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