We named the constellation west of Ursa Major The Camero
because we could feel its starry-eyed engine humming
in the dark, the freeway between Boulder and the Big Dipper
wide open, no limit other than the speed of light
Where else could we go, we were children really
the sky costing us nothing, our thumbs out to hitch a ride
on the next comet or Sputnik or beater 2-door
heading back down the mountain to our one-room whirling galaxy
Where ball-lightning shot down the wall and scorched the floor,
no surprise to us really, only to be expected
from the fire we shaped in our hands, ragged flash and bang
bridging the earth and sky, your skin smelled like creosote
And still does, our returning so many years later all roads beginning
and leading back here, all starlight sparked and bending
through the universe back here, gravity, every stroke of lightning
every storm leaving rainwater where I swing you over pools
Of light and dark, every
time we hear that
engine rumble
overhead
Tag: Poem
Quake Time
It was early, but my day
was in the can –
shiny and sealed and ready to be shelved –
when the world
punched through
its tin
The ground began
to gear and turn,
the floor pry open –
Earthquake in New Jersey –
where all the heartbreak
and forbidden highs
have festered, dormant,
a tectonic release
of waitresses in diners,
sloppy love in the parking lot
of the Vince Lombardi
Truck Stop.
Our dogs blasé, Jersey girls
after all. I open my phone to Spam,
its potted meat of memes
But nothing that can contain
our release, our moment –
our Dinty-Moore botulism
Swelling past the point of explosion –
enough fracked hair
to fissure rock,
more attitude
than even the earth
can bear.
MWA 1951-2024
After Lorca – Of the Dark Doves
The night you died
there were two stones
in the kitchen
One was a wolf
one was a cat
One had its throat in the grave
one was twice as sorry
There are three ceremonies
a chamber where ash is asleep
and a jar of blood
Slicked, I slip on pearls
you rolled like dice
before heaven’s gate
before swine
Your last words to me
two stones fatted for sacrifice
Two calves
with stones in their throats
You were three times prodigal
then you were none
Wine poured slick like blood
cut from a howl
I am a wolf at your grave
without a voice
Two times you died
One was a sorrow
and both were none
For Shay’s Word Garden & Ruby Tuesday
Walkie-Talkie
My old mercury tooth-fillings
are antennae the exact radio frequency of Howdy Doody
and Home on the Range cowboy stations
out of Durango, signals bouncing
madness from the ionosphere into my jaw.
The Science Lady tells us bull elephant tusks
and buffalo horns
resonate with satellites,
GPS sending them howling
in stampede Sputnik frenzies.
Blue whale ribs
channel Fipper reruns –
that chortling song on deep sea recordings
are laugh tracks sounding
until all is darkness in the Mariana Trench.
Creatures with drowsy engines upside down
playing trombone bones, playing the bones bones,
nuclear test TV patterns spread their
Hiroshima wings –
I dream of Jeannie.
Yet remember our awe at that flight of the gannets?
Thousands-upon-thousands wireline seabirds horizon-to-horizon,
returning to their single rock in Novia Scotia –
a nanometer silica of longitude & latitude
nesting between the waves.
What God do they know that I do not?
I who stumble home, not by Creation's let there be light,
but by a tin voice in my pocket –
"You have arrived at your destination."
when nothing could be further from the truth.
Richochet
What else could we do that night when the Dog Star was rabid
in the sky over France? After the Louvre where
Mona Lisa pulled a revolver from her lap,
Gauloise dangling from her lips, crying «Vive la résistance!»
Our brains abandoned by laughter
slamming through countries without repercussion,
air brakes on trains not powerful enough to stop us
from our hero’s journey, our youth unloaded
and stacked with backpacks on the platform, American
pancakes, milk and cookies food fighting with croissants snapping open
switchblades of butter. Nothing more important.
Chanson du ricochet: Song of stones, skipping over water.
