Poems

The Music Chamber

POEMS

The Music Chamber

(Why I am not Matisse)

published in Sidereality

I started a painting

of two girls and a mother.

The girls sit at a piano

with their faces turned away.

Why, I don't know.

Are they looking for some forgotten light,

those wounded lovelies?

The curtains are half-drawn. A lovely

noon. I haven't decided

how many colors to let in.

So far the girls are huddled ink --

in a stupor maybe

from my endless wavering.  (Should they wear pink? Are they any less innocent

if I smear them in gray wash?)

A dwarf figure, more like a stump

howls by the garden door. Yes, they are looking

toward it -- toward Mother. Crazy, I will admit,

but I hear her too. A howl

from a stump.

Wait. The piano's slippery keys.

Are those what they feel? The one girl, rapt,

picks a rhythm on the keys, a drowsy ping,

ping, like wax dripping on doilies.

Queenly steel blue eyes that

bleed

???

No! Wrong: gleam.

A gleam of black and steely something

slips down from Mother's sleeve:

How on earth

                     
                                                                                                     

did she get in?

Quick, erase the arm, the bleeding whatsit --

Too late,

I've brought in a note of savagery: I'm watching, I can't intervene.

Everything's on a grim course

of inevitability. 

There and there and there,  beating with their tiny fists

the girls pounce on the knife in a rush

and Mother falls --

A charcoal saint

in bloodied crinoline.

How did it happen? 

I wanted two girls, a mother,

a music chamber, a sweetly tender scene.... All the smiles

that a mother could wish.

And then came the stray thought,

bleed.

Who Hasn’t Dreamed of a Worse Life?

published in Fireweed

            The police call you in the dream. They speak the language of

      forbidden

      revelation,

      a bi-polar romantic.

      Some lies and fears crave to be exhaled.

The blind goddess drifts away, her hands

fat as cherubs loosening the sky in your mouth –

pearls or rain or something or other

thrums on their chests,

the cops coughing up clouds.

Sweetheart, they’re flying over.

      Must see you. And the wedding party

      showered with rice and bullets?

            Suspicious? Oh, yes.

You can escape. Just in the nick of time.

      But then if it’s not the police

      it’s the job the husband the kid.

      You might not want to wake up.

      You might prefer

      the police.

----

  

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 Ghost Road

published in Sidereality

The road is straight

there is nothing between us

the clouds could be hills

only they travel to us

puffs of wind like a prickly coat

your face like the moon I can't see

--  dark, full of sly phantoms

my eyes, swollen twice their size

the eyes of a bedeviled magician

I tell you,

Don't fret, little girl

Day is breaking

-- goes the old song

Sing it with me,

hop-skipping over nerveless stones 

Day is broken, she sings 

Happy girl,

followed by a broken road

Nothing to keep you

Nothing to make you run away

No memory

older than you are

------------

 

Mirror to Mirror

published in The Argotist

            Leave your sleepy rivulets to trickle down my wrist,

teacher. Put up a mirror for an answer

so I can ask the same

thing twice

            Seal shut last year’s envelopes, your lesson’s feral cabinet,

            Say, The mirror is facing the wall, so my secrets are safe

            Don’t ask me,

            “Dear little cobweb: why so brooding, mysterious, and  quaking?”

            Don’t say, I’ll seize this and this and this

            Leave everything

            like the sun, when nobody’s watching

            melted down for sheer moonlight

 

For Bob Arner

published in The Argotist

During last fall’s rehearsal

the wind spoke to earth in quarter inches, pacing each dropping leaf

to the plash of the water

losing itself in a zillion facets of ice

The pond gives way to broken glass,

ghosts of objects, gray-bodies, crying out in a witchy voice

Hello bone of my foot

Hello kiss me starry sky

when ghost birds with baby cries

flap like stray scrap across the

brassy garden

We will someday assemble an art together

that is all of that

----------

 Valentine

published in Salt River Review

I write long letters to the dead  (you only know how heartfully),

in the woods, scratching the bark with my lonely fantasies, you

were always near, the one to decipher my messages. True, I would guide

you, you couldn't have found your way alone. I wouldn't have

wanted you to. I loved holding the secret.

It's been thirteen years to the day since your last letter came,

a forest fell out of the envelope, fire blew off the bush, you see

I do remember and handwriting like someone opening his veins.

The charms you enclosed ("spitted flames") looked like the rubies

my mother piled on for shopping tennis anywhere anytime

she didn't give a hoot for propriety.

They kiss-kiss when I put them on.

But that's not what I wanted to say. I'm writing you because

she died yesterday I think you should know that

she kept on asking me When for godsake you

going to marry that boy

so handsome and  lucky.

I didn't have it in me

to remind her you were dead.

So darling, should you meet her, I'm afraid

you have a little explaining to do.

