Easter Sunday

I’m thinking today about Dad, oddly. It’s a day for celebrating the return of life, of resurrection, of hope an promise in the face of inevitable death. For so long, I was angry at him, thought of him as everything that I had to fight against to save my life, to be independent and free. But I realize now that it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

A flash of red in the backyard -- 

weaving through the cedar -- 
the cardinal who chose the tree
for his home

back for the season. 
Harbinger of hope,
comfort, messages from 

those we've loved
breaking through the veil
to reach us again, 

or the blood 
of Christ on this 
bright Easter morning,

signal of sure renewal, 
transformation,
new beginnings, 

energy, passion, 
monogamy,
the bright bird

wears our projections with
courageous indifference,
stitching 

invisible strings
maple to cedar to
flowering pear, 

singing liquid 
and clear, 
calling his mate: I

choose you I
choose you I
choose you



A Hopeful Afternoon

I’m finally getting my head around the spring, and turning my thoughts toward renewal, return, and positive change. It’s easy to fall into cyncism and alienation. Far harder to see what I’ve been calling destruction as the violent change necessary for the growth of something new.

Three Haiku

Nature returns, slow,
lush, deliberate, green,
quiet, proud, and sure.

*

Violet weeds spring
from winter's lawns, asserting
wild beauty and joy.

*

Maple fuzz pops up
like new hair on bare tree limbs --
ancient wise women.

Good Friday is turning gray

I Went to the Mall Today

and discovered
that we're still 
buying things 
in person, despite 
the virus that 
kept us locked in 
five years ago, 
or the lure of 
electronic excess,
or the sense that 
(somehow) we
might be using 
everything up, 
or now the 
looming shadows 
cast over the
gleaming racks of 
fast fashion by 
phantom tariffs and
the ghosts of
slave wage 
children

Rearranging the furniture

Sometimes I get a compelling urge, an itch, to rearrrange all of the furniture in my livingroom, or bedroom, or office. There are only so many combinations I can make in our mouse house. The bedroom barely fits the queen bed, one dresser, and various shabby pressboard organizers. Most of the time, I’m searching for the best lighting arrangement. But besides the need for more and more illumination, now that my eyes are hardening with age, what’s behind this compulsion to change things around?

Making Room for Light

Dylan Thomas famously urged his ailing father to
"rage against the dying of the light" -- and now I
understand more concretely what he might have
meant: my lenses grow hard and cloudy, the world 
darkens, faces flatten into silhouettes against a 
relentless sun, and text eventually fades into watery echoes 
no matter how I move the dull pages back and forth, 
up and down, chasing the meaning into hungry shadows.
Glasses can't brighten the edges of things, or pull me
into focus. In this purgatory, what light there is 
either blinds or oozes brown in mocking globules 
at the edges of my vision.  

It's no wonder women of a certain age struggle
to bottle their increasing frustration, depression,
confusion, and rage. Some days, I'd like to punch
the world in its flat black ignorant face.

Last night, determined to climb into bed with 
my book and read my tired mind into oblivion, 
I moved two bright lamps into the bedroom,
propped myself up with a mountain of pillows, 
put on anti-glare specs, and flipped open
a thriller. The characters jumped into fast boats,
fell into deep water, swam out and hiked into 
cold woods, doing their best to escape their 
armed pursuers, hiding from the moonlight, while I 
waved their book under my old eyes, searching 
for the sweet spot of mellow white in all that
encroaching night.

Notes from Limbo

Egad, this task is hard and seems to be getting harder every year and day that I keep on doing it. At least it’s another sunny day, for what it’s worth. And Easter is on the way, so that means a short week, resurrection, all that jazz.

Read a F*cking Book

says the sticker on my office mirror. So when
I look into it, at my sagging old face with its
liverish spots and eye wrinkles and strange fleshy
barnacles, I'm sometimes tempted to take 
its advice -- plop down on my comfy chair,
crack open a classic, and lose myself to
Pemberley or Thornfield Hall, where no one 
ages, the government beyond the manor walls
is never mentioned, the moors wait with
steaming horses and rock thighed lords, and
the canny heroine (smart and sassy) always 
wins in the end, despite her cheeky opinions, 
dead or dissolute family, and left of center looks.


The sun’s out and the trees are dancing

One of the things about spring that I love is when all of the flowering trees burst into blossom. I can’t be grumpy about politics, work shite, and encroaching old age when the magnolia trees are holding forth. Plus, I love bulb flowers — daffodils, shiny tulips, iris, lilies. That kind of assertive and frivolous color just restores my sense of poetry.

