Sunday, July 8, 2012

You child


You child
left unsaid

where time sometimes trusts love
brings us back to where we know

love seems easy
maybe simple

time tempers desire
leaving pain blistering and love hanging
in some place that we recognize

holding our hands
holding our breath
holding our trust
holding our love

making it real, molding it like clay

love is what we make it
love is what we imagine it
love is what we breathe it
it is what we live

sometimes the world ends
sometimes there is a time ticking by

maybe love lasts three days
maybe love expires in three days

you are turned up and wrinkled
left to refurbish what is lost

what is yours
what is love
what is life

even if it is all over,
where everything expires
there is still one thing

You child will love more


Link to trifecta 

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Dear Mother,


This is how I dream blue. 

I dream about water.

She balances over the jetty rolled out over the clear, calm ocean.  The tide is out.  She is looking for fish, bent over trying to keep her balance.

There is no life unless it’s blue.

She is thinking of the Turkish toilets in Paris.  She remembers the rain pouring in sheets and moving through the streets slowly.  She’s there hanging over the toilet.  Her back gives out and she’s slapped against the wall, shifting her weight.  The man eyed her with suspicion as she raced to the back of the brasserie looking for the bathroom.  She was a wet dog, dragging her weight toward a hole where she would force all the food, the looking, the crying, the eating, the terrible parts of her outward, into the toilet.  Her mouth is open, gasping like the gargoyles over the sink, spitting water over her hands, cleansing them from the sickness.

Just the night before, she’s sitting in the Madame’s window room, looking over the street watching what happens as the sun starts to go down.  Her sister just phoned, dialing the long string of numbers that would reach her in France.

Mom’s in bad shape.  She won’t stop crying.  She’s on the floor and I don’t know what to do.  She’s really sad.  I’m afraid to leave her alone in the house.  I can’t get her off the floor.

She remembers bathing her in the middle of the night.  Her mother, huge and grossly overweight, still one moment and banging on the ceramic the next.  She kneels on the floor, feeling awkward and angry, pouring water over her naked mother.  She thinks, if she could disappear down the drain like shiny little soap suds, this is what she would do but she wouldn’t do that and leave her mother.  She speaks with soft and comforting words, ravaged and blue, trying to soothe the woman in front of her and her blue eyes too.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

this is her alley


it is the heat, maybe.  the sweltering, longing, non-forgiving heat wrapping around you separating comfort from survival, keeping you alive.   settled in the bassinet, wrapped in dirty rags, umbilical cord, messy and erect. 

the girl enters the street, an alley filled with filth.  the sounds of loneliness inflate and contract—obvious and not so obvious—she hears it all.

the child-woman hears her voice.

her breath is bare, nearly translucent in any form, so slight that she cannot make out any words.  the sound is merely a syllable, the intonation--young—yet translated.  no delivered.  as heard from the hollow walls of a large pink cavernous conch shell.

she has stretched this voice, her bottled voice over walls and floors across bathroom tiles and kitchen counters, dragged through arguments and weeping, introduced her to mothers and fathers and lovers.  belted to her side, exhausted from fits of anger, keeping with the speed of running from suitcase to city.


time stops when


she hears the woman say

      “…the truth left
        between you and I
        is the girl---the mute child…”


and now

     she is ravaged, born across these sweaty sheets
     bed woven bare
     her sex lashing broken chords
     better kept unsaid

     the girl undoes your eyes
     she’ll breed selfish greed

     a child left to haul the mattress
     from the floor, where a mother’s
     hand put the blade to rest,


tomorrow.


this is her alley, the flag above her war.



Monday, June 11, 2012

her breath

This is how the Girl holds her breath.

There's the night when it never stopped raining
cracking at the windowpanes
tearing up the glass

                 The Woman is fisted,
                 folded with uncertain blows.


I say her weeping skims the water on the stove
always boiling a dinner for four
first chopping then rinsing
She is counting the lines on the cutting board.

There's the night when
she never stopped breathing
stretched bare over the linen,
Her skin working against heat.

Scathed over round surfaces,
where ordinary touch please Him
and Her.

This is how a Girl holds her breath
sick for it, saturated---uncertain and blue
the color of eternity


                and Mother.



link to Poetry Pantry

Thursday, June 7, 2012

gracie square hospital

                 


             (...is madness fickle?....)



Do you remember the room
with sallow yellow walls
defrosting madness and 
thickening time, the recycled 
bed linens, a window 
and nothing else.

The bathroom bathed
an old woman who 
wet her bed and left
the toilet bloated
settling hell and odor
alive in my room.

Numbered graves, some empty 
dressed with starchy sheets
a tempered pillow and blanket
thin and bruised.

The captain of our vessel
filled the paper cups 
with pink, some white,
others blue for the dead
to swallow and breathe again
and mumble senseless words
and never once
looking in your eyes.

Some vaporized 
on the old brown couch,
others paced the sterile planks
soliciting for show
how to be crazy barnacles
feeding from a ghost ship.


is love vacant

some houses are empty.  she thinks this is true.  she begs for the walls, someone to hold her, wrapped around this vacant fortress.  does love grow-- kept silently and secretly-- inside these tall and looming walls?  this is her army.  this is her war.

link to Sunday Scribblings the meme being "fortress"

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

sleep



Where the beds were crawling

     soaked and furious with nappy
     newborn hair, sickness too---the old fan
     came around and turned his blades
     laundering the air.


She was there

     and kin to the rice fields
     toiling in contractions
     from summer fires

     and remembers nothing
     not even the nurse
     with the nameless hands.


Some beds keep crawling

     later

     when the porcelain tub was flooding
     plugged with soap and tears
     and mother's blue eyes, too.


The girl will die

     a child-woman, wife and soldier
     and refugee born mother
     sheltering silence for you,
     my daughter,


sleep Guineviere