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beginning with 2013 National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)

Six letters

Empty bags, liters, lines
on your brow, smaller numbers
reading across the scale, six letters
make up the four-letter word
then five more
and now three
years later, more than a thousand
days since those words scrubbed
each other onto your face
into your heart and everyone
pretends that normal
is the new six letters.

The others don't
know what this means
when they see you
now; the wigs are bagged up
skin and bone
clothes grace the closet
haunting is not the word
one might say, or gaunt
when looking at your cheeks
now, again, pink not white.
The others don't
really want to know
what the six letters are
unless they spell normal
or common or health
since looking at you
is indistinguishable from seeing roses,
or pumpkins, or the sea.

Sea. C. There's the scary letter
only now it's a different six, a new
beginning, a b, a beauty
so those six, those
will be the ones we know you by
leaving the others behind.

Thinner

Grandmom kept receipts, invoices, statements, bills,
bundled with now-decayed rubber bands,
placed there carefully by her gnarled hands,
stacked and boxed, 1992 Home Savings,
1952, here's a Valentine's Card from her children
and a letter from her sons in the orphanage
where she kept them, being too poor
to house them at home with their sisters,
now tiny black and white contact prints
from negatives so rich from silver
dimes practically spill out of them -
Mom at 10 months like every other baby
in the lineage, squint eyes and dark hair
held at a distance by her unsmiling father.

And here is another: Pete The Greek, Grandmom's step-dad,
his only photo, saved perhaps because his wife is in it too,
plus the laminated prayer card announcing his funeral,
Mary Mother of God on one side, his life in two sentences
on the other, only it doesn't say what she always called him
"that son of a bitch" with the calumny that can only come
from close acquaintance.

Here they are together in bathing suits at the beach, Grandmom and Grandfather
   (though it doesn't sound right, Grandfather, he never returned
   after the war, stayed in Hong Kong far from his children, Mom
   didn't say much the day he died, just sobbed into her hands
   for the only time I ever remember her crying)
their arms around each other, Joe tall and handsome, Jean nearly as tall
showing her legs, the sand blaring, and on the reverse, August 3, 1935,
and I count
which means this photo was pretty
much taken when Mom was conceived
which also explains why Grandmom's smile
was the widest in any of the images
until the one captured the day her baby
graduated from University.

Our days are thinner now.
Images don't count
as much as when 90 cents for a packet of photos
cost a day's labor, and the one-inch-square memory
tucked away in an old envelope
next to a child's scrawled note, kept safe for 60 years
sustained imagination and memory
and eyes thick with living

Hearing

Most mornings I awake thinking
of you sleeping, breathing
rhythmically as a metronome,
the bass beneath a melody,
eyelids closed moons, eyebrows
two hovering clouds
above the day yet to unfold.

I imagine you embarking
into consciousness: they say the last
sense before death is hearing
but isn't it too the first before life, hearing
an alarm, or if you're lucky
in the spring finches whose yellow
or red breast feathers might grace
the pine needles just outside the window
or when I was lucky, your rhythm.
Maybe your brow lightly purses, or a sigh
escapes like air being let from a dream balloon
before you open fully to the light.
The music changes in your breath
at least, that's how I remember hearing it
though you don't play that tune
for me anymore.

Most mornings I awake with words
that might be poems on my lips
rather than kisses on your cheekbones

Maybe it's scent that's last to go
cinnamon, or vanilla, or you


...........


edit: original post 3.16.13.
posted to imaginary garden with real toads June 17 Open Links

Tracks

You left tracks like seaweed
dragged across wet sand
we sat for a pulse

and when we walked, the waves
washed them away.
My head in your lap

blue sky white clouds
the murmur of water retreating
into the next urgent swell arriving

Hafiz, from my lips to your ears.
We didn't kiss that day
nor in the parking lot

before you drove off into your secret
future, always looking to your left
dipping your chin, biting your lip

like someone was whispering
or kissing you there already
except those few times you smiled

like a lily, like freshly fallen snow on a split rail,
like the crescent moon
and as far

shredded poetry

Very cool portraiture, pasted from the Colossal website.

Portraits made of shredded poetry, by Jamie Poole

Happy birthday

Spine taller
voice lower
but scratchy
feet longer
jeans skinnier
four and
ten years
my son.

Eyelids crinkle
brows narrow
lips turn
up one
side only
until no
containment possible
laughter leaps
treetop high.

Valentines day
is his
no stupid
cards, no
forced love
just heart
every year
the same
love only
much bigger.

Conspiracy

All the conspiracies
are true:
guilty as sin, as an apple
hitting Newton's head
or water finding the easiest path

which if you've seen a riverbed isn't
straight until the Army Corps
paves it that way.
Forget evidence
or long thinking

forget anything which challenges
complexity. After all Occam's razor
cuts out all the difficulty
leaving only the simplest behind
so it must be true

that the weather isn't any more wacky
than we are used to
and that 6000 revolutions of the earth about the sun
are all the years passed since Genesis.
And faggots will cause society to crumble

just like the niggers did, like the kikes did, like
the nips and towel heads and micks and wops
the wetbacks and feminazis and viet cong, commies
and unions and journalists and and and
everyone who won't support what's right

it's a god damned conspiracy
that I can't find the remote
the price of beef went up
the government won't pay my doctor bill
and when I step on the gas now it don't go fast

like when I was 17
could see my feet
bluejays and redbirds fought for seeds at the feeder
not these black crows and gray pigeons
and I didn't need a pill to be a man

Admit

40 years in the wilderness

What can we admit? That words matter, yes: the how-to instructions sprayed pixel by pixel onto this now yellowing page. That power tools require power. That a world that never sleeps means the world never gets to rest. Now we can admit that digging into the earth for cast-off remnants of the sun – when the sun itself continues to shine – well, tunnel, mine, burrow, cave, treasure, riches – they all belong, and return, to the sun.

