with rapport. And then, abruptly--
it’s time to slip back into heavy coats,
the night that sprawls outside her door.

Climbing into the car, the black carapace
of a half-forgotten life,
he clears his throat and starts the ignition while
beside him all along, a wife adjusts her scarf,
stares into the dark, and
feels her way toward a new equilibrium.

THE GARDEN

2005-10-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

I hate vegetables, you said, and what's more
I haven't been hungry in months. I was digging
the hardened soil behind my apartment,
determined to make a garden. While I pulled roots
and defined a border with rocks, you stood
at the edge of my plot, clutching your story
in your fist like a ragged hat.
I was a neghbor who kept to herself,
but you told me about a recurring nightmare
in which you go home to San Juan
and find your family name erased
from the phone book; and no matter how many days
you walk through the city, you can't find
the street where you lived as a child.
While I went on digging, you spoke of the job
you didn't have, the days you passed from hand to hand--
tickets to a concert taking place elsewhere.
Finally you told me again how little you ate,
meticulously listing the foods
that had grown tasteless in your mouth:
chicken, mofongo, even the bitter grapefruit.

Two days later you jammed a .22 into your mouth,
determined, at last, to taste. But I could not listen
to the talk that followed your death,
without thinking about the stealthy garden
that was beginning to grow in your absence.
I thought of the tomatoes' red perfection and the taste
of dirt I could not wash from the carrots.
I saw the small boys who pilfered my cucumbers
and the best of the watermelons;
I heard their laughter as they spit out the seeds.
I remembered the day you spoke to me
as the soil lodged beneath my fingernails.
I scrubbed and scrubbed my hands for months,
but in dreams, I turned the earth again.
In dreams your words returned with the dirt
and the shape of the hoe in my hand.
In dreams you are still walking,
searching for the street of your childhood.
Sometimes you come to the edge of my garden,
looking as if your hunger has finally returned,
and I know that no matter how much food I grow,
it will never be enough.

CHICKEN MAN

2005-09-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

Note: This poem, a celebration of New Orleans' famous jazz funerals, was first published in the jazz magazine, Brilliant Corners. It was the first poem I chose to put up on the blog. With all of our minds on the city of New Orleans and its endangered culture, I thought I would post it again.

When I die, I want a funeral
like the Chicken Man had
in New Orleans. For once,
let them bury a shy writer
like they bury voodoo priests--
with gin splashed on my old suit and
two white horses to drag me
in my sorry box
through streets exalted
by sweat and neon.
May enough people know me
for my eccentricity or for my songs
that a few will join
in the ecstatic mourning
when the man with the black umbrella
steps forth to lead my parade.
Let the the dirge be short and
the jazz blow
till the sidewalks cough up steam
and every shoulder shimmies.
If someone steps up
to speak of me, make sure they say
that like the Chicken man,
I was a poet,
fated to walk through life
in a black top hat
with a monkey skull in one fist,
a staff
topped with a plastic human hand
in the other,
and that when I had them,
I passed out candles
to the multitude
who still clamor
for blessings on the street.

LADIES' TUESDAY NIGHT BOWLING LEAGUE

2005-08-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

For days you sit in the house
with the shades down. Diapers
rot in pails; the litter
you have married flourishes
in every room, trailing you,
reminding you.
At night your husband,
the former high school track star
pulls you toward him again.
His body, a cage that will
release neither of you
rises above you,
each bar in place.
You whisper to the runner
imprisoned there,
to the woman who once loved him.
But your voice has become soundless;
his breathing fills the room.

Only on Tuesday nights do
you remember how to shout.
Your blood infused with
Coca Cola,
your body like a bow,
you release the ball, and the force
of all your quiet days
explodes in the lane.
One after the other,
the docile pins fall.
A strike! A spare.
Again and again, you need
to see them tumble,
collapsing like the high walls
of the house you have built
around your life,
around your shouts of victory.

first published in The Painted Bride Quarterly

YARD SALES

2005-08-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

In the era of great movies,
they called women like her
dizzy dames. Good for a laugh
their lipsticked smiles still
poke out of old albums. I see her
pereched on a Desoto after the war,
showing off movie star legs
in a polka-dotted dress,
wide brimmed hat, and
open toed shoes.
But dames like that, the movies warned
don't age well.
Now beached up in an age of
action flicks and MTV,
she goes to yard sales
searching for heart-shaped pillows
and knick-knacks
with painted faces.
This is the last movie,
her life strewn across some
stranger's lawn, the grass
humming a theme song.
And she comes as always,
dressed for the part--cheeks
rouged to a feverish blush,
her eyebrows heavy black crescents
that have held her face
from tears for decades.
And sailing over the litter
that giggle they loved back
in the era of great cinema.
High pitched and dizzy,
it ripples through the air
like a blast of jazz trumpet
played on the wrong speed.

first appeared in Laurel Review

THE SECOND WIFE'S LOVESONG

2005-07-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

The first time you took me out
in your fast car
I felt the cold, the whiplike
touch of speed, sex's awkward jitterbug
snapping steel fingers between us.
You warmed me with her fox jacket
which lay in the backseat
like a sleeping child.
It's a fake, you said,
in deference to my animal sensitivity.
But as soon as I put it on
I felt the fox
still breathing inside it.

Since then I have come home
to sleep in her canopy bed--
the actress whos big break came
when the star leaped from
a window.

I think she is my mother,
this fox who sings to me
long after you fall asleep,
who urges me to dress warm on cold days
helping me into the silk-lined coat,
they made from her hide.

I think she is my sister,
this star
who disappears whenever I try
to learn her secrets--
a flash of red fur
free as fire, free
as my breath burning holes
in the stillness of this room.

first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal

FIRE

2005-07-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

Even though the siren is in the distance,
you know where it's heading.

Even though the fire has not yet begun,
your burning is in progress.

