Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2025

SNAPSHOT FROM MY MOTHER'S WEDDING

 


My brother stands just outside the door frame,
a small coffee cup in hand, while I sit on a folding chair,
thin and lanky in a too-big secondhand suit,
hunched forward, scribbling in a moss-colored notebook.
Neither of us particularly wants to be here -- though
of course we cannot say -- the pastel carnations pinned
to our chests belying our expressionless faces.
Our mother is marrying for the third time -- this time
to a good old boy from south Texas who no one
cares for or trusts more than the weather here in spring.
This was before he spit her name out like a curse,
his hands having become more menace than comfort,
and certainly before he held a shotgun to her head,
threatening to paint the wood-paneled walls with whatever
thoughts and dreams she might have left inside her;
and it's a few years before my brother lifted him
by the neck, dangling like a scarecrow in stocking feet,
eyes popping like buttons, holding him there calmly,
steadily, breathing hard but slowly, until our sister's shouts
convinced him to at last let go, allowing him to fall.
But this is not that moment; this is merely a snapshot
of that young man, having found a quiet corner
for a moment, writing his way towards all he cannot
know, his left hand curling above the page, pale sunlight
filtered from another room, hovering like smoke.


Saturday, June 7, 2025

WHERENESS

 


I had never considered it that way --
the simple state of being in a particular time
and place -- until you let the word fall,
suspended between us, both strange and familiar.
Where else could one be?, I wondered.
You loved words that way, trying out the new,
settling on favorite phrases, turning them,
chewing on their shapes and sounds, following
their threads wherever they might lead.
Now, all those years having gone wherever
the years go, I can only be grateful that
my whereness and yours found each other,
however briefly, breathed the same air,
shared the same silences, laughed at the same
absurdities you couldn't help but challenge.
You demanded much but expected little,
your lack of faith in others a religion unto itself,
yet never questioning where we belonged,
and never doubting that we would live forever.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

PHONE BOOTH

 

Once, you could find one almost anywhere,
a small and unassuming refuge, and sometimes
the only shelter from a sudden downpour,
the floor of an uncertain summer sky collapsing,
casting hard fistfuls of rain and hail against
the narrow panes of glass, tumbling down from
its small square roof, dimly-lit from within.
Sometimes it seemed the only refuge
from the constant clang and drone of the city,
the exact intersection of public and private,
a hand-me-down space that granted legitimate reason
for squeezing in close beside your first girlfriend,
stranded, shivering, calling home for a ride.
I can still feel the weight of those phone books,
suspended by cables, knocking at our knees,
the thick heavy receiver, the unexpected blessing
of a coin someone had left, mistakenly or not.
I remember most my sister, exiled by our mother
to the booth outside the grocery store,
evenings whiled away under its moth-yellow glow,
chatting and laughing with her latest beau,
making call after call with the same lucky quarter.
There were always messages -- a religious tract
to make a child ponder the afterlife, always an expletive
or phone number, or the secret code of initials,
a bright red heart rounded with a Sharpie.
But you knew that someone loved someone else,
enough so to write it down for all to see,
or scratched it into metal, sticky and smudged,
those rough, uneven letters, as close to permanent
as anything -- their messages still there,
long after their houses have all been removed,
declaring themselves, always in the present tense,
far above our cool and collective silence.


Friday, December 13, 2024

REQUIEM IN WINTER

 


The last hands to touch you were not mine, nor those of any friend or lover, but the powder-blue latex gloves of paramedics, helplessly shaking you, tapping at your thin neck and wrist, while a deputy sheriff -- whose shoulder had broken in the door -- stood by, as if your small body sleeping in your own bed were a crime. Part of me must have stayed in that bed we once shared, but no part that could have saved you. Have we let you down, allowing you to leave this way? How could any of us have known all the different definitions of alone? The last hands to touch you lifted you cleanly from this life, wheeled you out and up the narrow stairs we climbed a thousand times. My mind cannot fathom more -- not the coroner's cooling board and creaking drawer, not the scalpel used to search for what was already gone. So I leave you here, where it is always the same cold morning in January, the door frame hanging like a broken cross in the entryway, and you tucked beneath a fresh white blanket like a child, almost smiling. A flock of wild turkeys has wandered up the bluff; the sky is so bright it blinds.

