NaPoWriMo’s up to 800+! This thing's totally out of control. Maureen’s prompt on Day #4: write the blues, but first, live the blues.
Mostly all of them. God bless 'em.
Winter of 96, my vigils every night
listening between my mother's snores
for what. The IRA. The murderer from Seven.
Checking the oven. Some contortionist.
The enemies are men too, naturally.
How could a girl at fifteen save her mom,
her brother. Maybe Joan of Arc,
maybe versus David Bowie, but the world is dark
and crawling. Then those college boys
slept in our parlor. Rope of garlic. Vale of health.
I slept eleven hours; we all had brunch.
If murderers are Dracula so are the boys.
Your weakness lets them in; your weakness is
boys' kindness. Let me be kind the boys say
no one having taught them to bring over pie.
Even you, love, even you and I
began with you saving me from an unnecessary drive.
I won't allow it you told my brother,
the one I'd saved from being blown sky-high.
You'll leave this house at once and so I drove away
no chance to come back later, but still burned with saved.
Posted here.
*
“The Child is father of the Man”—Wordsworth
Areas of sun in Atlanta, southland spring. I want to drink it, but it’s not quite inside me the way the cooler weather was. Cars rattle, their hums and buzzes making the season seem ordinary, plain.
What was that? I ask. It wasn’t quite like death, but knowledge is its own version of not-wanting. I remember the way I carried the same coat around from port to plane, wanting to remove everything, to remove the cloak.
There was one bird in the mountains, though, a little one that sung from a rock. Oh those rocks, Alice, as good as anything, better than green zinnias and not quite humming the way the city does. That’s what I want to remember.
Traveling for apology’s sake seems endless….
Acceptance? A disguised way to sink back into home, some sort of place where I’ve been wanting to fit.
The sun is splitting the trees again, but not quite the way the rain made it seem before. We were high up there. There were good discussions.
My things to do in Portland dress wasn’t worn there, but is worn here, to make the memory hang on to something pure. But what’s pure?
Uncertainty seems to be the latest virtue, if one can call it that.
At times, the ways of loving send hope out of the chest—the beginning of knowledge that can’t be measured without a common, already loved, really known, but with room for something more, entirely alive.
Posted here.
*
Charging bayonet
Plate 359—Eadward Muybridge
The man with the gun must be thinking, out there
is the center of his purpose. The grains of the gun's wood
snug against the hip-bone. Left arm cradling the long barrel
so that the tip with the affixed blade tilts upward. Heart-level.
Purpose breathes its long kiss into his ear. A breathless kiss
held so that the man's stomach cinches into a concave sack.
Love falls where the wind carries his body—in short
asthmatic huffs as the man's legs move him forward, left
right, left. All the while, the butt of the rifle presses against
his flesh. Spring air let into the studio pulls the dark velvet
curtains from their rods as the coffee cools. Just as casually
a knife, raised up against the black backdrop says "look."
The man's shadow shakes in the new light as his bayonet
halves the air, fits itself into the fissures of an imagined breastbone.
Purpose as close to the edge of the picture frame as an arm. Purpose
to fill the wound, half bloodied and hot. The urge of the rifle
slaps against his thigh. Purpose as far as a country
where no memory can drive itself as deep as the hilt.
Posted here.