It began somewhere behind your eyes.
And though it was just a slow smoldering heat,

you immediately sensed it's greed.
That was when you first began

crawling through your life on hands and knees
hoarding oxygen in your clenched fists.

You know what is coming--
With sorrow, you watch those who are

still walking upright, inhaling smoke in gulps.
But there is little time for warnings

when the smoke is already acid in your eye.
You keep crawling at a steady pace,

watching the signs and arrows
that lead to the roof.

And when you arrive, well-trained
from a lifetime of fire drills,

you exit the building like a victor.
From below, the blind crowd screams.

Clearly, they don't understand
that you are one step ahead of the rescue team,

that you are wearing a red cross over your heart
and have come to save yourself

as best you know how. Their voices break open
like sirens as if they didn't see

the flames splattering in relief on the street,
the smoke dissolving in the air.

This poem, written many years ago and long forgotten, first appeared in the wonderful and now defunct Poetry Northwest. Reading it now, I am startled by its dark vision. It seems to have been written by a stranger.

THE MOST HANDSOME MAN I EVER SAW

2005-07-20T02:34:00.000-07:00

The most handsome man I ever saw
spent his summers
glistening on the hood of a car
that hadn’t moved in at least a year.
Spectacularly shirtless, he smoked too much dope,
married at seventeen, was never around
when the social workers came to
evaluate his wife’s claim.
The most handsome man I ever saw
was a gardener; his beans and sunflowers
sprawled in the open field
behind the project, a verdant patch
in a scraped out lot that belonged to no one.
And all through the short steamy season
the women, the young girls, the chicas--
they came to him. Came to him in the dark,
came to him in the garden,
came to him in the stalled out car--
his office in the Department
of Dangerously Stunning Idlers.
They came to smell the sun that
lingered on his skin, came to understand
why they shivered in 90 degree heat
when he passed them on the street,
came to taste the lush red tomatoes
that grew sweeter that summer
than they ever would again.

NIGHT IN THE HOSPITAL

2005-07-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here there will be no brandy
lighting your body like
a secret cave. Your only escape
will be by window where night,
cut in squares by
a child's blunt scissors
spies on you like a portrait
of the great grandfather
who has been
staring you down for decades
with his greedy eyes.

Though you've only been here
a few days, you're beginning
to forget the way the trees
chant to each other in wind,
and the vibrant blues and oranges
of the quilt you put between
yourself and night.
At first you try to pretend
you stumbled onto this
snowy landscape by accident;
it has nothing to do with you.

But a Portuguese woman is dying
in the bed beside you.
When she forgets the language she's
used for forty years
and breaks through in her primal tongue,
everything comes closer--
the fans whirring on the roof
like your own heart,
the night that can't be locked out
roaring in your blood.

first appeared in Cimarron Review

BROKEN GLASS

2005-07-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

In-the-out-door and
out-the-in-door.
How many times will she
get hit in the face with
the automatic door before she
learns-the-rules? Ever
see her? She's the one
with the broken nose
laughing at the wrong time
in the ampitheater.
At four years old, she
ran so fast across her mother's
kitchen that her hand
went through the window
with the impact. You
will know her on sight: her
scars are flowers in disguise.
Her occupation is building
cities out of broken glass. Her
courage is what keeps the doors
opening and closing against
the wind.

Comment: Broken Glass, which first appeared in Aphra was my first published poem. I can still remember how I felt when the package arrived containing my contributor's copies. I was so excited I had to wait a full five minutes before I opened it.

Oh yes, and after all these years, I'm still going out the in door.

POEM FOR A NEIGHBOR

2005-06-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

photograph by rehuxley via Flickr

All summer you have been
pulling in and out
of your nearby driveway,
your flat green car
burrowing in my dreams
like a slug.

You are tall and ordinary
unpacking groceries
from the trunk,
then producing the key
to your dark apartment
while I turned sixty
behind curtains.

All summer I have been
swallowing tea biscuits,
cupcakes, easy listening tunes
on the AM dial and
watching you, my nearest neighbor,
always driving away.

Did I ever tell you
about my husband?
I ask one morning
after you pull out with
a blond woman in your car.

He died in a high hospital room
looking out on the highway
where at night the cars
glow like moving stars.

Did I tell you how he
gave out watching them,
waiting for a crash,
an engine fire--something
to justify his burning?

All summer I have been
watching you, waiting for
the hottest night of the year
when you will open
all your doors and windows,
and I will catch
the strange rays of your TV
rising from the screen and
moving through the space between us
like cars, like meteors,
the mosaic of a common light.

(I wrote this poem on my 27th birthday; apparently I was feeling old.)

first appeared in Tendril
reprinted in the anthology, Yearbook of American Poetry

THE BURNING FACTORY

2005-06-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

As children, my sister and I watched our grandfather
grow senile. He would sniff the air
and ask if something was burning.
Our mother slapped us for laughing and said
he often remembered the factory fire
he'd witnessed at sixteen when he was
the youngest shoecoutter in the city.
I can still smell that flesh, that cooked meat,
he'd say, as we grimaced and pedalled away on our bikes.
After a while, he began to wake at night
thinking he heard those trapped workers,
but it always turned out to be a late driver,
tires moaning as the car turned a corner,
or a howling dog left out for the night.

None of us imagined my sister, the family beauty,
the one with the bright red laugh,
would be pulled into breakdown after breakdown
as an adult. No one predicted
she, too would sniff the air, conflagrations
more terrible than our grandfather's memories
searing the edges of her sleep.
Things seem okay for a year or two,
then she'll call, three thousand miles away,
the factory workers terror as it became clear
they would not escape the fire
cutting through the lines.

