Post by mfwilkie on Jan 30, 2008 17:37:14 GMT -5
Draft
I
Skinless. That’s how I feel.
Dismembered of all but heart—
flesh reduced to bone
to an abstract of circular thinking: the ifs
of grief, raw, internally exposed.
II
Morning sits outside the door, outside
each window, but I ignore it. Exhaustion
has more appeal.
On the fifth anniversary of your death/Revision
what you left me with came up with the sun—
the lyric of you that still resonates in me,
and such a private song can't be explained
it has to be sung with all of love's clichés
and eccentricities. That we were riffs through
this very private morning.
to any one who will listen
to a smile; my heart will wrestle my mind for
tears, but the strength of what moved with ease
between us will win the day, and those to follow.
That we were riffs through the privacy early morning.
~~
PBP#88
Lost: the words we used to watch us through the night.
Found: inflamed insomnia, and a naked hand that screams
into the mouth of a deaf page.
~~
Self-Portrait/first revision
First revision:
I suffer from a belief in possibilities.
Scratch that. I admit to wild imaginings,
to wearing socks in arguable relationship—
today's chili pepper confronts the crimson tide.
I'll even admit to soothing the blues while birds,
perched on pleached branchings, unwind morning
in languages I haven't yet mastered (though
my enthusiastic stab at Cardinal-speak
has been known to ruffle a few male feathers.
And I like being on the warm side of windows
when the frenzy of snow becomes a study
in Dervish dance techniques one night then
settles itself in a Currier & Ives-eye and mind-full,
fit to print, the next. These are moments
when I weigh life on both sides of the glass.
I've hung the ocean on my ceiling with no fear
of drowning or of time—my hand holds
a long life line.
Death
strikes, and your heart cries out for a mercy,
begging the inevitable to let the years pass
as planned, to let love have its voice, its eye-
to-eye, hand to cheek affirmations of intimacy.
That everything happens for a reason is not
something a heart without its purpose finds
easy to believe.
Army and Navy
He has an easy look about him
as he sleeps; calm returns
as thoughts of surgery, of cures,
are swept away with rest he needs.
I check love's breathing and the color
of his skin—I touch his toes.
He'll turn and reach if I move
my hand away—but I stay near
so fear won't find my sailor's dreams.
My breathing slows and matches his,
and for a while, I let his rest
become my own.
Paper Bag Poem #77
Cloud-blurred blue. I see this sky.
See its cumulus burden forced on by
hidden winds. I'm sitting in a chair
inside a room and find this sky.
The chair is brown, smells of new.
Inside this room, inside the music
of a rainy afternoon, I find this sky,
and other things. (imaginings)
Once a Wife
Every bleem is a story,
every bitchwork another blather
requiring the element of chocolate
to stem the flow of broken-hearted
blood. I order a potable ton.
In my mind, images—
a muddy market square,
a gazelle, and a horse, both
in white linen, both waning,
both trying not to sour from
the heat of the play.
It’s the third day of fermentation
and my tongue has gone numb
with strange saliva, my vision fixed
on a patch of blue grass extending arms
without hands. The wind has gone quiet.
The clock is confused, lost is the
eye of innocence.
And everyone expects Sunday dinner
will be the same, eventually, but you.
...lost is the last ounce of innocence I possessed. (?)
I Am A Woman In The Prime of Life*
Riding the black express from heaven to hell
(the sleepless night outstaring me)
then the long sunlight lying on the sea,
I, between yew and lily, in resignation,
swam only in familiar depths (until)
the leaves that shifted overhead all summer
stopped singing a whole year.
A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling,
meandering into air— I sit burning cigarettes
(while) the future reconnoiters in dirty boots.
What is it, if not you?
* A Cento from the Collectd Early Poems 1950-1970
by Adreienne Rich
~
A Page in My Handbook
Just like that, the wind lost its breath.
The natural vibrato of the ocean's waves
became an elegy, and only the light from
midnight stars pulsed as his heart slipped away.
In the century of quiet that cradled widowhood,
they understood that wisdom comes of beggary.*
* from "The Seven Sages" by W.B. Yeats
~
The night was
four wet moons
around a red magnolia.
And silence
to drive home with,
and to.
The lovers of Zeus, these moons,
Not Galileo Galilei's moons.
I feel that far away from everything.
~
Billy Collins and the "C" Word
This is not a message for Garcia—
it is a mirage, curves and angles
exposed. There is a window, but
no glass— and I have nothing to wear
but a bag of city rags over the shakes
from his death, the ruination of desire.
