Category: Poetry

Love, Music, Poetry

4:50 pm, Pink Floyd

smirkpretty

Tulips bend to paint a corner of Washington
Circle with candy tongues
tied, twisted police tape slaps at a strutting
breeze, a whir of wheels, skin and spandex sheathing
viscera pulsing femur tibia and tucked wing of
earthbound flight. A checkered cap tops
the pile on a table by an escalator
ringing like a miscalibrated telephone, unheeded
warning every third or fifth body rushing
up to open air, no one turning. Back
after back in suit jacket, wilting and shedding
finally revealing damp shoulder, furred forearm
freed from cuff. Lime-green
chrome and finned convertible
on oversized whitewalls takes the corner,
watering eyes and turning heads.

Delayed train, detour, an extra mile
on foot west, sundog flares against the curved city
bus merging with a hiss. I thought I knew
the way, thought I’d thought of every
contingency but I never imagined him
in the everything
grazing the tips of my fingers, him
in the everything holding me fast

To these teeming streets. Nothing to compare
to this belay. No metaphor, no halo
of light, no vapor trail threading sky
is anything like the music
making me skate an inch
at least above the skin of the planet
and so it should come as no surprise
(except that’s exactly what it does) to find
I learn to fly
the instant I give up
trying.
 

Poetry

Family Tie

smirkpretty

I said, “Help?”
And help came.
It was the rising inflection
that made all the difference,
the vibration, just a lilt, carried
from throat to ear
a request
a far cry
from the flat period
of its named
and willful absence.

This was never allowed
here, and suddenly it is
as if no one ever doubted
the need
for assistance, for reciprocity,
as if we are bound
as King said, in one garment of destiny.
As if it has always been true
even here, and suddenly
it always has.

Choices, Poetry

The Cat Came Back

smirkpretty

The first mistake was the one you made.
The second was thinking it had
forgotten you. What will the third be?
Do you let it climb naked
onto your back and ride
you like a name?
Do you give it tea, your ear, a year
or three to chatter itself empty?
Do you build Hadrian’s wall
and repel any breach?
Do you involve the police?
Maybe you rest your arm
across its bristling shoulders and say
Thank you
but I’ve got this
now.

Poetry

Lunar Equinox

smirkpretty

It is frost now, still
faltering between
chill blue knife and furred limb.

Moon meets sun in a garden of stars,
all visible in half-night. A red-tailed fox
skies across gunmetal dawn
feet never touching
the ground. Babies begin
in groaning belly
of robin, raccoon. A squirrel
squatting on the wrist of a high vine
scratches at the shell of last year’s seed. The bare end
of provisions before the next harvest means lean times
for a merciless brood.

The yield may suffice.
It may not.
The way to survive is to live as if both are true
at all times.

Remember: the equinox lasts
a single night. Each of us is on one side or the other
even if the lifting foot is only just clearing the line
even if the bottomless blue still saps any recollection
of fertility. By a hair each day, darkness falls away.
The crack in the ellipse
narrows, the coin tilts on its axis and slips
through. The first moon

of spring is a fat dubloon winging
across the frosted miles, casting off
as it turns the full gleam from the sun. It is only when you stand
just so and gaze just there that you can gauge its trajectory
and lift out your shirt
to collect what spills
over, such riches
only last through twilight and by dawn
you will be blind
again.

Poetry

Give Up

smirkpretty

The place the gaze lands
is in one’s control
as is learning everything
within reach
about this here and that
just beyond.
So is what goes into the mouth
and
what comes out,
the tenor, the grip, the sharpness
of the blade
with which truth is pared.
The fall
onto knees. The plea
and forgiveness.
The bedtime. The book.
The lyrics and even the tune.
Action, stillness
and the flavor of silence.
What is given
away, what is squandered on trinkets,
what is stashed
in the cellar
and forgotten.

Yes
even forgetting.

But not what was buried there before,
no
that is not within one’s control.
Neither the place where the gaze begins
nor the native tongue. Not what is offered
up, how much, and by whom.
Not what goes into his mouth
nor what comes out. Not the shot fired,
its teeth and velocity.
Not geometry. Not ancestry.
Not gravity or the callous arc of cosmic debris.
Not sleep or dreams, the weight of the day,
the insistence of hunger, the volume
of the neighbors. Not the child’s preference
for something entirely different or the echo
of aching for something
entirely gone. The imbalance of desire.
Not the first frost.
Not the one who arrives
or the one who won’t go. Not the departure
of faith.
Not secret worlds.
Not the keeping
of words
or the end of needing
them.

