Dad dreams we flee the Nazis, our ‘55 Buick low on gas. We drive by the sea. They come with guns. They come in submarines. He wakes sweating and terrified. He shares his fear with me. Nazis enter my dreams dragging the stench of Dachau. They come with guns. They come in submarines. I wake sweating and terrified. Neo-Nazis march in Charlotte armed - flags waving, hatred palpable and near. In dreams, I hear the thud of boots on the night stairs.
Category: POETRY
collected poems
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TERROR
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flu
Hold every cell still palm under chin legs and feet balanced. Stay in the trough between cough and ache. Sleep without waking the dragon. Forget how tooth, limb and eye throb and cry for relief. Dream, pray hope this will pass.
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GRANDDAUGHTER
She touches me as if I'm rock or tree immune to time and gravity, impervious to woe. The twenty years we’ve left (with luck and grace) invisible to her. In her constant now our cardinal sings the mac ‘n cheese is hot. We walk the stones in her backyard our sacred spot. She will have time enough to seek me in rocks and trees when I’m gone. Today she leans against my jeans and turns me briefly immortal.
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PERFECT DAYS
These mornings are it, life’s glory disguised as just another Spring day. Sunshine, leaving for work in the soft air - a bit of traffic, not too much – an easy commute. The sweetness of it, life here and now - The no big deal, the simple day, the normalcy. It’s what I yearn for when life turns cruel to drive over the bridge into town to breathe the smell of the river, to ride down Main Street as cherry trees blossom. Give me a day like that, I think one with no special thoughts or agonies, a day to enjoy my habits with nothing amiss. Sometimes I walk right by them without noticing, these perfect days, driving down Main Street. -
FLYING FREE
To go in a puff of feathers, a glory of days,
Soft as clouds of air
Gone – gone – gone.
There are worse things,
Lying there
Suffering in white sheets – tethered to machines’
Endless beeping – intake and outtake monitors -
The blue of fluorescent lights pulsing about you.
A constant parade of people checking, checking, checking,
Reluctant to let you go in case they might save you.
‘For what?’ is the unasked question.
‘For what – please?’
It’s late in the day for golf.
Americans fear death like quiet.
Both are becoming hard to find.
Shop Rite makes me bless my deafness.
Feathers and glory
It isn’t all bad to explode out of life
Black feathers against a blood moon.
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TREE MAN
Squirrels remind me of a man
I loved, who with rope and spike
mimicked them
climbing trees and swinging
limb from limb.
“They are my brothers”
he said. Came home crying one day
because he crushed a nest,
killed babies, when he felled
an oak.
I stop to watch
a tree man work today.
High in the air he swings
in chain saw ballet. As
I watch him cut, climb
leap from limb to limb,
my young life returns to me.
I see my love without a net
fearless and free
against the sky.
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INVASIVES
A flattened Cane Toad lies in the street. Its poison can kill a dog. They hunt by the garage at night under the light - run when I come out leap into the garage door with a THUD. Invasive. Poisonous. Not bright. When the temperature drops below 40 in South Florida, iguanas fall from trees like rain. “Don’t touch them” we’re told these colorful creatures are dormant. They advise us to kill them -these visitors from the Jurassic. I cannot. How could they know they’re trespassing? Purple stalks of Lupine carpet Iceland their color pops against green moss. Their beauty out-competes local flowers - poses for photo ops with tourists picnicking by “Keep Off” signs, blankets old lava flows and glacial melts. Visitors stride from ships and planes to seek this island’s treasures - yet urge it to trade silkies for Sea World. Loosestrife blooms each August at riverside in my old town. The mill wheel turns. Art hangs in the stone museum. People come for the small shops and fine buildings but stay for quiet streets overcast by ancient trees. The area booms when the Interstate is finished - corporate folks out-compete farmers. Agway loses to Walmart. Commuters careen past hay wagons on country roads.
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GRANDMOTHER
It must have been a high-end sanitarium. The plates she painted there were Limoges. I thought for years she was an artist. I did wonder why we had those, when all Dad’s banker father left him was a gold dollar. The rest went to the second wife. My family said I didn’t look like anyone. They said Grandmother was in and out of institutions before dying young. They would have mentioned TB. But my eyes gaze back at me from her 1910 portrait. Why did no one mention this resemblance? Did they fear insanity was catching like flu? It must have been a high-end sanitarium where she painted all I knew of her perfect roses, lilacs, forget-me-nots.
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THE PIANO
The piano would not fit through the door of the shingled house with the western view. The black and ivory keys I caressed each day could not bend through breezeway & kitchen to wait until my hands grew large enough for lessons. Only my father’s accordion entered this house to gather dust in its black case in the cellar. Standing on the back seat of our grey Buick I’d play the front seat like a keyboard and belt out “Singing in the rain. I’m singing in the rain.” Walking home from Washington School, I’d dance in musicals of my own making. Sometimes in summer Dad would get out his accordion to play “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “The Beer Barrel Polka”. Something happened in junior high. The whole family became cacti. The music stopped. I was grounded more than I roamed free. I went to the Brooklyn Fox but said I was going bowling. We were the only white kids in a black audience swaying to Sam the Sham, The Four Tops, The Shirelles. The joint was jumping and I’d go again tomorrow. But the concert went on and on and I missed my curfew. It was the only time my father ever hit me - a face slap for lying. But damn that music was great.
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ARTISTS
we’re not artists in all places, times. no one’s whole life rhymes. at moments we may draw, write, pray. at others, watch, love, raise children, join the fray of being. let’s love ourselves await the time when Spirit calls then pick up pen or violin and begin.
A WELL TRAVELED HEART 