Thursday, December 12, 2024

STEMS AND VINES

 


I didn't know the names of most,
other than the obvious, but I would take my time in that small corner shop
at Victoria and Grand, as if I had a plan,
pulling together a wild array
of color and design, jagged stars
and spears of shifting green,
delicate faces receding into their
velvety folds, varieties you might not
expect to find side by side,
but that made sense to my willfully
uneducated eye, bringing them
home to surprise you with.
Though you tended to eschew tradition
of all kinds, you allowed me this
bit of old-fashioned courting,
a word I have since grown to love,
the shy earnestness and ritual behind it,
its long, noble history, the eternal doorstep
we eventually come to, hoping for entry.
Those days are long gone,
as are you, and there's nowhere
to bring you flowers now,
no patch of earth or marbled stone,
not even a vase upon this dusty bookshelf.
The shadows here move without shape;
the wind crowded with your absence.
I wish I could remember
the names of those flowers now,
each spectacular species from another world.
They would be my words, as my words
in turn would bloom for you,
dark and glistening with the earth,
declaring, in no small measure,
everything you must already know.

Sunday, December 8, 2024

ONE SUMMER EVENING

 


I had forgotten
that it was raining
outside;
I had forgotten
even that there was
an outside,
sitting there with
you, waiting for
it to pass.


Friday, November 15, 2024

GRIEF


The usual messengers arrived to do their worst, kicked your name back and forth as if they knew you, speaking words that were better spoken by you years before. The first told me that you might be home if I stopped by, reading or sleeping; it was only my timing that was off. The next one put on a faceless mask, said I should have been there, should have called, if only to talk of the weather or old times. One cursed you and raged, as I did, against your selfishness, your carelessness with all of those pills. Another fed me only sorrow, bitter and familiar, like the whiskey of my youth. Yet another pressed the old apartment keys into my palm, hard; gave me a stack of books you didn't have time to read. They came and they went, never when they were expected, talked and argued over each other for weeks, then months. None of them listened. None of them told me the name of the one they had kept hidden, that last visitor called Gratitude, which had been there all along, waiting only for me to turn, to raise my hand and testify. To stand.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

PARIS, 1911

 

We never made it to Paris, though the framed Steiglitz print of a rain-swept boulevard in that city -- everything gone gray, everything blowing to one side -- which hung for so long in our old apartment, is here with me now. The same thin tree, half-bare and bent beneath the weight of the sky, still reaches upward in defiance; the same street sweeper, shrouded from shoulders to ankles, stoops as though retrieving something dropped to the reflecting water below. The same shadowy figures and buggies in the distance continue to move slowly past. I can almost smell the rain through this curtain of years, can almost hear the whoosh and drumming of it, as if it were approaching us here today. For the moment, this scene rests in the narrow hallway which leads to the bedroom, awaiting the right wall, the right light. You, of course, are not here to ask; and on any wall, in any room, it seems only to get further and further away.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

GUPPIES

 

Nothing grew in that drab one-bedroom
apartment, gray-blue light cast from the swerving
freeway below, the old service road following
beside it like a shadow, then turning
with a half-hearted shrug, a sad aquarium
of ordinary days circling, reflecting,
measuring themselves against us.
You moved the plants from one window
to another, hung them in the kitchen,
then the bathroom, fed them on eggshells
and coffee grounds -- all to no avail,
their brown and brittle ghosts too weary
to drift away, littering the floor and windowsills.
When we came back from that day trip
to the lake, the guppies you had just bought
were floating on the surface of the water,
their small incandescent bodies motionless,
tailfins like flames sputtered out, yet still glowing;
we knew, separately, without having to say,
that something larger had ended.
You left, at a ridiculous hour of the night,
a time normally reserved for old blues songs,
and weeks later, I did too, filling every bag
and suitcase with all the emptiness I could claim.
Even now, I wonder why we chose that place,
whether in hope or desperation; even now,
I wonder in what other rooms,
what other lives, we might have survived.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

SECOND GHAZAL FOR TRISH

 

There's no burying you, no risk of forgetting;
though you would say the past is merely escape.
Whatever truce you made with life was brief,
its tentative agreements offering you no escape.
We were so young, what could we have known?
But I knew, even then, that love was more than escape.
Some days we read for hours, daylight shifting.
You said that poetry was the opposite of escape.
It was, we imagined, you and me against the world,
until the world itself managed to escape.
In the end, you pulled away from everyone,
your stubborn isolation a poor imitation of escape.
The prayer I offer now is one of silence,
the unspoken understanding of no escape.