Strings of Haiku for Piano fall in a
background of sedentary noise.
~
Melancholia
the shape of sound
around my ankles-
rain to ground
~
Thursday's Child Has Far To Go
Sometimes, the first few seconds of stir
come ignorant of the past, and ego reaches for
the familiar, for a presence, the genuineness
of his arm...
This is an admission of superior loneliness—
How it rises, how it stinks.
~
Untitled
four thousand pieces
of abstract oragami
equal one bad cold
cold, and boxed, and wondering
how to appreciate the word widow
in a numb-struck life
life that is cold at night
cold in the light—
cold as an abstract melody
~~
Blue Moon Dancing
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
(from Light breaks where no sun shines by Dylan Thomas)
I've decided to end this life,
drink enough memory down
to drown the acid-reality of loss—
put an end to its worm-like ache;
his death has taken hold of my bones
and every muscle that I own;
my thoughts can't turn a corner
without running into a ghost
only I can feel. So, I mean
to swig enough intoxicating imagery to balance
the threat of imbalance in living the rest of my life
without the love of my life. Habits have become
nightmares—the idea of rest
is out of reach, and laughable.
Baudelaire was right—
I need to drown myself in the vintage
seasons that slipped their arms around us
and stay drunk until I'm sober enough
for this new face.
Residuum
My feet are moving against the snow,
each step an attempt to distance
myself from the fire in my bones.
But the air’s not cold enough-
the pain, not old enough...
~
An Electric Arc
Those hot last days,
the end of our winter,
we talked in secrets,
the way lovers do,
breathing close, touching,
always touching...
even with our eyes.
~
Stuttering
I should be asleep, but a leaf of memoir,
pearled with someone else's sorrow, seeded
a table from my past—a wound brought
forward to an oval, oaken altar set with
shaky hands and one stone-cold cup
of tea; one banded hand and a single
cup of tea gone cold. The hands belong
to me. I'm watching a ritual drowning, a
rite of passage, the settling of concious
widowhood on a banded hand gripped
by a single cup of cold tea, one banded
hand, one ice-cold cup of tea, one hand
holding whispers and no one to touch.
~
Freeze frame_All Around the House
a band of pressure forces
more inches of white on
white.
The white won't get whiter,
but it will get taller.
Stained glass lilies wait out
this abstraction in a window
used for praying.
~
Paper Bag Poem # 43
a.m. marginalia from the hill:
Navaho impressions of morning
taken with ceremony—
the myth of becoming
will not stand still to coddell
the end of a dream.
I've become Changing Woman,
and tonight, with the wind,
I will sing down the moon—
end this day to begin.
~
Freeze Frame_Salisbury, MA
A Sunday Night Sonnet
Jan 14, 2008, 2:22am
No stars tonight. No moon.
Sea and sky, one shade of endless?
Maybe.
A wall?
Maybe.
Whatever
sounds like a nightmare
on its way to interrupt someone's genteel dream.
At the edge of high tide
turning—
a wash of foam,
a forgotten light.
Haphazard tatting on a pillow case.
Maybe.
~
Untitled
The mood in this new hour bears the weight
of stone, of walls within walls within walls.
Reason has come to deal—with the quality
of endings, with tomorrow beginning alone—
where quiet is time's only grace, where the lyric
cannot breach the element of pain and deny it
its place, its pounds of sorrow, its heart of grief.
This is the moment within when life faces death,
and decides.
~
sedoka
#1
splendor on splendor
against the sunset—
grass shivers
in the soft turf
under the apple trees
endings
#2
sundown comes
to rest the day—
an appointment never broken
loons hush
one after another
my heart pretends to sleep
~
An Epistle on Three Post Cards to Daithi
I
Ten geese and a quarrelsome crow for A.M. tea!
The sojourners from Canada stayed long enough
for toast, but the neighbor-crow, a maple away,
flew off when I started to read above the murmur
of energetic leaves. Critic!
Chasing papers now...
II
My thoughts on your thoughts on the science
of words sans spirit is sameness, a mill for still
life paintings scratched on parchment; silence
followed by internal yearning.
We walk around assembled art– the thief
who needs a hundred thousand words to lift a stone
when the honest movement of a hand to memory
without attemptive imitation would do the reader nicely–
III
Life ripples. Do you need the metaphor?