Each time it happens, I weep and shake
as if it were the first, but I'm never sure
if I cry for her, or just for the
ordinary days of our childhood, the sweaty closeness
of living in one city, in one house, that our family
has lost. As she stutters into the phone, I cry
for the day my mother gave me a perm
and I watched my sister's face like a mirror
as the curlers came out,
and for Sundays when all seven of us
climbed into the old Pontiac
and went for a ride. If things had gone well
for my father at work that week,
he would turn up the radio on the way home
and we'd all sing as loud as we could
while the orange sun spread out along the highway
like a distant and always benevolent fire.

first appeared in The American Poetry Review

MICHAEL

2005-06-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

Eighteen years in the same house
and I still drink my coffee
thick with cream
from the same blue cup;
my slippers scuff across the floor
as I migrate, cup in hand,
toward my morning desk.
I peer into the computer
as if it were a mirror or
the night sky or
a lake where someone
I loved very much
was drowned.

I say the drowning victim
wasn't me. I drink
my coffee thick with cream
from the same blue cup;
my slippers scuff across the floor
as I migrate, cup in hand
toward my morning desk.

Later the postman will come
with the daily mail: Michael.
Eighteen years ago, he was tall and blond.
Now he walks across
a field of buried pets
who played at guarding our lives
to reach the mailbox. His shoulders
slope and his eyes are pale when he
drops another day into the box.
More news of our extinction.

(A brand new poem. Yay!)

NAMING THE BONES

2005-06-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

Freshman year, you stood before the class
in a sky colored dress and sang out
the 22 parts of the skull without trepidation:
occipital, parietal, temporal, spenoid...

Smooth as a game show host,
you tilted your chin bravely and announced
the dangling man with rousing alliterative zeal:
mandibles, maxillars, malars, mastoids...

You ran your hands over long bones and short,
carressed secret hollows, poked at porous arcs;
slenderness you courted with abandon, rejoicing
at the pointy hip, swell of ribs beneath your shirt.

What were those strange and foreign names
to you anyway? Radius, ulna, carpus, metacarpus...
As remote as cities you would never see,
black and white photographs of orphans
on streets littered with despair. Only when

your friends began to die did angularity
begin to signal dread: Beautiful Karen,
the first girl in your class to grow breasts--she
painted butterflies on her scalp when the cranium

revealed its terrifying nuance. And then Richard,
a man so ordinary you were sure
that even death would take no notice of him.
Embracing in his airless room that last time,

all the sing-song lessons leaped to life:
Illium, ischium, scapula, sternum...
That was when you began to fear
the proximity of bones, the clavicle sharpening

itself above your heart, knobby patella gleaming
beneath jeans. What could you do but
arm yourself with flesh, swallowing milk and olive oil
as you resorted to the oldest trick

of the species? And to flinch in silence
as the bones were addressed out loud
by girls in sky blue dresses, too young to fear
the cold litany that belies frail identity:

Tibia, fibula, femur, metatarsus...

Photograph by Gustavo G.

first appeared in The Ontario Review

TAKE ME TO ALABALMA

2005-06-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

It’s two in the morning and after a twelve hour day,
James and I are washing dishes in the hotel kitchen,
the place so still that the clanging of the old machine becomes
percussive, vaguely uncertain, like the pulse
that underlies everything. For a long time we float in its echo.
Then the old bluesman, who’s supported a killer music habit
by washing dishes for nineteen years
sets a glass rack on its side and takes a seat.
You won’t believe where I was a minute ago,
he says. And though I’m too tired to ask,
I know he’s going to tell me anyway.
Alabama, he says. Alabama 1981. I resist a little longer,
then pull up my own rack, light a forbidden smoke:
Okay, so take me to Alabama.
Like all the dishwasher’s stories, this one begins with the moral.
Setting and character will come later,
but the first thing James wants me to know
is that some of the most talented people on earth
spend their whole lives playing dives--
nothing more than shacks--
giving it away without ambition or desire.
These people hear music in their sleep;
they dine on it, breathe it into every heart they enter.
Take the band I heard that night in ‘81. Some nothing town
in the middle of Alabama, thirty or forty people
crammed into one of those shacks,
and these guys gave up the real thing.
James says, temporarily forgetting the racks of dirty dishes
that surround us, the fatigue that beckons like deep water.
Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night,
or stop dead in this place, and I’m there in that shack--
a gin and tonic in my hand,
the light gone wavy with smoke and sound,
and that music--more real than anything I ever heard--
still snaking through my veins.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLUE STRIPED SHEETS

2005-06-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

You bought them the first week
after the divorce. Standing in line
at a now defunct department store,
you took a lesson in scaling back--
a cheap coffee pot in one hand,
twin sheets nesting
in the crook of an arm. Strange
how you remember it all so clearly--
those first nights lying on blue stripes
with your books scattered across the bed;
a sharp corner of Mme. Bovary
waking you with a jab to the ribs...
Now, nearly twenty years later,
you pull the blue striped sheets
from the back of a closet and use them
to haul leaves into the woods;
the polychrome colors of a new autumn
mix with old stains: blood,
a starry splotch of paint that brightened
a succession of rented lives. Of course,
there were lovers, too--
mostly forgettable--but one caught forever
in stripes of sunlit blue and white.
Now his memory mixes with the smell of earth,
with leaves so bright with death
you stand breathless in the woods
and watch them fall.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE NIGHT CLUB BURNED

2005-06-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

What remains in the memory
of the survivors
are not the bodies--
twenty-four of them
stacked like hewn oak.
What lingers is not
the sweet night air that revealed
its power to dupe and betray,
in one treacherous turn.
No, what the survivors
lived to remember most clearly
was a silver platform shoe--
heartbreaking and meretricious,
cheap and strangely immortal
abandoned only feet from the exit.
In and out of the dreams
of twenty-five years
that flash of silver has appeared--
the unforgettable moment
when a girl was forced to shed
name and expectation
as she faced the startling night:
unshod, unadorned,
forever unknown.