On the taiga, in the lee of the west hills, Karp and his family prepared. Each morning they prayed for the hideous torture death of the anti-Christ. Dmitry might not be there. He may have been gone for some days, barefoot in the frost, hunting with snares for rabbit and weasel. He might return tonight. The forest might provide. Or not. Time isn’t an issue where there are no clocks. It may as well be a series of tableaux, like turning pages in an art-history book on the Middle Ages, before perspective was permitted, before the separation of onlooker and the viewed was understood.

The geologists were dowsing for oil, or gold, or some precious metal like uranium. They always are. Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition paved the way for the looting. Darwin’s Beagle spawned evolution and the meticulous cataloging of flora and fauna. Who bankrolled Columbus and the litany of Spanish and Italian explorers? It’s what they do. For us. So when they stumbled onto Karp’s little encampment, furrowed dirt passing for a garden, birch-bark hovel little more than something Brer’ Rabbit might have dug, and they took pictures and brought presents and television and perhaps maladies so that 3 of the 4 siblings died, and Karp died, leaving only Agafia to tend her garden, she remained unafraid. After all, what could hurt her? 40 years of Siberian cold? Starvation, that wicked hunter who clambers up inside skulls found no purchase – she had never eaten a feast, so he had no images to taunt her with – he had no claim. Loneliness? The last remaining hermit – no. She lived further removed than any human, except the scientists on Antarctica, and they had each other and satellite connections.

Let the explorers depart and search for their eye’s content, something from the earth no doubt, some mineral or gem or liquid, condensed by eons of pressure, something that allows the onlooker to be transported into some place where they can escape from having to search the most challenging terrain. 

ice

I'm certain
you're not
the only one
to hear the crinkle of broken ice
underfoot, after a night freeze,
like laughter through a window
or the tug of tumbling stones
broken over and over
by incoming waves.

Have you ever stared at sepals
pursed tighter than a scowl
patiently waiting past
setting and rising suns
certain they'll open
more sure than the sweet tang of ice cream
that your reward
is just
moments, a minute, just a minute

then the sound
maybe only your imagination
and you glance away
but in that instant you weren't attentive
then
that's when

the clink and crash of ice underfoot
sounds like a broken promise.

E

My first favorite letter
must be E
for exuberance. For effort. For the first big animal
the elephant on a flash card, its arm of a nose
like a trumpet made of laughter, and E
gets to be big and loud and different and noisy.

You're past the slow beginnings, but it's still early, 7:15
on a sunny morning, when steam rises off grass
like a gassy promise, the alphabet has so much future
and here come the big words, exultation,
electric, ecstatic. Here is the rest
of the day ahead, the year, the life before us,
it's turning 12
and knowing your A-B-C's is commonplace
but now you get to the meat, the heart, the future of life
and little words haven't crawled up
to weigh you down, words haven't emptied you out
leaving you exhausted, waiting for the end.

E isn't like that. Not in the morning. It carries
the future. It's in everything, it's everywhere
it follows love and makes it complete,
it's even in absence

which is why I can spell sons
without it
and still know my favorites are in there.

for D. and A.

All the big
words don't matter
much in the quiet

days following the final exhale.
The beautiful woman whose gossamer garments
filled up moments
colors bright as a butterfly swarm
with lives just as short

her fingers empty of fingers

coolly inhaling, still
heart still beating

and none of the words matter.

13

He wears his shoulders higher
so much so mine no longer drape
and must climb a bit

while he gravels his voice
and places foot astride my shoe
apprising how soon

he'll be lord
though in practice
he manages his minion brother to distraction

in the frozen section at the market
the same spot I once leaned over
his feet dangling from the carrier

squirming at the cold
so the kind lady reached in
handed the box

to him, cooing, both
smiling
completely

unlike today, brothers bickering
like a murder
of crows

Crows

14 crows perch on the neck
and shoulders of the middle-aged pine
squabbling no doubt over whose is
the blowing wrapper lifted from the bins

and whose is the too-much-so-toss-it
lettuce shreds, corn-fed cow bits
all a-splat, HFCS ketchup bleeding everywhere
from hideously smooth buns.

If they preen my eyes can't discern
but for a flash of sallow beak against black feather.
It's said that crows have voracious memories
and will pester anyone who disturbs them

remembering faces for years, memories
of ancient wrongs they've been storing
in the clouds far longer than any computer
so I studiously avoid shooing them

just measuring the 14 steps from my door to the ground
and 32 paces around the bend to my silver car
sometimes wondering where the color
in birds went, and where went their songs