So tell, me (if you know) how we lift ourselves over
thresholds without communicating feeling? Am I
so old school that old school moves me most?
Enough! Enough! Enough! I miss you, and the breakers.
Skip a seashell for me; you know the where, the when,
certainly the why. Have to run; the damn crow
is back and offering forgiveness for my last piece of toast.
Even so distant I can taste the grief.
I'll devour both, slowly.
Love you to death.
Maigréad
~
The Crown
By Maggie/Mugs and Lynn/Chicky
1] Sonnet for the remnants of November by Mugs
I swear ocean air was my mother's milk,
and that full moon's high tide melodies
bind my DNA with harmonic flexibility.
To me, there is no such thing
as dissonance
in the squacking of seagulls,
but don't be fooled
by the implication of language,
there is pain.
And pain, like an upper structure triad
in modal jazz, needs the introduction of contrast
for release, for cutting tension. Against
the uneven metronomics of the sea is
where I go to handle the bitchwork of grief.
[2] Sonnet for the onset of December by Chicky
Where I go handle the bitchwork of grief
is the fixed ridges found in the ravelings
(the kinkier the better), in the undoing of things
once done. Howsom’ever brief
was the lock with the loop or howsom’ever long—
fibers know. They remember. Left
alone, they will find a same crease and lean just
where they bent and brushed to spoon in song
of some weave or other.
His sweater has been
disassembled, reconfigured to socks, woolen,
warm with brown roses in Fair Isle designs.
I enter December in sweatered feet;
sometimes I dance in his arms.
[3] Sonnet for the resurrection of Memory by Mugs
Sometimes I dance in his arms—
a three-quarter time step-step-close
that slows to images of after-love
in a memory-burn, the ten second high
before a chaser of fuck-you-pain
we train ourselves to hide from view,
because time only moves in one direction
for the distant living. So, what do we do
when a re-awakened rush of hot desire
compares the past with the future making
earnest conversation over dinner
and impatience burns holes in the brocolli?
This one minute waltz is a distraction—
my heart's mind is already out the door.
[4] Sonnet for the remnants of Then by chicky
My heart's mind is already out the door
to another room—any room. Even outside
in a parlor of rain will be better than
Blue Danube’s turned for the laughs on a day
in a year an hour can’t reach. When ‘Then’ suspends
like a bridge between ‘him’ and ‘now’
you know, you know, you f**k**g know you won’t find
the approach. Only the mist where a rainbow has rooted
paints your open hands and you’re weary of being wet.
Dropping the ‘I’ from all your whines
you speak for a while as if once removed. Tomorrow,
perhaps, ‘you’ will become ‘she’ when thoughts occur.
And by the grace of language, the frenetic
whim of words, a door labeled ‘it’ will close.
[5] Sonnet on the Meaning of Words by Mugs
Whim of words: a door labeled ‘it’ will close.
Stepping away from lyrical to re-think
this conceptual framework
posits a set of determinants worth
more consideration: How do you leave
the married part of your life, the pas de deux
that came asunder because the gods
ran out of miracles and could only hold your hand?
Which doors to leave open, which
to close? On which wheel of cotton
do you lay out habits for a new life?
It's snowing. Nothing eccentric, but
I'm out of cigarettes and
there's no one to record music for the trip.
[6] Sonnet on the Ends and Onsets of Tides by chicky
There’s no one to record music for the trip.
But then the moon never asked for whale song
or to hang high and cold—one might even think
out of hearing—anymore than Al asked death
to partner him in a polka. I listen hard, turn
one ear toward the unknown and then the other, try
to filter out the slide of leather soles
across the floorboards of heaven, boards surely
sanded by Hera and the girls to ease the glide
of dead through their beer-barrel promenades,
their Louie-Louie-Aye’es, but all I find
is a storm in the tree limbs and a great rustling
moving in and out, in and out likes tides
forever unable to stay or go.
[7] Sonnet on the remnants of Self by Mugs
Forever unable to stay or go
and another stub for the ashtray.
I smoke when I have no control
over the volume of memory. That last night
was a battle of bands: Irish Harpers with
fingerings of love vs Death and Departure—
a dirge determined to obliterate a duet of labored breath.
We lost.
Dr. Dan wore a shirt and tie that matched. It was July.
Evening. There was a clock at the foot of the dead.
Loneliness made a move on my life.
For a long while you keep secret what you feel you've become—
a poem of irrevocable grief.