In Praise of Spring Flowers

What juicy upthrust joy the daffodils speak,
bursting through the backyard lawn to shout
yellow. And how about those crocus with their
darling mauve and yellow mouths open to suck
cool April air? Next, the glossy tulips, shiny as
horse skin, waving gently in the neighbor's beds,
and the sassy snapdragons, petunias, pansies,
followed by the lilies curling orange and red
and gold from their stabbing stamens. Of course 
I adore the peonies, their tight fat buds luring 
busy ants, sticky infant fists exploding into 
tender fireworks that last just as long before
a hard drooping in the first serious rain and then
an ignominious melting into the dirt. But my favorite 
might be the luxurious stands of iris, wild and 
cultivated, thick green thumbs peeling out 
into delicate vaginal fabric, plump, ripe, secret,
and heroically tenacious, rising up long after
the planting gardener has gone.

14 is mean

Not sure what I want to write about today but just thinking about the number 14 makes me cringe. Reminds me of those days in 9th grade when I was the most awkward, needy, anxious dweeb, doing everything in my power to *act* like I knew what I was doing, like I was cool and had it all together, when anyone could see that I was the awkward, needy, anxious dweeb I hated to be.

Fourteen

and wandering the grounds of the American School
under the diesel sky of a blatting Avenida Observatorio --
short, awkward, silly, baby-faced, a thousand worlds 
swirling my mind, a hundred thousand plots sifting
pubscent blood, reality as industrial and hopeless 
as the neighborhood outside these locked gates

dying to be liked, valuable, beautiful, sexy, source
of admiring smiles -- not doughy yearning wrapped
in ghostly skin, unfinished, stabbed to the heart daily
by mean girls and ignorant boys, socially tragic, 
"too smart," neurotic, shrill, and slightly evil, drifting 
in fictionland, plucky Cinderella dreaming her in-
 
evitable discovery

Number 13

Bagheera doesn’t think I should be writing a poem right now. He thinks I should be petting him instead.

Black Cat Ghazal

I would like to stalk my life on murder mittens, tick ticking
along midnight hallways, invisible as a black cat.

Thirteen ways of looking at a black bird, says Wallace
Stevens. 13,000 reasons to love a black cat, I say.

So many readers fall in love with Edgar Allen Poe's raven.
Ugh. I think he's horrible. Cf.  "The Black Cat."

Bagheera dozes on the table, head lifting and falling
with each breath. Flying dreams? Witch's black cat?

This is the last stanza and it needs to contain my name.
No. I'll just end by praising the delicious beauty of my black cat.








The Right to Be Forgotten

Just went to a play on campus, “The Right to Be Forgotten,” by Sharyn Rothstein. Powerful, thought-provoking, and acted by lovely people I find in my writing classrooms. While I was watching, part of my brain (the wallpaper?) thought about how I’d have to find time to squeeze writing this poem in, and posting it — on the internet, where it will live forever.

On the other hand, I’m fairly sure that no one but me is really reading this. And a few SpamBots. 

Half Dose Sertraline Blues

Watching the maple’s shadow stretch
Across the greening thatch
The Velvet Underground on the iPhone
Burbling “Oh Sweet Nuthin”

Coke Zero zinging capped teeth
Typing this third lame attempt
To make art from the achingly mundane
The drone of someone’s mower

These glasses that refuse to bring
Anything into focus
And now The Rolling Stones telling me
”… still I’m gonna miss you …”

I said I needed to feel again
And cut the happy pills in half
I said I needed to feel again
While she whacked my world in half

I said I wanted to be here 100%
So I boldly chopped the dose
Said I needed all my wits
While she set everything on fire

Spring is apparently here now
Pretending to be light and breezy
It’s all going to be okay
She smugly announces over ashes

She only cut off all our noses
To save our ungrateful faces


TGIF, baby

Emily Dickinson Gives Me Advice

Men can be Crooked -- Mean --
Drive you into warped Seclusion --
And I would like to say -- they can Change --
But in the Aggregate --

It's John Q. Public who
Can't hear Anyone Else crying --
Only the regular Drum Beat 
Of his own Guarded Heart --

He is not Waiting -- as We Do --
For the Final Gentleman to Call -- All
Clad in Black -- horse and hack Steaming --
He does not Hear -- the Lid Slide back

Or the hungry Murmur -- under Earth --