BOB, THE MINER'S SON

2005-06-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

Until recently, I never understood your friend Bob,
a bright enough guy, but chronically unemployed,
living with his mother at forty-two.
I never understood that somewhere
in the center of their sagging duplex--
beneath stacks of unread magazines, heaped laundry--
behind the dazed eyes of the actors who keep Bob company
on a black and white Zenith in the basement,
lost in the monologues he holds in the dark,
long rants about cosmology, fly fishing, faith,
the father who died of black lung
twenty-five ago still lingers:

In this room, Bob still hears the wind that
slashed through the house one November day.
It was the only time any one could remember
the old man losing his temper--
four kids streaking through the house,
and him exhausted on the couch, sputtering curses
no one thought he knew.

Here beneath the rack of guns with which
he taught his sons to kill only what they could use,
the cough began slowly, insidiously, until
it filled the house, spilling into past and future
with its implacable demand.

Somewhere in the center of this house--
in the cloudy basement where Bob blinks at the women
on MTV, dazzled by the whir and flash
of distant laughter, or in an attic
so cluttered with the litter of ancient preoccupations
it will never be sorted out,
a patient man still struggles for breath
the way he did on their final hunting trip.
Forced to stay behind in camp,
he let his son track the last deer.

Somewhere in the center of an ordinary house
where nothing seems to change,
the quiet of a day in the woods
continues to transfigure your friend Bob:
the shadows, the river, the perfect stillness
of the deer he killed that day--
and his father’s weak smile
when he dragged it back to camp.
It was not the last smile,
nor the last startled deer that Bob
would strap to the roof of his rusted Ford--
just the only one that matters.

NINETEEN YEARS AFTER THE AFFAIR

2005-06-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

She remembers that he drank only the blackest beer
and tipped with abandon; she could still pick out
the bomber jacket he found at the dump
and wore for a season, or his Volkswagen bug--
bee yellow, its trunk secured with a piece of rope.

In nineteen years she has never quite freed herself
from the vulnerability at the nape of his neck
after a haircut, or the drowsy afternoons
in a Guatemalan hammock that hung inside his house.
Though lost in the many moves that followed,
she remembers the books he lent her--Bellow and Kafka--
his reckless underlinings and exclamation points
more vivid to her than symbol or plot.

In dreams, she occasionally runs into
the string of wild roommates
who traipsed through his rented farmhouse
that year: the pacifist who tried to seduce her
while he was away, a graceful skier jailed
for writing bad checks--all look remarkably well.

Sometimes she wonders if he has forgotten
the snow that year, or the way
everything between them was defined
by glacial temperatures--
heat blowing on their faces in the car
when they sat in his driveway till morning,
a frost that penetrated his bedroom window
the first time she wrote her name there.

One morning toward the end of winter
he pointed to a notebook that sat on his desk.
The night before he had been up till three writing.
About her. Too shy or too perversely wise (which was it?)
she never asked to read his words.
Instead, while silence grew as deep as snow,
she let the hour pass, the season end,
the lease to the farmhouse expire.

Nineteen winters, and that unforgettable cold,
a drift of pristine snow, have followed her,
but the notebook remains as it was
on his long abandoned desk:
unopened, unread, the story
of a life she never dared to claim.

GLASS

2005-06-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make a life of strong poems,
a play that was my own.
But lifting my pen I find
my father writes with my left hand,
my mother with my right.
Always it is the same story--
Father nodding off in the armchair,
his disappointments falling into my poems
like glass,
and Mother knitting the same afghan,
the same sweater for thirty years
while we shiver in the next room.
It is the same for me.
When winter comes, I zip my oldest son
into a deep blue snowsuit and open
the storm door for him.
Disappearing like a stain on snow,
he heads for the icy hill where
sleds shriek downward with such speed
that the trees blur, the sky rocks overhead,
and for a moment he flies free
of my cautious voice,
the nest of worry and love
that waits for him at the bottom.

first appeared in Poet Lore

CAT LADY

2005-06-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

That was what we called you behind your back
when you huddled in the corner with a smoke
muttering about treacheries on the job,
ancient perfidies we would never understand.
At the end of a shift, we rushed home to families, lovers,
or the benevolence of a chosen solitude
while you walked six miles to the vacant lot
where a pack of feral strays waited for the scraps
you tossed into twilight. You hoarded your story
like the last match in a black tunnel. All we knew
was that you had left husband and children
20 years earlier--for fated love it was presumed--
though no one knew you well enough to ask.
In the end, it didn’t matter: you were alone in a rented room,
cancer insolently devouring your flame.
Still you remained proud--allowing no visitors
into your barren quarters, spurning our offers of help,
those bland ambiguous kindnesses.The last time I saw you,
you sat on the stairs in a dreary hallway
the planes of your face sharpened by thinning light,
as you guarded the door to your room,
your story, your vagrant heart to the end.

first appeared in Tar River Poetry

A SIMPLE LUNCH

2005-06-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

Entering the dining room,
she is already set apart.
Because she is alone, a nun
lost inside the habit of another age.
Because she carries a book of poems
for company--Czeslaw Milosz this time, the earthy scents of Poland and Berkeley
already on her fingers.

Because she longs for God above all else,
for a love that orders the universe, that makes
the broccoli green, the wine clear, her heart full:
she further estranges herself by stopping
to pray
right here among the clinking glasses,
the voices, doors opened and closed
to keep out the wind.

Because she knows that none of this is hers:
not the poems, not the brightness
of the dining room,
or the almost Biblical nourishment,
the waiter sets before her--
a piece of fish, wine, a hard bread,
cold greens in vinegar--
No, not even the loneliness that drives her
to this noisy place is hers;
or the wind that sweeps in,
finding her at a table near the door--
Because of all this, she
folds her hands the way they taught her as a child
and begs her simple food:
gratitude, mercy, a knowledge
of the secrets her God so resolutely keeps.

