wordweeds

If you must go
from here to there
in a straight line,
incorporate a curve.
Another. A third.

2018

My tiny Pisces mother gave four
hearts to walk the earth, and we gave six
but know we all gave more.

Ill-timed, ill-formed, ill-born—life is short.
They swam only in our darknesses,
wilted on the wet lip of the door.

But earth is just a shore.
A life is loved and lived in tender kicks,
the secret kisses of a pink seahorse.

2018

Folding his huge clothes,
My heart handles
Cotton altar cloths.

2018

in our age or in theirs or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it –
if we forgive our fathers what is left
~excerpt from “forgiving our fathers,” by Dick Lourie

When Lewy
bodies in his brain
locked his arm midair,
I lifted the forkful
of eggs to his open lips.
My mouth opened too,
the way mothers’ mouths do
while feeding their infants.
The unexpected gift—
I found the truth: gaping.
I finally forgave him
for forgiving himself
for everything he did
and could not do.

2018

For Derek

The sonnet makes so many students groan
As if I’ve offered them a bowl of mud
If they were cats, the sonnet’s a dog bone.
No love of artful language fuels their blood.
Shakespeare’s long dead, no use to their rich lives
Of spending every minute on the phone.
“Off and away,” I say; their eyes are knives,
Perhaps the tiny screen is their hearts’ home.
I get it—know the small black mirror’s lure,
The raunchy memes, the vines, the sexy text!
But still, such techno banter is manure
In which to sprout a bard’s mind, so complex.
Groan as they may until the couplet’s done,
Some even say they had a little fun.

2018

Dad gives me this:
Please remember
If I ever forget you,
I will never forget you.

2018

Money auto-deposits monthly.
After years of milk-struggle,
Salary freeze, and now, slow gains,
Finally, a small measure of security.
Why would I give up
Living small and safe on the plains
For a new people and place.

I’m not rich but
I can over-tip.
I can buy art.
I can save for braces.
I can fear loss of comfort.
I can remember something
I used to know about being poor.

Magic was free.
Rooms of grandma’s furniture, free.
The forgiven land loan, free.
The majesty of Friday night pizza,
The sound of a generator powering
A VHS movie on a mountaintop
For my two kids, nearly free.

Poverty gave me preciousness.
That power is gone.
Now, sickened by
My own miserly arrogance,
I recall once knowing
That not even a president
Could rob me of peace.
Like a hermit in a cell, I was free.

2018

To provide an illustration of her well-built home,
My new friend– tall, lean, salt and pepper hair,

Have you noted the house doesn’t shake, he lightly mentioned,
When you jump in the shower? (Her story in me–a rhizome.)

2018

Grandpa’s final breath
Found its way into the lungs
Of my quiet son

2018

Big headed, he said,
too large to pass through,
before the vertical scalpel,
before pulling me feet first
from my mother’s riven womb,

hanging upside down
like a bloody, sleeping bat,
my mother’s warm body
for one moment–
my first lost hat.

2018

Unless rain. Campus always spotted
with students
on the lawn in solitude or small groups.
I’d walk
to the art department, a low-lying brick building.
The usual vague joy or dread
rising, not knowing
what problems I’d face before the canvas,
human sized. The welcome smell of turpentine
primed the hours ahead.
I loved that poison. Toxic anticipation.
In my corner, on a rolling shelf, a huge glass palette
the size of a table,
dried paint layered in colorful scabs,
an archeology of wounds of the current painting,
brushes thrusting
hard-end out of a mayo jar of turpentine, real turpentine—
not cheap mineral spirits for house painting,
nor the nontoxic
citrus solvent of motherhood, stealing minutes
from children—
Long hair bristle brushes gooey
with the grey sludge of sunken oil paint.
Too lazy or cool to clean them every day or week.
Leaving brushes in that swamp—
a good way to warp or kill expensive hog bristle.
Fascinated with pseudo self portraits,
I painted many women
who vaguely looked like me with better breasts, standing
in various depths of murky red seas,
lost in vast space,
knee-deep in the horizon, crucified, Tao- or Shiva-bound,
avoiding the gaze or turning
from various men. Decades of living the paintings inside,
I took myself out of that space to
drag huge swathes
of juicy blues, whites and creamy yellows over
still large canvases—that much hadn’t changed—
to recreate clouds from above or below,
blue punctuated by sun or moon.
Now elemental light. The between in here.
As if the wooden handle is a conduit routing sky,
lit spheres and space from the body.
I disappear.

In a weary voice
The night before
A nuclear stress test:

“That’s the way it goes.
First your money
Then your clothes.”

2017-18

If a man were paddling down the Canadian River
and he lost his paddle,
how many pancakes in a doghouse?

Seventeen, because ice cream has no bones.

* * * * *

What’s the difference between a duck?

A vest, because a bicycle has no wings.

* * * * *

Why is an elephant grey?

Because a blue bird is blue.

* * * * *

How many philaramics in a platicus rex?

Six.