The maple creaks
under the weight of the sparrow.
The devious cat thinks to corner a drifting leaf,
while the squirrel remonstrates.
My wheel chair does not do well on stairs.
You come.
Not afraid anymore,
I tell you things.
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Night necklace
A dream of Sally Field
before her habit.
Of goods unsold and their crestfallen man.
Of footsteps lost in slow meander,
and a rethreading of fumbled beads that will bring you back.
Quarry Light by Edie Meade
Limestone country, where the quarry growls in heat thunder over the fields: we’re driving to find the place Dad wanted his ashes interred. Tonight Mark and I bring the boys to a cabin so quiet we can hear the electric lines of the high pylons hum through the easement.
We take a creekbed for our evening walk. Limestone bears fossils and slips of gray clay, mayapples, mint and touch-me-nots alive with damselflies. I know them like old friends – comfortable even decades later because they represent the nothing-times, those stick-digging days when little needed to be said.
At nightfall, we walk back to the cabin along an access road white with crushed gravel. The kids rush through puddles made by over-payload dump trucks. Frogs hop out ahead, unafraid. None of us are afraid, somehow, out here. Quarry light brings a lingering, thick sunset and I realize how much beauty there…
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Effigy
Boxes sit moldering in the basement: things we thought we needed, in impulsive increments, but never touch now and can’t get rid of. Effigies of missed moments; gargoyles that laugh at lost love.
Image: Effigy urn- San Francisco Museum of fine arts
Ephemeral
~One can’t speak the things that are told to the mind at night; can’t sing the paths of private melodies that dwell in the antipodes of what is. But, thread you those footsteps, stay to the true, and know what is coming is living in you.~
Art: The Virgin, by Gustav Klimt
Out of the woods
I have no story.
No masterpiece,
no grand release,
no claim to glory.
I live inside the artist’s brush,
the cooling night, the river’s rush,
the knocking of the woodland Thrush;
in Plato’s Allegory.
***
Art by Remedios Varo
How
How straight the young oak
that dreams of sky-rise.
How stilled- the hot houses,
brow-beaten in the heartbeat of the heat.
How contrived-
the perfect lawns like dime store pictures.
How bobbing-
the tiny birds that speak in peeps.
How serene the cat- curled in woolen sleep.
Perfect ~ by Lisa Alletson
We would always stub out our candy cigarettes on the mulberry leaves in our tree house, fingers and lips stained purple from berries, watching our parents drink gin and tonics after sets of sweaty tennis. Mia’s mother with the long legs saying her daughter would soon need a nose job. Her whisky voice rising into the branches when she asked my father to join her for a shower. My mother giggling and pouring her gin to overflowing.
***
We would always track down the nearest bar no matter what continent. Mia’s huge grin getting us in even when the place was full. Waiters competing to refill her perfect martini. Refusing the men buying her drinks, she’d pull me from my chair to slow dance, her fingers smoothing my hair, holding my body tighter with each passing city and year, as we’d sway and sing Piano Man in every language we…
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Twelve
On a roaming evening in a town called Twelve, the houses were all of glass. One could see, as one passed, the cold and the warm hearths, the worshippings, the pointing fingers. The quick caresses or the coldness of turned backs and folded arms.
The street of shops was all dull metal, windowless with risings of sooty smoke . I heard the hiss of pavement rain, and stopped for a slowly train. On a lime-lit billboard in a field of wild rice, broad brush strokes said SEVEN, a devil’s tail pointing straight ahead.
All my life
I feel odd and strange: as if someone from the future has breezed into my room. From a point of light in a grey sky he comes. He has broken wings and sunken eyes, but smiles and caresses my face with warm hands. And he says…no, his eyes say…”All your life. All your life.”
(With acknowledgement to Lennon / McCartney)
[Art by Francis Picabia- “The infinity of God”
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