Billy the Mountain
“Billy was a mountain (Billy was a mountain), Ethel was a tree growing off of his shoulder”*
A responsive Reading to Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry
Billy, you’re such a wiener! I think we used to pants guys like you in Jr. High. Fer Christsake – Let’s take poems and hold a BIC lighter to their words! See if they burst into Hindenburg flame — Zeppelins of hydrogen guitar riffs. Take the poems you’ve been handed — chip at them with hammerstone and try to make a flint knife or spear, something useful for survival when the world ends. Or cut eyeholes in the pages and use them as a mask in a bank robbery — then turn their meaning inside out and disguise yourself as a metaphor for the blinding sun as you run down the alley, cash spilling out of your bag. Grease yourself with WD-40 poems, WD-50, WD-Infinity — so you can slip through the wormhole from today back to today and only lose consciousness of a few hours. Hell yes, tie them up! Beat them with a rubber hose, interrogate them for meaning, make them give up the names, the names… If they lie, if they fail to tell you the truth, hang them at dawn. Hang them all.
*Billy the Mountain, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, 1971
For Desperate Poets
For Ruby Tuesday prompts
Ruby Tuesday
(For J&C)
You said “Goodby Ruby Tuesday” to me before clicking the lid shut on your jewel-box car – redlining home with your heist in the passenger seat, her hair the theft of every red sky at morning warnIng you of the storms ahead. But you had wound and knotted my vision to a rocket – gravity harpooned to its soul – spoutIng fire into water-black sky in its fury to escape the barbs set by iron laws of the land. My heart caught in the coils – a Nantucket sleighride dragging me skyward away from the river, the estuary, the sea, the whale-road home – instead of sanctuary, you – if you call me Ishmael, I will call you Ahab – sank us on the graveyard moon where you filled coffee cans with ashes of the dead. If I fall to my knees next to you and dig, dig all the way to China, will I find scrimshaw runes of my mother and father written on bones? Will my lips be caked with dust from kissing the lunar ground where I was tossed ashore by the Sea of Tranquility in a meteor storm? Will you find your lost limb when you hobble to the trunk of your car In the moonlight? Back in our story a ruby slipper was still on her foot when her leg washed onto the rocks. Like me, she must have clicked her heels three times and said “there’s no place like home” so we could sleep with the fishes and dream of rivers and the sea where what we’ve lost sinks out of sight to where there is no light – where like a blind fish, my hair luminous, waving in the merman dark – I ask her name and there is no reply.
For Desperate Poets OLN (and Desperate Crossings)
For Ruby Tuesday prompts
Wild Thing
If Jimi says its true its true
the dead don’t lie across their fretboards
six third rails to kiss the sky
For Desperate Poets
Laundry Day
I pour Wheaties of ruin into a bowl– | |
Across the room, | |
iron, zinc, and B12 good for the blood. | |
Scarecrow’s feet at the edge of my eyes, | |
you say look at me. | |
a tattered squint hung on rough wood. | |
Skin as dry as cigarette paper | |
I ask can you forgive me? | |
rolling out of bed on Tobacco Road. | |
Sushi took me for a swim | |
You know about drowning. | |
to the bottom of the river. | |
Does the mirror taste like glass? | |
Your tongue lingers | |
Hard water. | |
Jolly Rancher stuck in my pocket, | |
so sweet. | |
lint and sugar, Fireball cinnamon. |
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
Sphygmomanometer
If I could just reach out and pluck
the jewelry of lights, emerald and ruby,
atop the Empire State Building –
kiss your hand and place them on your finger...
But tonight they shiver white.
I know that we too are the city
waving a handkerchief in surrender –
we all give, uncle.
Ambulances hot up the West side –
flashes rising red like mercury in a thermometer,
EMT’s listening to playlists in someone’s chest,
searching Spotify for melodic signs of life.
Sphygmomanometer, hematocrit, xylophone,
osmosis, music of the spheres in syllables
strapped to a gurney, bang bang tangs
of the street’s tuning forks vibrating against our skulls.
In darkness, we watch the film-flam
towers of chocolate, their veneer of sweetness
crumbling under its own weight,
summer will come soon and melt us all down.
Sitting next to you
the rushing solar system of the Roomba
circles in our ears.
Tell me what “vacuum” means to you.
And yet let us marvel at my lack of a manbun,
and all our peculiar luck, all
that is still pregnant and topsy-turvy
in the thrift store of our lives.