And yet,
I could swear ocean air was my mother's milk.
I
Skinless. That’s how I feel.
Dismembered of all but heart—
flesh reduced to bone
to an abstract of circular thinking: the ifs
of grief, raw, internally exposed.
II
Morning sits outside the door, outside
each window, but I ignore it. Exhaustion
has more appeal.
On the fifth anniversary of your death/Revision
what you left me with came up with the sun—
the lyric of you that still resonates in me,
and such a private song can't be explained
it has to be sung with all of love's clichés
and eccentricities. That we were riffs through
this very private morning.
to any one who will listen
to a smile; my heart will wrestle my mind for
tears, but the strength of what moved with ease
between us will win the day, and those to follow.
That we were riffs through the privacy early morning.
~~
PBP#88
Lost: the words we used to watch us through the night.
Found: inflamed insomnia, and a naked hand that screams
into the mouth of a deaf page.
~~
Self-Portrait/first revision
First revision:
I suffer from a belief in possibilities.
Scratch that. I admit to wild imaginings,
to wearing socks in arguable relationship—
today's chili pepper confronts the crimson tide.
I'll even admit to soothing the blues while birds,
perched on pleached branchings, unwind morning
in languages I haven't yet mastered (though
my enthusiastic stab at Cardinal-speak
has been known to ruffle a few male feathers.
And I like being on the warm side of windows
when the frenzy of snow becomes a study
in Dervish dance techniques one night then
settles itself in a Currier & Ives-eye and mind-full,
fit to print, the next. These are moments
when I weigh life on both sides of the glass.
I've hung the ocean on my ceiling with no fear
of drowning or of time—my hand holds
a long life line.
Death
strikes, and your heart cries out for a mercy,
begging the inevitable to let the years pass
as planned, to let love have its voice, its eye-
to-eye, hand to cheek affirmations of intimacy.
That everything happens for a reason is not
something a heart without its purpose finds
easy to believe.
Army and Navy
He has an easy look about him
as he sleeps; calm returns
as thoughts of surgery, of cures,
are swept away with rest he needs.
I check love's breathing and the color
of his skin—I touch his toes.
He'll turn and reach if I move
my hand away—but I stay near
so fear won't find my sailor's dreams.
My breathing slows and matches his,
and for a while, I let his rest
become my own.
Paper Bag Poem #77
Cloud-blurred blue. I see this sky.
See its cumulus burden forced on by
hidden winds. I'm sitting in a chair
inside a room and find this sky.
The chair is brown, smells of new.
Inside this room, inside the music
of a rainy afternoon, I find this sky,
and other things. (imaginings)
Once a Wife
Every bleem is a story,
every bitchwork another blather
requiring the element of chocolate
to stem the flow of broken-hearted
blood. I order a potable ton.
In my mind, images—
a muddy market square,
a gazelle, and a horse, both
in white linen, both waning,
both trying not to sour from
the heat of the play.
It’s the third day of fermentation
and my tongue has gone numb
with strange saliva, my vision fixed
on a patch of blue grass extending arms
without hands. The wind has gone quiet.
The clock is confused, lost is the
eye of innocence.
And everyone expects Sunday dinner
will be the same, eventually, but you.
...lost is the last ounce of innocence I possessed. (?)
I Am A Woman In The Prime of Life*
Riding the black express from heaven to hell
(the sleepless night outstaring me)
then the long sunlight lying on the sea,
I, between yew and lily, in resignation,
swam only in familiar depths (until)
the leaves that shifted overhead all summer
stopped singing a whole year.
A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling,
meandering into air— I sit burning cigarettes
(while) the future reconnoiters in dirty boots.
What is it, if not you?
* A Cento from the Collectd Early Poems 1950-1970
by Adreienne Rich
~
A Page in My Handbook
Just like that, the wind lost its breath.
The natural vibrato of the ocean's waves
became an elegy, and only the light from
midnight stars pulsed as his heart slipped away.
In the century of quiet that cradled widowhood,
they understood that wisdom comes of beggary.*
* from "The Seven Sages" by W.B. Yeats
~
The night was
four wet moons
around a red magnolia.
And silence
to drive home with,
and to.
The lovers of Zeus, these moons,
Not Galileo Galilei's moons.
I feel that far away from everything.
~
Billy Collins and the "C" Word
This is not a message for Garcia—
it is a mirage, curves and angles
exposed. There is a window, but
no glass— and I have nothing to wear
but a bag of city rags over the shakes
from his death, the ruination of desire.