HISTORY

2005-06-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

Today, on my way home from the bank,
I stopped at Craigville beach
where my dog scatters the gulls
like so much ash as she races
across sand streaked with snow.
Tugged along the coast,
I walked with purpose
and a kind of greed--as if
toward some point on the horizon where
the alternating raptures and
rapacious despairs
that drive and torment my days
would finally cease.
This is the beach where the young
gather in summer,
and a thousand inadequate
radios flood the coast
with the music and curse,
the brilliance and ruin
that is desire.
But it is all emptiness
now, reduced to elemental
blue and white.
Ignoring the cold at my cheek,
the insistent demands
that waited for me elsewhere,
I walked until my limbs ached and
my eyes began to sting.
Someday, this flash of gulls
we’re following
will be erased; and with them,
History, that russet tide
of selfishness and grace.
Someday the line
between blue and white
will erode
and there will be no one left
to stand on this promontory
and weep for the little
we have learned,
or the vastness of all
we still don’t understand.

TRURO, age 8

2005-05-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

That summer I learned to like
buttered clams with tough necks
& sand in their bellies.
Sandbars were everywhere,
uninhabited towns rising out of the sea
where my breath was
the native language,
waves & wind its translators.
On the beach
my mother slept in a backless
bathing suit.
Each day her laughter
like her skin,
grew more golden.
Sometimes, drunk on rye whiskey,
my father would steal a lobster
from a fisherman's trap.
Angry & red, those lobsters still
surface in my memory,
floating in the safe confines
of the bathtub
where I first discovered them.

How soon it all was over &
we had to go back
to our factory town--the smoke
a curling lobster claw
over our huose.
I went to school;
my mother sliped back
into her white body,
& my father took a second job
at the egg auction.
It was his job to take the ax
to chickens with soft
white feathers & hard eyes.

Chickens, chickens!
I remember you headless,
never picking up your cue
to lie down & play dead--
but running, running
toward me--your life
a red geyser
melting down
th clear colors of summer.

first appeared in Thirteenth Moon

SILVER MAPLE

2005-05-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Only when it's too late
do you realize
you never loved your house enough--
never loved its cluttered corners, its
places for sleeping and for
dreaming wide awake; you
never properly examined its cupboards,
the old teacups and new paper
someone left for you
to comfort and explain yourself.

Only when you first glimpse
the outskirts of your exile
do you understand
you never loved your basement
the way you should have,
never appreciated
that underworld of moldy castoffs
you saved for decades
hoarding them for the life
you live in secret.

Only when you are reduced
to wearing slippers day and night
do you realize
you never paid proper homage
to your shoes--
the skinny dancing shoes
with straps around the ankles
and the ordinary working browns,
that tapped out the story of your life
as recklessly as a jazz drummer.

Only when it’s too late
do you realize
that you have failed
the silver maple outside your door;
on most days,
you walked past it,
seeing only surfaces
blind to the luminous network of veins
that underlies everything.

BLUE ANGEL

2005-05-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Marlena, the bartender calls herself,
you know--like the actress,
though the regulars are quick to say
she’s really plain Marlene.
Unfazed, she slips the names
of the star’s old films
into the still blue air
while we sample her inebriants.
Poor bitch never got over it
when her knees began to sag,
Marlena says,
shaking her head in secret sorrow,
as she slyly sips vodka
from a Perrier bottle.
She thought those gammes
were hers to keep--
as white and solid as marble.
In her wallet, Marlena
carries her own snapshot
of impermanence--
herself at twenty-three.
Not a bad looking broad, was I?
she says, passing around her former self
like a gracious hostess,
before she tucks it back inside
its plastic sleeve.
With a little prodding, she’ll tell you
about the lovers she had,
names and stories as neatly cataloged
as Dietrich’s films,
and how she can tell in five minutes
of banal talk
how a man would be in bed.
Little things give it away, Marlena confides
pressing exhausted breasts
against the bar--
the way he holds a cigarette,
for instance, the range
and timbre of his laugh...
But at fifty-eight, Marlena’s given
up on men, forgotten all
those dazzling movies about flight.
What she likes now, she says,
is a cold beer and a game of Keno,
a chance to win
at something you can keep.

TORNADOES KILL 8 IN ARKANSAS AND TENNESSEE

2005-05-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

A photograph taken from the air shows us
what remains.
It is a Jackson Pollock, a confusion of color
on a grey-brown background.
But somewhere in it,
is everything we know of the world:
houses, trucks, roads, people.
And there beneath the familiar--
the chaos
that finds us behind our locked doors,
that tracks us
to the rooms where we lie reading,
that pulls us
from lives we thought we were leading,
and flings us out like broken sticks
into this aerial view
of vast and random darkness.

first appeared in The Ontario Review

SUMMIT HILL

2005-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

It always seems to be winter
when we come back here, miles
of trees glittering with ice,
cornfields flooded white--
and somewhere in the center,
a lonely figure in a snowmobile,
lost inside its mechanical hum.
Going back to the old mining town
that clusters at the top of the hill
is a process of rising, climbing,
ascending into a past as real
and unyielding as these mountains.
And just as unknowable.
Less than a century ago, my husband’s
grandparents came here from
Poland and Slovakia; they fitted themselves
to this sharp landscape.
Here they would go down into
the earth, and draw up an existence
we’ve grown too cossetted
to imagine. Here they would
spend the rest of their lives--
fifty or seventy-five
winters like this one, traveling
a road cut through mountain,
peering through black trees
into rough cut gorges, cold streams,
woods too deep
and impenetrable to fathom.

First appeared in The Ontario Review

THE EMPTY ROOM

2005-05-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

You were no different
from anyone else
leaving home at eighteen;
your bag was small,
and there was much
you could not take.
The small statue
of the Virgin Mary
for instance, a gift
accepted carelessly on some
long forgotten feast day
would be left behind.
Too superstitious to
throw her away,
you relegated her to
a spot on the bureau
where she presided over
a closet full of dated clothes,
the bed you slept in
for a few restless summers
then abandoned for good.

Our Lady of Sorrows.
Our Lady of Stillness.
Our Lady of the Empty Room.