I meant no harm by my deception, tell her that please,

and let me know

what she says because I hate to think this

is something you can’t read.

----

Lore's Necklace

            (for Leonore Uhlmann-Heyland and Joachim Uhlmann)

Published in Rattlefish Literary Review

Before all the clocks stopped, I fingered each of her beads like a prayer to the past

            I remember this
            I remember that

I remembered richly even while tomorrow grew thinner and thinner.

Before the game was pulped for turbines, I held the talisman

on my tongue, chanting

the poet's golden riddles
for luck.   

One strand of intoxicating verse
looped into another into another to glow for all
            time.

This was in old West Berlin

in the shaggy metropolis with the mid-morning schnapps breath.

I heard the poet chanting

silence, silence, silence

before the collapsed glitz of winter in surreal Paris

             and

the bead became the blue rose

in the enchanted necklace

            rare like that.

----

Sunset in Frascati  

published in Salt River Review

St. Peter's flared in the distance, the crimson dome.

A steep drop of crystal cliffs

led me down to the child's grotto.

Beyond that, a thin strip of molten sea.

A dead baby

was tossed before the altar.

(Coming closer, I saw with relief

it was only a lump of clothes.)

Kneeling there, listening.

Far off, a motor roared in anguish

over its broken muffler, a radio

thumped heavily beyond the vines,

and the violators were chipping away

at the hills in search of pre-Christian tombs.

I heard them, the mad motors, the greedy mystics

and their pickaxes attacking the  hills.

You took on trust

I would respect your secret wilderness

beyond the tidy, sequestered paths,

or I'd get bored by

so many rows upon rows of cindered

ferns that I wouldn't venture far

or stay long.

But I stumbled upon it

in the blades flattened around a pedestal,

each weathered blade of grass

seeming to join in a script 

the name of someone, you know who I mean,

the woman who was covered with tubes,

who even then was writing in her head:

Burn this.

---

 Before the Celebration

published in Salt River Review

once there was a little world

waiting to be mended.

dimming light and the hour’s hoax

of perfect timing.

a life-sized dummy

rotating on a flat earth, struck by pins and the busy scissors

of the seamstress, quick,

what was her name?

a chart of the earth’s surface

was the body’s,

tailored to changing measurements,

each year look ma, I’ve

grown.

then there was a rip

so final.

a rip. maybe only a pinpoint split --

and darkness falling swiftly.

such dead stillness,

and the dummy tilting elsewhere, waiting to be lit.

 

New Year’s Transformers

published in Jivin’  Ladybug

  

Out of body, the strange apparatus

divides

air from air. It resembles a mouth,

an opening. Inhale.

Not really a mouth, but there are hands

stitching together a summer cloud

in a sky of frayed ends.

Not really hands, not a sky, either.

Scents carried in the air weigh nothing.

All you can touch

contains a cosmos of memories.

There is not here. Now is not

the time.

 It can hear you talking,

although you only mouth the words:

it can pick up anything

and bear it along

up, up, and away: all those messages from elsewhere

arriving

and arriving and only passing through.

Interpretation of Dreams, for My Daughter

published in Jivin’ Ladybug

In my dreams sometimes I relive the thrilling first

sleep of a small,  sated innocent.  No howling,

primal  twilight.  No monstrous, beating

heart rattling  the crib.

Someone’s mom

(or is it me?) devours every

creeping horror.

Awakening, I am clueless,

bruised deaf, screaming like a fish.

Maybe mothering is only a question

of which chunk is eating whom?

Ritualistically, I might squirt

menstrual hexes across

the sheets. I might chant crone’s wisdom.  Or mumble a prayer

against the scary future.  But I don’t

do anything,

I just dream. Some dreams

are also prayers.  The best ones recall

the naked grin, the bare brine tongue

of a slumbering angel.

     

           

Born

published in Sein und Werden

one shapeless sprawl     gray silent

without end       no omens of mis-

adventure

no warnings

to beware   

as life

as humanly here    begins:

a lit door opens without a sound

and you       a pint-sized probing scout go forth impatient

to consume the air    you have the dignity of rareness    oh you have never felt so naked

it won’t hurt     whatever they take from you

(you don’t even think to ask for mercy)

and will you miss the smell of the garden

and will you want the colors of home

poor alien?        name!birthplace!family!

what roots that clutch

do not signify multiple

frailty?

now now now your cries clack between jaws

mechanically after-the-fact                unseeingly

you act     with all the wrong verbs        poor sucker stuck to props that are no longer

here

cues hissing      warning of

mis-

step      over and over       (the throngs shouting less, less! instead of more, more)

and the glitter

comes spattering down …

rhyme it:

tell

well

bell and fell     and so on     so much

to be known

hell   sell   yell

and so forth

so much     so much

oh memory me

more

yee!

purely purge thy dross

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