The Quantumverse
On Reading: Four Small Bees Found Living in a Woman’s Eye
He could see in her eyes she'd been sweeping graves. Memory and duty – incense and a yarrow-stalk broom worrying away leaves and dirt. Unearthed, bees flew to her sweat, her sorrow. They knew no pollen could yield such honey – love, so smoked with grief that it was holy. Ancestral manna to feed her, and keep watch.
First published Sept 2020 in the I-70 Review
You said I was to imagine a great thirst, and then to slake it. But I think “back at ya!” – instead why don’t YOU imagine you are the sea itself with salt in your throat, waves rolling off your tongue tasting the brine of last night’s sleep – the great deep trenches deep as the pathways of your lungs, as if we could name your breaths Mariana, Tonga, Aleutian – And you cannot imagine thirst because you are nothing but thirst, the way a fish cannot imagine water. And you cannot imagine drinking, because you are nothing but drink, the way a glass cannot imagine empty or full – In this way you, the reader, and I break the fourth wall of the sea – the stone jetties and dikes, the levees and breakwaters, give way. Our tsunami comes then, beyond imagination.
The day slips away, a greased crow –
hours and minutes on fast wings, my hands slick
from trying to spell the alphabet backward,
cawing: “Mind your p’s and q’s!” and which is which
Waiting for Amazon to deliver a box of wind,
open its thermals to lift my pages,
my shuffling, flapping sorrows and anthems –
trash or wings and which is which
My wife sends me to the pharmacy, midwife
to the season's skele-ghost and fire-nurse costumes,
the mockingbird kiosk sings for my debit card –
and which witch is which
I stop in the park and thumb coins into a rose bed,
wait for autumn to brew me a coffee –
I bang on the trash bin, demand oak trees
drop their red and yellow poems, end their masquerade
Of art and life, and tell me which is which
For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse
This morning I am a shuffleboard disc – shoes scraping across cheap playground asphalt, lines weathered and flaked I try shoving over a copy of The Waste Land, see if I can make points with ”hyacinth,” or bump off “lilacs” with ”lilies” But I'm too sleepy. I still have goblins in my fingers from last night's dreams, my maw dry and filled with peacock feathers Better, my game of folding grief like origami – I tear pages from the book, crease poems into surprise! A crown of thorns Forget about forgetting, memory steeps in tea bags of the past, dried peels and scabs of 1970 in tiny paper sachets "Are we having fun yet?" Outside again, the sun slowly slides Into scoring position, aloft Above the mirrored river, wings choppy as waves, geese wheeze south for winter
For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse
Sleepy, when my arm went over you, the trapdoor slipped open as always And we fell in stuttered flight, like bees drowning in sugar water set out in the lids of jars Tongues and stingers slurred with nectar, our waggle-dance instead a stumble Drunken semaphores to the Sandman – Instead of: "follow this way to forage, to hive, to hoard" He reads: “Turn left at Chicago, ride the ferry in your dwarf costume, and meet us in the Shatterproof Café” Which becomes someone else's dream tonight while we linger on the veranda, our bower draped in honeycomb
For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse
The same way rain betrays a newspaper left on the bench – Water kissing the cheek of headlines under a grey paste sky drained of news – I finger my coffee mug like a rosary, rubbing the face of Christ from the stains In my best Judas voice I ask to you please pass a napkin and a pen What will I erase between the lines, between you and me, What will I leave hanging
Anne Sexton wrote: "God has a brown voice, full and soft as beer." But I think no, more a shot of cask-strength bourbon – "Wow, shit. Woo! Hoo boy." Or "Hoo-ah!" like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Holy – fiery midnight tossed back without sentiment, the stars sway and shake as they did at creation. No sotto-voce stage-right, no sorry Romeo in crestfallen overcoat, no sentimental trombones stepping on valentine shoes doing the boxing-step waltz. Or if God has a soft voice, maybe like asphalt gone formless on a burning hot day, the sky a void – no place for bare feet on the road. Waiting for weather. Waiting for thunder and rain.
Here, an overdose of pigeons – brown and grey as a dime bag of scag – they needle at french fries and trash in a proximal race with rats for bloat and blessed anesthesia. As do I, as do I. I sit on a bench by the river, mainline the romance of rusty barges, the charmed smell of diesel and transmission fluid In the wasteland of a ferry repair depot. It is thusly Charon and I converse. He, a charming industrial ghost – part ferryman, part dilapidated freight warehouse in tux and spats – we veer into conversations on jazz and sports, What 'Trane and Billy Holiday had to say as they crossed over, their eyes and livers hardcore, burned out Detroits of the soul – the Babe too and Jesus A chatterbox who wouldn't shut up and didn't leave a tip. I have no axe to grind with death, but also no yellow bricks to lay end to end then say goodbye – a road paved for the caisson, Its distant drummer's march. A cop drives by, shines his light. At this late stage, it doesn't take a brainiac to come in from the park. I'm a junkie for the dark.
Sometimes a cheroot is just a cheroot said Anna Freud’s lover, chomping a lilac cigar – embers flaring like sunspots, peony juice jetting into the spittoon As brass as the reign of George V’s morganatic mustache – where a century later on Hampstead Heath I pull hairs from the beard of Modernism Declaiming poems in front of her house and biting heads and arms and legs off those gingerbread men of literati, history, badinage, Stanching the wounds of PoMo amputees with crumbs and frosting – while we carry on alive, unfettered, in ecstasy of symbols.
I heard you sing “birds burn alone” thinking you meant to rise, a firebird Now I see you standing lost and lonely in Piccadilly Circus, a ghost wrapped in curls Of carnival red and yellow flame – not standing tall from the ashes, but leaving a residue of hunger Like water marks on stone where you live under bridges burning memories and trash to keep warm
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