Strings of Haiku for Piano fall in a
background of sedentary noise.
~
Melancholia
the shape of sound
around my ankles-
rain to ground
~
Thursday's Child Has Far To Go
Sometimes, the first few seconds of stir
come ignorant of the past, and ego reaches for
the familiar, for a presence, the genuineness
of his arm...
This is an admission of superior loneliness—
How it rises, how it stinks.
~
Untitled
four thousand pieces
of abstract oragami
equal one bad cold
cold, and boxed, and wondering
how to appreciate the word widow
in a numb-struck life
life that is cold at night
cold in the light—
cold as an abstract melody
~~
Blue Moon Dancing
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
(from Light breaks where no sun shines by Dylan Thomas)
I've decided to end this life,
drink enough memory down
to drown the acid-reality of loss—
put an end to its worm-like ache;
his death has taken hold of my bones
and every muscle that I own;
my thoughts can't turn a corner
without running into a ghost
only I can feel. So, I mean
to swig enough intoxicating imagery to balance
the threat of imbalance in living the rest of my life
without the love of my life. Habits have become
nightmares—the idea of rest
is out of reach, and laughable.
Baudelaire was right—
I need to drown myself in the vintage
seasons that slipped their arms around us
and stay drunk until I'm sober enough
for this new face.
Residuum
My feet are moving against the snow,
each step an attempt to distance
myself from the fire in my bones.
But the air’s not cold enough-
the pain, not old enough...
~
An Electric Arc
Those hot last days,
the end of our winter,
we talked in secrets,
the way lovers do,
breathing close, touching,
always touching...
even with our eyes.
~
Stuttering
I should be asleep, but a leaf of memoir,
pearled with someone else's sorrow, seeded
a table from my past—a wound brought
forward to an oval, oaken altar set with
shaky hands and one stone-cold cup
of tea; one banded hand and a single
cup of tea gone cold. The hands belong
to me. I'm watching a ritual drowning, a
rite of passage, the settling of concious
widowhood on a banded hand gripped
by a single cup of cold tea, one banded
hand, one ice-cold cup of tea, one hand
holding whispers and no one to touch.
~
Freeze frame_All Around the House
a band of pressure forces
more inches of white on
white.
The white won't get whiter,
but it will get taller.
Stained glass lilies wait out
this abstraction in a window
used for praying.
~
Paper Bag Poem # 43
a.m. marginalia from the hill:
Navaho impressions of morning
taken with ceremony—
the myth of becoming
will not stand still to coddell
the end of a dream.
I've become Changing Woman,
and tonight, with the wind,
I will sing down the moon—
end this day to begin.
~
Freeze Frame_Salisbury, MA
A Sunday Night Sonnet
Jan 14, 2008, 2:22am
No stars tonight. No moon.
Sea and sky, one shade of endless?
Maybe.
A wall?
Maybe.
Whatever
sounds like a nightmare
on its way to interrupt someone's genteel dream.
At the edge of high tide
turning—
a wash of foam,
a forgotten light.
Haphazard tatting on a pillow case.
Maybe.
~
Untitled
The mood in this new hour bears the weight
of stone, of walls within walls within walls.
Reason has come to deal—with the quality
of endings, with tomorrow beginning alone—
where quiet is time's only grace, where the lyric
cannot breach the element of pain and deny it
its place, its pounds of sorrow, its heart of grief.
This is the moment within when life faces death,
and decides.
~
sedoka
#1
splendor on splendor
against the sunset—
grass shivers
in the soft turf
under the apple trees
endings
#2
sundown comes
to rest the day—
an appointment never broken
loons hush
one after another
my heart pretends to sleep
~
An Epistle on Three Post Cards to Daithi
I
Ten geese and a quarrelsome crow for A.M. tea!
The sojourners from Canada stayed long enough
for toast, but the neighbor-crow, a maple away,
flew off when I started to read above the murmur
of energetic leaves. Critic!
Chasing papers now...
II
My thoughts on your thoughts on the science
of words sans spirit is sameness, a mill for still
life paintings scratched on parchment; silence
followed by internal yearning.
We walk around assembled art– the thief
who needs a hundred thousand words to lift a stone
when the honest movement of a hand to memory
without attemptive imitation would do the reader nicely–
III
Life ripples. Do you need the metaphor?
