ORIENTAR
I want to go to Orientar
where the meadows glow purple
with frankincense flowers.
I want to watch children
laughing and singing,
collecting the gold that falls
from the sky. No one goes hungry
in Orientar, for the orchards
of myrrh bear fruit all the year.
The kings and the queens
of Orientar are kindly and wise
and they follow their stars.
Rearranged, and the grammar changed to protect the guilty.
LINE ONE, 2016
I have forgotten how to sleep.
I don’t do things I resist.
I do not like beets or old goat cheese.
I know what is going on below the surface.
I think I’ll save the dollhouse that my parents made.
It was late winter.
We drove all afternoon and into the night
as if the only reality was the car—
He told me he’d killed the coiled dragon
here in this country called US.
So many trees across the path.
These levers, bellows—
Tonic. Sub-dominant. Every Good Boy.
We preferred tunes in the Crixian mode.
Don’t think about walking down the stairs.
It’s bad enough falling, or being chased.
All the women in our family have affairs.
If you’re wise,
forget the damned button—
it’s so small.
You know the watering can?
It reminded me of that morning.
It’s best to pretend it never happened.
Thanks a bunch, Kari. Just what I need —to focus.
What, precisely, is the point?
Not so much the spot of blindness
I might have been.
In the beginning, I thought I’d learn
the way they forget to.
Oh, my vice, my difficulty!
Goldfinches edge the lawn.
Now, I am drawn to gray, November,
the gannets,
cold chłodnik* green with dill.
Sleep, little one, sleep.
When I was a child, I could fly.
*you say “whod-neek”
NAME THAT ROOT
Knobby, greening, hard white twists sprout in spring.
Planted, they draw stripy bugs who leave orange eggs
and thick red larvae that squash to a gooey mess.
Their poisonous leaves draw spores of blights.
They soften, slime and perish.
So basic their absence can mean famine.
Growing them is a chore, a back-breaker,
but in late summer, grabbling them
with your grandchild means a feast.
I’m reduced to looking up old prompts and combining them. This is the result of two: “make up the world,” and “new proverb.”
PROVERBIAL
In this world, nine stitches
hold Time together.
You’ll need waxed thread,
a curved bookbinder’s needle.
When you have finished
sewing up Time’s spine,
all the eggs in your basket
will hatch at once. One swallow
will settle on your hand
to twitter up the summer
and two will call from a bush,
then lead you on.
Follow them to a meadow
where a red morning sky
is opening the roses.
All the horses you have wished for
will thunder from the mountains.
Choose one and look in its mouth,
but don’t believe a word.
The last lines from April poems in 2015, tweaked a bit:
LAST LINE, 2015
It never even entered my mind.
Winter gone, and we are still alive,
hearing jackdaws in Ostrowy.
You can’t miss them—
syrinx and larynx and lung.
My friends. And you, too. Definitely you.
One square inch, the world,
always knowing where you are.
Those goldfinches, newly gold, outside my window.
The music pours out.
Anyone who loves you will understand.
I’ve been killing for years.
The brown heat lingers
and the white cat won’t leave me alone.
I hold a pair of smooth gray stones.
Greek writers praised Donatis of Evorea who died in the 4th century,
a Thursday, at dawn, as oarless as his Nan.
Always, we remembered his weeping.
He wore an extra-large, cold-weather hat.
He was a sacrifice; every tree paid in pain.
Our children are full of our songs,
bottles of water, cans of beans.
They lead me on
while my keys clack down and my strings resound.
The blessed lick their fingers clean, and sigh.
Back when I thought
I could do anything
the light congealed,
too steep to climb.
Rain.
Not feeling very creative, so I went to old April poems and took the third line from a bunch of them and this happened:
LINE THREE, 2013
Coated with wax and buried,
I have the power to heal others.
I’ve only just learned to be
driven to and fro by words and noise.
Don’t come lugging that bag.
My mind is a jumper of passion and power—
not bad for a woman my age.
My hair, my fingertips
are ready with yellow flowers,
clouds in their colors: yellow, purple, blue, gray.
I found another wad of wax under my armrest.
I contain you.
According to some very early writers, it was on March 23 that God created Adam.
MARCH 23
On this day, or so they say,
God created Man,
gave him an Eden to tend.
Adam, God’s gardener—
Oh well. And then he fell,
and thus began the end.
FELL SWOOP
Tired at last of myself,
the way I’ve been for seventy years—
tight and worried, wanting my perfect way—
in a swoop—and was it fell?—I laughed.
Laughed at the coiled clay vase that wanted
to be a fish, laughed at the poems
that wouldn’t be printed in little magazines
and at my past earnestness
about the importance of that, laughed
at my belief that those pants would
make me leggy like the model in the catalogue,
that this diet or pill or “spiritual practice”
would fix my — everything.
And last night I split a bottle of Switchback
with Jean and we laughed at our husbands’ old jokes
during what would once have been
a nervous attempt at “dinner party”
and we made spontaneous
ice cream sandwiches for dessert
from crispy brownies and ice cream
straight from the carton, and I’m still laughing.
LOCATIONS
“. . around the edges of oddness”
~A Bluebird Fairy by Emily Anderson
You won’t find it
in halls of ivy, or
in the chambers of kings.
It isn’t between the covers
of carefully curated
volumes available only
to members with reservations.
Never in anything
organized
by color or size.
Never in anything glossed
or listed or rewarded.
But look!
It’s teetering on a tooth
from a reconstructed
conodont. Spinning
on the rim of a sixpence
balanced on a pole
balanced on the rubber
nose of a clown
riding a unicycle on
a tightrope stretched
between a stormcloud
and the beak of a raven.
It’s lurking in the garden dirt
under the left thumbnail
of the weaver’s second
daughter. If you want it,
you might start there.
Garden Party
in honor of ol’ Walt Kelly
We are dancing on a dingbat
in the fury of a gale
while a wiley alligator
winds a kitestring on his tail,
and we do not have to worry
if the fury can’t abate,
for the foolish old bassoon man
has a catfish on his plate
and the streamlined fancy foremast
casts a shadow on our fate.
O, the moral of the story
is the wellspring of the fool,
and the quarrel of the sorry
is the spinning of the spool.
When the roses grow forgotten
in the gardens of the moon
and the chickens all fly skyward
on the string of the balloon,
when the demons do their darndest
to knock acorns from the tree
and the long-awaited pirate ship
comes sailing from the sea,
then we’ll know it’s time to cut the cake
and have a cup of tea.
O, the moral of the story
is the wellspring of the fool,
and the quarrel of the sorry
is the spinning of the spool.
I wrote this ages ago, in imitation of the great Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” poetry.