It is a lifetime before
you think of her again,
dream the weight
of that statue in your hand,
the calm that flowed
from her open stance.
By then your room
has been painted clean
a dozen times; the statue
has gone the way of all
we think we own.
But in your best moments,
you stop flailing
and open your arms
like she did.
In your best moments,
you dream you have become her:

You are the waiting.
You are the stillness.
You are the empty room.

.

BRAZILIAN MUSIC

2005-05-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

He works two jobs washing dishes,
scraping away the excess of
other people’s appetites. Like most of us,
he finds his hours are
not what he expected. If he were a younger man...
if his English were better...well, then, perhaps--
But like the ghostly revelers he knows only
from what they leave behind,
he does his best to sweeten what remains.
If you ask him how he traverses
the length and tedium of his days,
he points to a tape player
perched precariously above his head.
One touch of his finger and
the dish room spins with tropicalia,
Bahia percussion, strains of Samba.
For each day of the week, a new voice
transforms the clatter of spoons,
the rhythm of hands
into another form of fusion,
as a man moves with private effulgence
through a life of broken plates,
and dreams of home--
synchretist of silver, glass and drum,
of masked disappointment,
and the fierce, exultant song
minimum wage can never buy.

AT THIRTY-SEVEN

2005-05-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

I wake up longing for the sleek brown boots
I had in my twenties,
their suede as soft as baby seals
their heels so high I listed forward
like an unstable tower.

Balancing on those narrow peaks,
I swayed through town in a pair of jeans
sure that I could take what I wanted,
sure that nothing
would be taken from me.

Okay, the truth is I only pulled out
those silly boots a few times.
But how I miss knowing they were there
in the back of the closet
ready to stomp, to dance--

huddling together in the dark,
mute and hungry as forever.

FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

2005-05-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

From somewhere else, the child
invents herself, coiled inside
my son’s girlfriend. Though I do not
know her, still I plan.
I buy a crib, some fleecy clothes;
I hear her say my name.
Could I really be Nana now--
with black lace beneath my jeans?
I see my grandmother stalled
before the mirror,
touching her snowy perm.
Who is that? she asked.
And what’s become of my long braid?

But though the child
brings news of my extinction
etched on her furled palms,
I wash her clothes to soften them;
I hang them on the line
charging them with light and air.

Later, in secret, I keep watch
for the fairy tale crone
who hides in the mirror,
the one who follows
until it’s time to lead,
singing in the background
on the way to somewhere else.

BERNADETTE AND LAYLA

2005-05-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

Two women in their forties,
they frequented the same clubs
we did, eyed up
the hard jawed men
we dreamed we might love.
Ruthless with youth,
we joked about the possibility
of ending up like them: loveless,
overpainted, still cruising
when weariness had clawed its name
on our faces, driven us
to lurid hair tones.
Layla, with her snakelike body
weighty breasts,
lived on the dance floor,
not caring if she
danced alone or with
some boorish stranger
intent on a nameless piece.
But Bernadette slumped over her
drink and smoke like
a private fire
and waited for last call,
her dismal perm a dark halo
around her head.
We saw them as extras
in a film about us,
never guessing how soon
the shadows of their demise
would appear in our own glasses,
how soon we would be
forced to choose
between Bernadette’s bleary resignation
and Layla’s brazen spin
against the tumbling dark.

first appeared in The Ontario Review

MY BABY'S SO UGLY

2005-05-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

We didn’t want fine service,
candle lit tables,
the murmur of literate talk
about politics or sex building
like steam against the windows.
No, after a shift,
the waitresses from the country club
yearned for dives--places like
Bud’s Country Lounge where
you waited half an hour for a beer
while the wall-eyed bartender
chatted up a girl with a flamboyant chest
straining against hers tube top--her heart,
red and mysterious as a pomegranate,
thumping brilliantly behind it.
We lived for nights like the one
when a drunken lead singer
wearing a jock strap on his head
sang “My Baby’s so Ugly”
with such irresistible heat
that sixty-five year old Lucy
climbed onto a table and peeled off
vest, tie, tuxedo shirt.
Then, gyrating so recklessly
we were sure the table would give way,
she flung them to the crowd
shedding both time and torpor
in one defiant rhumba.

Saint Colman's

2005-05-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

A large church on a city street--
cavernous, impersonal.
But here my life began
in every way that matters.
Here I made up my first story
at age seven. With little Joeen
who had escaped
her grandmother’s stiff hand
for the third time in a week
crouching beneath the pew,
I told Father Cooney
the runaway was my sister.
and that a benevolent mother
would come for us soon.
I lied with such passion and ease
that when Joeen
reached up her sweaty hand
I felt the blood
that ran between us
trickling into my palm.
Here at age thirteen,
I fell in love with the back
of Brian Doyle’s head--
so close I could see the tracks
his comb left in shining red hair,
so near I got high
on his drug store Canoe.
When the church was empty,
I came alone and set a blaze of
candles, kneeling
before a woman swathed in sky
and wondering
what to do with my life.
This is the church I ran away from
at sixteen, smoking cigarettes
and gulping Cokes
in the cemetery across the street
when I was supposed to be at CCD,
kissing a boy for the first time
while the dead kept silent witness,
and Sister marked me absent.
A large church on a city street--
cavernous, half-empty now,
but I have spent my life
running away and coming back,
trapped between the lures of that night
among the headstones and
the unchanging gaze
of a woman in blue.

ON CATCHING MY HUSBAND WITH A CIGARETTE AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ABSTINENCE

2005-05-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

It is not the smoke that
coils around your head
in the garage where you’ve
retreated with coffee and theTimes
for an early morning butt
that so startles me.
No, it is merely your expression--
the tacit admission
we seldom dare to make
That there is always
a life we hold in secret--
unknown, ungovernable,
fiercely unpossessed.

first appeared in The Sun

THE ONE PLACE

2005-05-11T05:36:00.000-07:00

This is the one place
you can never go:
Back to the old addresses
you thought were your own,
the numbers, street names you
still recite by heart.
Glistening with detail,
they taunt you with false solidity.
But when you approach
the familiar doorways
the locks have been changed
to keep you out.
And when you steal inside,
the clothes in the closet, your clothes,
are fitted to another body,
the face in the mirror
is unrecognizable.
Then, deep in the night,
driven by an irresistible desire
to see the orange moon
that once flamed
outside your window
you rise and begin to dress.
But you stumble
by the foot of the bed,
forgetting that was where
you used to leave
the black sturdy boots
in which you once tramped heedlessly
through a world
that no longer exists.