So tell, me (if you know) how we lift ourselves over
thresholds without communicating feeling? Am I
so old school that old school moves me most?
Enough! Enough! Enough! I miss you, and the breakers.
Skip a seashell for me; you know the where, the when,
certainly the why. Have to run; the damn crow
is back and offering forgiveness for my last piece of toast.
Even so distant I can taste the grief.
I'll devour both, slowly.
Love you to death.
Maigréad
~
The Crown
By Maggie/Mugs and Lynn/Chicky
1] Sonnet for the remnants of November by Mugs
I swear ocean air was my mother's milk,
and that full moon's high tide melodies
bind my DNA with harmonic flexibility.
To me, there is no such thing
as dissonance
in the squacking of seagulls,
but don't be fooled
by the implication of language,
there is pain.
And pain, like an upper structure triad
in modal jazz, needs the introduction of contrast
for release, for cutting tension. Against
the uneven metronomics of the sea is
where I go to handle the bitchwork of grief.
[2] Sonnet for the onset of December by Chicky
Where I go handle the bitchwork of grief
is the fixed ridges found in the ravelings
(the kinkier the better), in the undoing of things
once done. Howsom’ever brief
was the lock with the loop or howsom’ever long—
fibers know. They remember. Left
alone, they will find a same crease and lean just
where they bent and brushed to spoon in song
of some weave or other.
His sweater has been
disassembled, reconfigured to socks, woolen,
warm with brown roses in Fair Isle designs.
I enter December in sweatered feet;
sometimes I dance in his arms.
[3] Sonnet for the resurrection of Memory by Mugs
Sometimes I dance in his arms—
a three-quarter time step-step-close
that slows to images of after-love
in a memory-burn, the ten second high
before a chaser of fuck-you-pain
we train ourselves to hide from view,
because time only moves in one direction
for the distant living. So, what do we do
when a re-awakened rush of hot desire
compares the past with the future making
earnest conversation over dinner
and impatience burns holes in the brocolli?
This one minute waltz is a distraction—
my heart's mind is already out the door.
[4] Sonnet for the remnants of Then by chicky
My heart's mind is already out the door
to another room—any room. Even outside
in a parlor of rain will be better than
Blue Danube’s turned for the laughs on a day
in a year an hour can’t reach. When ‘Then’ suspends
like a bridge between ‘him’ and ‘now’
you know, you know, you f**k**g know you won’t find
the approach. Only the mist where a rainbow has rooted
paints your open hands and you’re weary of being wet.
Dropping the ‘I’ from all your whines
you speak for a while as if once removed. Tomorrow,
perhaps, ‘you’ will become ‘she’ when thoughts occur.
And by the grace of language, the frenetic
whim of words, a door labeled ‘it’ will close.
[5] Sonnet on the Meaning of Words by Mugs
Whim of words: a door labeled ‘it’ will close.
Stepping away from lyrical to re-think
this conceptual framework
posits a set of determinants worth
more consideration: How do you leave
the married part of your life, the pas de deux
that came asunder because the gods
ran out of miracles and could only hold your hand?
Which doors to leave open, which
to close? On which wheel of cotton
do you lay out habits for a new life?
It's snowing. Nothing eccentric, but
I'm out of cigarettes and
there's no one to record music for the trip.
[6] Sonnet on the Ends and Onsets of Tides by chicky
There’s no one to record music for the trip.
But then the moon never asked for whale song
or to hang high and cold—one might even think
out of hearing—anymore than Al asked death
to partner him in a polka. I listen hard, turn
one ear toward the unknown and then the other, try
to filter out the slide of leather soles
across the floorboards of heaven, boards surely
sanded by Hera and the girls to ease the glide
of dead through their beer-barrel promenades,
their Louie-Louie-Aye’es, but all I find
is a storm in the tree limbs and a great rustling
moving in and out, in and out likes tides
forever unable to stay or go.
[7] Sonnet on the remnants of Self by Mugs
Forever unable to stay or go
and another stub for the ashtray.
I smoke when I have no control
over the volume of memory. That last night
was a battle of bands: Irish Harpers with
fingerings of love vs Death and Departure—
a dirge determined to obliterate a duet of labored breath.
We lost.
Dr. Dan wore a shirt and tie that matched. It was July.
Evening. There was a clock at the foot of the dead.
Loneliness made a move on my life.
For a long while you keep secret what you feel you've become—
a poem of irrevocable grief.
And yet,
I could swear ocean air was my mother's milk.