Sunday, August 11, 2024

YOU CAME TO ME AGAIN

You came to me again in my sleep, as if nothing had changed between us. You wanted to talk about old movies, talk about money and how it made no sense. I had longed for the sweetness of the mundane, the steady rhythm of the dripping faucet wearing away the porcelain of the bathroom sink, dust building its imaginary creatures below our feet. Most of all, I didn't want to tell you that you were gone, slipped silently from this world while you were unaware. But I wanted you to mourn the loss of yourself, as I have, this life of chores and small, fleeting pleasure, the stubborn yet fragile body which gave you so much trouble. Of course, you were better at explaining things, as you often did for me. The words I offer are half-formed and ordinary, hovering between us, neither moving nor standing still. Last week, your sister called to remind me that everyone in our dreams is but a different version of ourselves. If this is so, I am again talking to myself, while you are wondering whether to accept my explanation, whether to answer with words, or the silence we have agreed upon for so long. 

 

Sunday, July 28, 2024

GHOST STORIES

 


Visiting the Finnish Lutheran Cemetery,
the small clapboard church leaning wearily toward
the empty highway, my cousin reminds me
of what the gravediggers told her, how the residents here
grow restless in the evening, walking and conversing,
as if not yet settled on this idea of being dead.
"But," she reminds me, by way of disclaimer,
"they have been known to partake in the whiskey."
Everyone has a ghost story around here:
restless ghosts walking the creaking staircase all night,
opening the heavy doors and windows, shaking
the rusty box springs of the bed, or the mischievous one
who locked the unsuspecting dog in the car overnight,
and the stubborn one who followed the family when
the farmhouse burned to the blackened ground.
My ghosts, by contrast, are so reserved, hardly stirring
from their bodies of air, speaking only from the measured
silence of the page, leaving even the dust in its place.
I told you, dear friend, to visit as often as you like,
test your presence in this once-familiar world,
read the poems you wrote when still a teenager,
amused, I would imagine, by what seemed
so important to you then. Haunt me as you like, love.
Come close. Hover, the way you sometimes did
when I worked, if only to see if you are in the words
I have not yet begun to write or understand.


Saturday, July 20, 2024

THE AFTERNOON SHE DID NOT DIE

 


Well, we go on -- one hand floating weightless as a balloon,
the body pulling itself downward again.
Our bones can only be lifted so much by this wind,
and the ocean is so vast before us.
Though a residue remains, like soot from
a long-neglected fire or a thumbprint on the soul,
and it belongs the way a bruise belongs,
the way our shadows spark and smolder without us,
solitary, when shut away for the night.
Today I walk with neither haste nor direction,
the sex and the sorrow of sad letter days
discarded, the fact of my name, age, and profession
lost to the angular wind. I carry your words
in one pocket, your silence in the other,
past the once-familiar storefronts of our past,
the soft glow of your childlike face gazing back at me
and back upon itself, a foreign postage stamp
on an antique postcard you bought but never sent.
How can I answer now, knowing this business of words,
this stooge's religion, to be diversion at best?
How can I speak when addressing you now means
addressing any tree, or cloud, or patch of grass?
You have grown vast by way of vanishing.
You always said it was an art, a trick you could not unlearn.
But we go on, each in our separate ways.
Our bones can only be lifted so much by this wind.
But the body is such a stubborn guest,
unwilling to leave, despite the late hour.
We may as well settle in, make up the spare room.


Friday, July 12, 2024

WEDDING DRESS, NEVER WORN, FOR SALE

 


In the newspaper photo, no larger than
a postage stamp, it resembles most
our childhood idea of a ghost, with neither head
nor hands visible, walking away, directionless,
gently billowing from side to side;
or something you might come across
in a museum, a remnant of love and devotion
gone hopelessly out of fashion, pressed
and pinned behind a case of glass.
A thin, watery light, seemingly without source,
softens the edges along one side,
cuts an angle across the torso like the page
from a book suddenly stripped of words.
This is not our story to tell, though
we can't help but imagine the details --
the blistering late night arguments or withering
silence -- which lead, inevitably or not,
to this sudden change of course.
Someone else can slip into the story
now, change the names, rewrite the ending,
all while admiring the intricate stitch work
weaving in and out, the extravagant
and unnecessary ties, beads, and bows,
white cumulous clouds rising at either shoulder,
the small, angled windows of lace
we can very nearly peer through.

Saturday, July 6, 2024

ADDICTION

 


You held your secrets close, as gently
as they would allow, as if they, too, were
wounded things, in need of your full and constant
attention, as if keeping them cocooned
in your cool, anemic room kept you both safe.
So much we did not and could not know,
so much you kept even from yourself.
You longed most for respite from this life,
its continual demands, its pettiness and pretense,
the futility you saw in its endless disguises.
You wanted to step outside of it all, time itself
racing past the window glass, frame by crooked frame.
What a shock, then, when it found you unaware.
What a shock when the pills swallowed you.
I still don't understand the simplest things
in this life -- like how to love and be loved without
fear, or how to explain to others that you were
never the measure of your illness alone.
I still don't know if the world, as you might
have said, is so bitter that we must wash it down
with something strong, or so very sweet
and wonderous that we must raise our glasses
again and again. You tell me. You tell me.