QUESTIONS FOR SISTER DEATH

2005-05-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

FOR D.F.W.

All praise be yours, Sister Death, from whom no mortal can escape
--St. Francis of Assisi

In the great stillness that follows you,
we come and pick through what was left behind.
Artifacts from a civilization of one,
they are studied for meaning: the books
she used to explain the world,
kitchen utensils and honorary degrees
jammed in boxes--
all rendered useless by your touch.

Look at this! we cry, ablaze with memory.
The Magic Flute, her favorite opera!
We seize the record that has become
obsolete in a world of CDs. Still we listen
as we sift through the photographs that are
hopelessly out of order now--
time’s predictable sequences blurred.
Here college graduation is followed
by a three year old’s wary smile;
former colleagues are trapped
in endless celebrations no one remembers.
Do they know how valiant they are
lifting their yellow overexposed hands in a toast, time spilling from their glasses? Do we?

And always in some unseen corner:
You, the hidden note in the opera,
lingerer at every party,
silent and common as dust.
We search the photographs
for a glimpse of your grinning mug
buried among the crowd shots:
Are you the tyrannical sibling
who always gets her way,
the neighborhood bully who takes down
the strongest among us
without a contest? Or are you
what she believed you to be:
the faith she staked her last breath upon,
a longed for angel whose benevolent hand
has unleashed the stars from their rigid path
and made this empty room sing?

THROUGH THE WINDOW

2005-05-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

She was a neighbor who stayed
in the house most of the time,
her hair trained into innocuous waves,
a crest of blush on both cheeks.
The first big news we heard of her
was that she had a brain tumor. Inoperable.
Through the window, we watched
her husband mucking through the streets
in the rain and dark, head down, skidding on the slick November leaves
that had appeared overnight.

But by spring, there was hope: The patient, emerging on her husband’s
arm, blinked back the sunshine.
Buoyant in a turban, she announced she
should be dead, but was not!
We watched her with smiles that
ached across our teeth,
as she ambled bravely through
his carefully cultivated garden, craning
to take it all in: the blinding yellow forsythia
overwhelming scent of lilac. It was Christmas morning when they came for her the last time the red lights of the ambulance
winking in garish festivity, the hour
so raw we had to switch on lights
to find the tree. But already
the kids were ferreting beneath it, desperate for something wonderful.
Through the window,
I watched, as they lifted her
above the snow and dark while . in the background, the kids shrieked
at what they’d found.
.
He missed her like crazy,
the husband told anyone
who would listen. And from
the warmth and noise of our house,
we speculated on his loneliness often.
Vivaldi soaring in the background, the kids
yelping for dinner, we poured some Merlot
and asked each other:
What would it be like?
But more unexpected than death,
was the new woman
who appeared through the window
with unseemly haste,
moving in like our generation did it.
What about the wife who
stayed in the house all those years?
I asked my husband one day, a new anger seeping through our house
like dark wine on the carpet. What about the woman who pressed the shirts, who polished the furniture and
forced her hair into those tortuous curls?
What about her?

Drowning in shadows,
I drifted to the window again,
waiting for the answers to appear
etched in the clear,
readable print kids make when
they write their names on frost.
Was her life really obliterated as easily
as their frozen words? Banished like those long forgotten forsythia?
And if it was, where did that leave us,
the mute and hungry audience?
Who would we watch, pity, grieve for
now that she was gone? Who would bear our darkness
now that she had given us the slip-- Now that her faithless husband
had so blithely refused it?

first appeared in Tampa Review

SMOKERS

2005-05-04T17:54:00.000-07:00

Smokers leave the best tips--
so says my friend Mary
who’s spent ten years balancing trays
and studying the impulses of men.
And what’s more they never
complain about the food;
they don’t send back the escargot;
the red meat is never too bloody
for their taste.
While the prudent huddle
in the smoke free section
inhaling caution in gulps,
the smokers signal Mary for
another round of martinis
scattering ash
with every flick of the wrist.
Heedless of the mountain
of grey dust they have left
in their wake,
the darkness simmering in
their lungs,
they have given up trying to hoard
their days, attempting
to number their breaths.
And in the end,
they open their wallets freely
and wink at my friend Mary,
as they amble into the darkness
leaving behind a starkly empty table,
the ash
of their reckless generosity.

first appeared in Gulf Coast

THE OCEANVIEW

2005-05-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Of all the places you never visited,
this is the one you miss most:
a third rate motel with salt-scraped paint
less than a mile from home.
Here you never stole a smoke in the bathroom
while the face of a passionate traitor
took shape in the mirror.
Here you never agreed to meet the man
who taught you longing
could become a form of madness.
This is the place where you
never peeled back the cotton spread,
and invited the ravenous world inside:
reckless sea, smear of purple sky,
those noisy gulls who linger in the parking lot,
their hunger never appeased.
Sure, you thought about it a few times,
but something--duty? fear?
the vestige of childhood’s cross
marking forehead, heart, lips--
always kept you back. Now when you
pedal past the Oceanview on your bike,
it is closed for the season.
And when you peer through the window,
hoping for a furtive glimpse
at the life you never lived,
the mirror is empty of everything
but this biting winter morning;
the encroaching sand
sharp as glass in your eye.
Far too many times, you said no.

