Zen and the Art of Moving Back into the Middle Class

The new house starts out pure space.
We imagine living in it this way, empty,
Like monks or motes, needing nothing
But to float on light, to wake from a dream.

The trucks roll in with couches and beds,
Boxes of clothes we forgot we owned,
Too many dressers, four decades of Nat Geo,
Easels, two hand-me-down wheels and a kiln.

We break our backs on the chance
There will be time to paint, throw clay, collage.
(Where to store old paintings without a garage?)
Pans! Spices! Bowls! Books! Zafus! We’re home!

Space fills and fills like a mind. We settle in.
The couch is comfortable. Most of the clothes fit.
Enlightenment comes: we are not monks, but parents.
A teacher. A carpenter. A commute. A mortgage.

Left Pointer Finger Relearns her Place in the Scheme of Poetry

Can she type now? Having lost her outer corner to a paper cutter, not unlike a jaunty, tilted beret lifted off by sharp wind, she donned flesh colored bandages a month, forgot how to work unencumbered by pain, accustomed now to pointing up like a tea pinky, up and out of the way.

(Her beret: a bit of faded pink me-jerky topped by white feather of nail. Grotesque little hat! I can’t throw you away! The day we parted, I dreamed of tossing you into roadkill in hopes a Sangre de Cristo raven would take you in and up like a Tibetan vulture’s prayer. But still you sit on a bedside shrine! Abject object of attachment! )

This poem, the first since then, is practice to get her moving again. Her fingerprintless tip, in pins and needles of severed nerve sleep, tries to remember an old dream. She doesn’t hurt anymore.

(Middle finger–still protecting her little sister–strains to hold back on the keyboard, slowly learns to step aside and let her walk again.)

Despite dried tension—the clear-scabbed, tick-sized fact clinging still to the middle of what is raw, she insists: Let me do it! I can type! Right thumbnail bumps her on her way to B. The little cringe passes quickly, whispers: best to keep a honeyed bandage on her one more day till all is finally thin, pink baby skin. What a miracle! Our edges crawl to close around a deep rose center.

December 15, 2017, exactly one month later

Our Range

Even in two beds mountains apart—
An hour drive, two thousand plus feet of sky
Between—I whisper the usual to him, to night.

His name a sigh breathed against memory
Of his shoulder rising up a peak that falls to face & thigh.
Window streetlight sun glows wide behind.

To whom can I pray: spare this silken range of man.
Let us rise & rise. Warm with kiss & palm I climb,
My own eroding peaks in slow collide.

2017

The Mississippi of Motherhood

In the midst of rhapsodizing endless lost days spent at home with my children as babes, toddlers, kids—their faces terrifying lights of innocence looking up, trusting I’d give everything, which I mostly willingly did—those days before a black hole swallowed my resolve, my bed, my home, and finding myself now sitting with my 15 year old son, the baby, who’s lived with his father for years, watching the movie he chose, Colossal—not one I would choose, but touched, nonetheless, he wanted to watch it with me, knowing I’d like the fight sequences, which I mostly did—I am reminded of the Romantic sublime inside the silence of mothering, those eternal minutes, swept up in children rivers, not drowning, no resting, no branches, no bottom, just treading in place yet moving by giant steadfast current, no white water thrill, just slow and brown, the Mississippi of motherhood, water in my ears, shore out of sight, I could never fully surrender to the pull, nor to the brown depth, and yet, with only three years left in my last child’s childhood, I can think of no other timelessness I’d fancy more than the terrifying boredom of slow witness: the mystery of my boy’s voice cracking into man, his whiskers, his leg and armpit hairs thickening by the minute. Please, life, I beg: take my remorse, mundane me to bliss, trade me my every regret for this.

The Deep Sleeper’s Scheme

Our bed, a shallow tin—
I, the turning key.
Our blanket, the lid.
You, the cold sardine.
Come morning, snuggle in.

2017

Reading your Copy of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems

I love to read your dog-eared book:
“No Tool or Rope or Pail,”
page one-fifty-nine.
“After the Argument,”
page one-thirty-one.
Of course, “since feeling is first,”
page one-twenty-seven,
and “The Middle Years,”
one-twenty-four.
Ninety seven’s “Sonnet”
made me rush below.
Finding poems whose pure pages
you have innocently creased,
defaced for your own sake,
is like walking into a private sanctum,
reading in secret the stains,
the dapple of your mystery.