Sunday, June 23, 2024

ASHES

 


For weeks, then months, they sit undisturbed
on a makeshift shelf in your brother's musty garage,
the gray-white residue that once answered
to your name packed neatly into a surprisingly
small cardboard box, unadorned and anonymous.
Drums of exterior paint and car exhaust
surround you now, boxes of tools, and bulky
winter clothing packed in large plastic containers,
the ordinary stuff of life in process.
This is not the respite that I would have wished
or imagined for you, dear friend; though
you will be relieved to know that this stop is not
final, only a way station before the long drive
out of state where you will be scattered,
per your request, out near the railroad tracks
which run the length of your old hometown,
where your mind -- always too sharp and too busy
for its own good -- could wander with neither
weight nor interruption, and your body
could walk and walk never losing its way back.
It's a walk I can't make with you; but should I hear
the call of that Illinois Central, rising
above the chatter of birds and traffic hum,
declaring its own speed and distance, at just
the right angle, I'll say they're playing our song,
as if I could remember the words or tune,
as if the grain and grit of your slender bones
were somehow able to dance again.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

CEMETERY GRASS

 

I remember, too, you brushing your hair
in the morning, never gently, but with a quiet
vengeance, as one would rake a field
full of fallen leaves. I imagined, still half asleep,
the sound of claws digging through
deep undergrowth, sparks of electricity
thrown this way and that, lightning flashing
with your frustration below the surface.
"I'm a hag!," you would call out,
and on a good day you would be laughing,
throwing that calico brush to the floor
like a weapon no longer of use.
But I loved your hair, thick and stubborn
its springs and tendrils always reaching upward,
shining like sunlight through whiskey,
threads of silver arriving much too early
for your liking. You said they were your ghosts
returning to have their say, too many
forgotten lives for you to keep track of.
Now, I dress for an early autumn, no matter
the weather, a far cry from the young man
you once loved; and you have become
another ghost to walk beside me, stirring
the trees, brushing the clouds aside as easily
as spider web, curtains, or breath.


Wednesday, June 5, 2024

TURBULENCE

 



Flying into New York for the first time,
all those years ago, the plane gliding through
wisps of white cloud, waving and vanishing,
before the gray and the darkness
rose to meet us, rough knots of wind
jolting us one way, then another, as if God,
having failed to reach us through other means,
was again trying to get our attention.
Lightning broke like a crack in the glass,
the plastic curtain of the window falling shut,
while my anxious mind immediately began
to map out the details of our demise,
engines coughing and sputtering into silence,
the passengers behind us praying without reserve,
the strangely serene drop from 40,000 feet
to some abandoned field, your thin summer skirt
with its pattern of daisies blending into
the long, wet grass, the shapes of our bodies,
appearing to be running -- whether toward
each other or away -- imprinted into the earth.
But just as quickly, the darkness gave way
to sunlight, the clouds began to erase and rewrite
themselves, shapes of commas and ellipses
trailing off, above and below, the brief story of
our life together -- part comedy of errors,
part tragedy -- still being written, still in search
of an ending that would make sense.


Monday, May 27, 2024

THE LAST TIME

 


The last time I saw you, after so long apart,
I was, I confess, startled by how small you seemed,
as if you had somehow perfected a means of
walking away while standing perfectly still, or were
trying to slip out of this world unnoticed.
Your shoulder blades shown through your frayed
gray sweater, your blue eyes drifting further and further
into themselves. Perhaps our former lives always
seem smaller when we wander back in, or perhaps
we are merely the worry dolls of anxious gods,
worn smooth as river stone with time.
You were having trouble eating, you confided,
and trouble sleeping, too -- though
this malady was certainly not new to you,
your mind forever leaping from one thought to
another at the most inconvenient of hours.
Would I have wanted to know in that moment
that this meeting, seemingly insignificant,
was also a kind of parting, that you would soon
disappear into the shadow world of self, no longer
calling or answering the phone, no longer
reading, or bothering to venture outdoors?
Would I have spoken something disguised
as wisdom, or offered you some small comfort,
a prayer which you would almost certainly have refused?
Would I have thought to ask for forgiveness,
or simply to thank you for the years we walked together?
I do not know. But we parted with smiles that day,
not the slightest taste of bitterness lingering
between us. We were kind, as we had been
at the beginning, as we were meant to be, two
old friends softened into unexpected middle age,
adept, at last, with the familiarity of our leaving.

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