DOROTHY AND MARIE IN THE BUICK

2005-05-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Only a few months since
they dressed these old teachers
for burial, two plain wrens
in ordinary brown;
first Marie, then Dorothy,
their opulent white hair
glowing on pink satin.
A few months
and already they have learned
the wily tricks of the dead.
Careful to keep their distance,
they lose themselves
in crowd scenes. Hiding
behind other people’s eyes, they
duck into luncheonettes, disappear
behind menus. And when
I search the booths
for the bright flame of their faces,
that moment of recognition,
I am greeted only with empty stares:
No one here knows who I am.
Then this afternoon
on the way home from work,
the ennui and fleeting despair that
sometimes hit around 4 P.M.,
trailing me like a cloud of exhaust,
I thought I spotted
their fifteen year old Buick. Sure,
the color was wrong--
it should have been grey, not blue.
But it was the same conspicuous ark
no one drives anymore.
Nobody but hard-up teenagers and
old women like Dorothy and Marie.
Eyes on the Buick, I’m thinking
they could have afforded more--
a van for Dorothy’s wheel chair,
a jeep in which adventurous Marie
might have cruised the beach.
But years before I was born,
they committed themselves
to simplicity, sacrifice,
ideals as remote and elusive
as the hulking eight cylinder
I’m following with my heart.

first appeared in Potomac Review

A WHITE SHIRT

2005-04-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

Later it will hang in a dark closet
beside your blue suit. When you
wear it, it will stand between
the lies you tell the world
and your heart.
But now, dangling on the line,
autumn’s slow conflagration
sparking behind it,
it has shaken off your claims
of ownership.
Startled with sun,
the wind captured in one swollen sleeve,
it is the purest thing on the landscape;
it is the Holy Ghost
come out to stir the flames.

First appeared in The Tampa Review

YOUR WAITRESS

2005-04-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

While dreaming a poem about autumn
your waitress thoughtlessly poured
water in your coffee cup,
splashed chowder on your suit.
So sorry and excuse me but
in case you haven’t heard
there’s a high wind in the dining room,
a half-moon in the pie;
there’s a blaze in the crystal,
and wild weather in your eyes.
I know you wanted your meat rare,
some extra sour cream,
but just outside the window, trees
are bleeding leaves;
the sunflowers wear mourning;
there’s desolation at the tables
and tumult in the air;
an anarchy of color
threatens stability everywhere.
I know you wanted your tea hot
and your check promptly tallied;
but in case you haven’t seen,
your waitress has unloosed her hair,
has given up her tray
and absconded with her pen in hand
to catch the world that’s burning.

first appeared in Nimrod International Journal

MARY, CIRCA 1945

2005-04-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

All she wanted was a cup of tea made
just the way she liked it: neither weak,
nor steeped to bitter black on the cold stove...
A cup of tea she would have fixed herself
if she were able,
A cup like the one she made every afternoon,
brewing it in the last of her wedding china,
a small and delicate cup,
festooned with a single yellow rose.
Too late she realized this was the best hour
of her day: the hour when
she huddled over her steaming cup
and worked on her scrapbooks, clipping bits
from Life or the Saturday Evening Post,
and pasting them beside
the photographs and exotic souvenirs
her sons sent from the front.

If only she had understood
what happiness was--
sipping on the perfect cup of tea
neither syrupy nor bland with too much milk,
perhaps nibbling a biscuit from a plate,
as she kept watch for the postman
whose step crunched the walkway
at precisely three--the possibility
of a letter pulling her to the window
with the lightness of a girl.
That such letters were terse and rare
only increased their price.
Folding and unfolding the wispy sheets, she read them
until she felt the texture of the words,
the way she had once felt the boys’ skin
pressing into hers
when they were small and needy.

But in the end, she was reduced to this--
stranded in her grey bed and crying
for a simple cup of tea
like the children once cried for milk.
The sons who came home were strangers .
Distracted by money and drink
and memories they could tell to no one--
they rushed in,
smelling of cold air and salt and young women
with flushed faces, cellophane bright mouths.
Always in a hurry,
they promised to fix her tea,
but forgot to light the kettle
or left it cooling on the stove,
as a succession of doors
slammed behind them.

How could she have known that
throughout her long vigil,
she was the one who was in danger?
That sipping her tea, arranging the scrapbooks
until they told the story precisely,
she was the one who had been marked out,
betrayed, the cells of her body
embarking on their own high drama?

And now, decades too late,
we come loping up her walkway;
we push past the heavy gate, the door
with its blistered paint, its faded number.
Separated by nothing but the perversity of time,
we climb the stairs to her room and
pull back the grey sheets,
our mouths full of her name: Mary.
Retracing the arc of an ordinary life,
we stand at the foot of the stairs,
as if we still expect her to appear
in her thin nightgown, a little weak,
but pleased to see us,
dying for a cup of tea

Come to the kitchen, Mary, come!
Together we will sit at the table and watch
the street where your heart lifted
at the sight of the mailman.
Together we will keep watch.
You can show us your scrap books,
the letters folded in thin blue packets,
a war made tractable by your hand.
Though surely late, we’re here to read
the story no one wanted; we’ve come
to bring you the perfect cup of tea,
one that is neither too weak,
nor steeped to bitter black on the cold stove...

THE CHICKEN MAN

2005-04-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

When I die, I want a funeral
like the Chicken Man had this week
in New Orleans. For once,
let them bury a shy writer
like they bury voodoo priests--
with gin splashed on my old suit and
two white horses to drag me
in my sorry box
through streets exalted
by sweat and neon.
May enough people know me
for my eccentricity or for my songs
that a few will join
in the ecstatic mourning
when the man with the black umbrella
steps forth to lead my parade.
Let the the dirge be short and
the jazz blow
till the sidewalks cough up steam
and every shoulder shimmies.
If someone steps up
to speak of me, make sure they say
that like the Chicken man,
I was a poet,
fated to walk through life
in a black top hat
with a monkey skull in one fist,
a staff
topped with a plastic human hand
in the other,
and that when I had light,
I passed out candles
to the multitude
who clamor
for blessings on the street.

First appeared in Brilliant Corners