S Mountain, or, "We call it Tenderfoot"

Salidans love S Mountain, and so do I.
It reigns above the Arkansas,
Over little streets like a weathered ziggurat,
One road spiraling off its peak.
Though I’ve always clucked my tongue
At the sight of crosses carved or hearts
Or letters drawn on hills or mountain tops,
Somehow the giant S is a quiet marvel,
When it peers above low clouds
Like Olympus watching over the town,
A place for bicycles, rafts and tiny gods.
A girl named Shea says S stands for her.
A local preschool teacher/bartender
Says it actually is the number 5,
An oracle warning naïve nomads
How many jobs they’ll need
To survive here in paradise.

Two Eclipse Haiku

Moon, a black finger,
Slides through a bright diamond ring.
Midday marries night.

The moon was a coin
Eating the sun, dark money
Eating light from us.

21 August 2017

River Rich

One would think there’d be nothing hard
to say once you’ve arrived
at the river that haunted you for years,
now the front yard of your employment.
You engage in weeding thistle
from its rocky banks, leave lanky mullein
though someone’s been breaking off the seedy head.
Inside the old steam plant, new with community,
you enact newfound ineptitudes,
no longer resident expert of an arcane field
of words and rules that never helped you
better tally night’s profit, fairly divvy tips,
sell concert tickets, juggle small town/
small office alliances.
The art of being novice is not simple.
How many times must you ask, must they repeat,
the proper string of clicks, the ratios of coffee
or powdered lemonade to water?
Undrunk, the river rolls by.
The forgotten pitcher of a hot July wedding
handed over with grace for you to refill
must be received with gratitude, humility,
with memory of every well-tipped waitress
of your short stint in middle class life
in which bills were not your 3 am,
your sunrise thought. (The old game:
you don’t know what you’ve got.)
To live in the land of the river rich
you learn to serve them, entertain.
Later, on a whim, on a day so cool
and bright that you feel rich despite
the pre-order checkbook glance—
you sit on a patio by the river. You write,
foolishly order fish, sip one martini full of honey
to celebrate the fact there are beekeepers
you will meet in the morning
for their annual gathering, their water goblets
and vats of lemonade already waiting
in the kitchen and conference rooms next door.
In black dress, near black dressed tables
you smoothed with your own palms,
you will greet them with a smile.
Eager to improve your single backyard hive,
in doorways, you will take notes
on their lovely, troubled lives.

2017

I’m From

after George Ella Lyon, with my students

I’m from TVs the size of fridges,
Atari squeals, Simon, Merlin, Intellivision.
The lazy dust cloth, the working mother’s hiss:
“Hit and miss, Rachel. Hit and miss.”
I’m from vacuum trails in plush red carpet,
A mustard house on a frontage road
And truckers’ begged highway horns—
Wah Waaaaaaaaaaah!
We kids would jump in triumph.

I’m from floral couches, floral papered walls.
It felt like home until a college peer up north
Noted, “20 years out of vogue.” Huh. It was.
Still, I am from my mother’s red geraniums,
Acrid marigolds along our walk, the peeling iron rail,
The 3-inch heels on which she perched while pulling weeds.
I’m from low sky wet on hair frizz and clean skin.
From Pepsi and popcorn family nights.
From pizza without parents and thrown-phone sister fights.

I’m from “The man sits at the head of the table”
And “Serve him first” and Troy, Rebecca and Kim,
From my mother’s pride in goulash
And hamburger cottage cheese lasagna.
I’m from ten cents per her plucked grey hair.
I’m from Granny’s hidden grudge—her flaky piecrust
Made me know a different kind of love,
Her lips turned from my kiss.
I’m from “As I have loved you, love one another”
And the rumble-belly of Fast and Testimony meetings.
From “I know this church is true” and “Cool beans! Warm corn!”

I’m from the muddy Mississippi, the cardinal of Carpenter Park,
The Sangamon and baptisms for the dead.
I’m from the buttered cob and lumpy cream of wheat,
The smell of my step-dad’s Sanka coffee.
From the father who left us on a black Kawasaki,
The mother who curled up into a claw.
I’m from her desperate call: “Go to H-E double toothpicks!”
And Dad’s lonely basement cot.

I’m from Pine Drive, the tangled woods and Tammy,
From jerky-dead pigs in the yard of an abandoned farm,
From canned goods still shelved in the half burnt house,
From straw that caught me once I dropped the rope,
From Illinois lightning risked in wet grass
And Orion blinking on a hungry dog’s pen.
I’m from the snowman I was never meant to build,
Pneumonia outrun by my dare.

I’m from back roads that throw kids from cars
Into Heavenly Father’s arms. From long prayers.
Driving fast, I’m from ever-receding rows
Of green tongued corn, horizon swallowed in the throat
And in the heart of fields. But it’s been years.
I’m from God and corn no more, but still I yield.