Mindfulness, Poetry

Mass x G x Height

smirkpretty

Stillness is impossible.
Just try to stand
frozen. Ankles flex. Toes grip. Knees
hips spine skull
of course the brain, a multitude
of microscopic adjustments. It is not
stillness
that holds you firm
to the skin
of the earth
but motion. A taxidermist
would have to stuff your sack of flesh
with rebar and concrete to keep you
upright. And still
one gust could take you down. And still
you are not
even aware of the exertion
required
to stay exactly where you are, no less
or more
than what you might expend
by taking
that step.

Love, Poetry

Love Lettering

smirkpretty

Who will receive this next
ink ribbon folded back on itself, tucking
the pulp heart of the matter
into its own layered belly like an origami crane?
As if for peace
offerings and platonic love, I write to him
(or is it you?) yet contemporaries of Plato knew
that Mercury conceived the alphabet
from the sight of those wings V-cutting the sky
and words are nothing more than traces of hollow
bone and feathered vein, the page
a leaf stirred to flight.
 
Pen nib, beak, and paper’s razor edge.
Perhaps it takes on a power of its own, this letting
into letters a promise I fancy
a vial drawn from Delphi and ferried
in talon to brush his trembling lips
(or yours)
with prophecy,
with Us.
 
Alas.
When he (or you) unfurl the knot
of scratchings here, neither gods
nor philosophers tumble out,
no. Not even a waterbird
for all this trouble. Just abracadabra and alaka-zam,
a spatter of angles and curlicues casting
untested home-cooked spells.
This tattered plea calls not on him
but you,
(yes, you)
to fold back the edges, to smooth open
the wrinkled sheet. I beg
your mercy. Use your hands. Clear a place. Let divination
spread itself
across the waiting acre
of us.
 

Family, Poetry

Proboscis

smirkpretty

The brooch must contain traces
of her. In the solder bearing glass
to wing, a bit of cell, a fleck of skin
resides, this amulet is her
as much as mine.
The butterfly falls open
in my palm.

By caress and incantation
the jinn unfurls from brass
antenna and twines around
my naked face
planting one kiss then another
dozen the way she did, her powdered cheeks
fluttering, alight
until I squirmed from the onslaught
of an affection,
so much like thirst.

“I know you love me,” she would say
on her way into the hall, closing
the door on fleeting dusk, my visit
in that blink of summer never long enough to probe
under folded silk slips and kidskin gloves
to unearth each rose bead, each hidden leaf
of virgin jade. I loved her in return,
I suppose (as if a child has any notion
of the magnitude of such a claim). She told me I did
so this is how I know

that when the jeweled pin
pierces the wrap at my breast, she is
what thrums there
drawing nectar from the pistil
still, but with all the latent force
of flight.
 

Outdoors, Poetry

Defenestration

smirkpretty

Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It

At the upper lip
of a gilded wall the world slips
open beneath the half-lifted arm
of a woman whose locks trace
cirrus cloud and azure
day. Out there, the ancients whisper
fingertips against your
seeking arm and warm
forgotten skin like a shaft of light
showing you the way
to where the wakening occurs
despite haze cloaking sun,
miles to cover
and a capricious chill
at your unsheathed neck.
 

Poetry

Physical Education

smirkpretty

The affliction is a sack of gravel without a strap.
It demands to be moved.
They bear it together.

He plucks the handkerchief
from his pocket and wipes his brow.
This address here is barely a footstep from where they began.

You did not give it your all.

The accusation is not spoken
aloud. It does not need to be.

He is right. She has made no headway
in urging the burden towards its destination
(where was that again?)
He says she has done nothing, that those inches
gained were his. That she has ridden free.

Her exertions are lost on him. It is all press
and no progress. She has frayed
her back, torn connective tissue, bruised bone.
Sweat is easily mistaken for tears.

Force against force.
The problem is one of physics.
She suddenly understands this.

A single choice:
air accepts her invitation. A rending
sets free the clutch of gravity.

She splits open. He loses his grip. The sack sags
and 359 other directions
of travel appear. They both tumble out to sky.

Off she drifts, loose from the pod that held the seed.
Fluff and dust. It catches a gust.
Weight is barely a memory.