Poem A Day Project: Home Sweet Home

My friend's husband calls to tell me
she cannot go to the beach
with me tomorrow:
she's coming unstitched with worry.
What if she has an episode?
What if her meds fail?

The problem is she remembers
as if it happened yesterday
what her father did long ago
in that house with no white shutters,
with no softness of gathered sheers,
or clean scent of white cotton.

Hers was an unscrubbed shed,
rugs were stained,
windows small and heavily draped
so light and air could not rush in.

She longs for a house
with a blooming sofa heaped with pillows,
a soft throw for an autumn nap,
sunlit bedrooms painted

in dreamy hues.

A house where childhood
can be transformed.
A lighthearted realm of seascapes,
candlesticks and books.
A place to host family dinners,
share pure embraces
and remember a beloved past.

Poem A Day Project Dirge on the Pier

A hundred harbor seals swim

along the pier, all  barking and coughing.

But the bellow does not at first 

disturb the filmy light, 

the fairy shimmer around the sea.

Susan Radlov is dead. 

It's the coughing from below 

these planks that calls 

this shocking fact 

to mind again and now 

the chummy yowl of  harbor seals 

will join the growing list 

of most mournful sounds 

I'll ever hear.

Poetry Workshop (Poem A Day Project)

The poet to my right coils 

and uncoils herself, flattens her chest 

against the table, rolls around in her seat--

She just can’t contain herself in a single form.

Not her on my left with a penchant

for the lost, the brittle, all the hard

things in life, which she reads

to us with twitching eyes, spine pulled 

straight as a rod, her whole body pleading

Don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me.

Another sits so quietly.

Life has scraped her clean, taken her apart 

stone by stone, washed and dressed her

and set her down across from me.

Her poems fidget, search for a place to start.

She asks, Can anyone help me?

All the rest model courteous self-control. 

There’s not a carnival vibe among us. 

We don’t even blink when our teacher

Tells he will soon be dying.

On command we pick up our pens--

our rescue from this shy reserve.

(Just because we’re poets 

doesn’t mean we know what to say.)

We simply share a need for

kindness, for mercy as we force ourselves

upon one another shamelessly.

I'll Miss Him (Poem A Day Project)

He's leaving.

The young man lugging his TV 

Out to that beatup old car

Is happy to be going.

I’ll miss him.

But not how you miss someone

who’s never coming back, not like

you miss the child who hugged your waist

As tightly as he could and cried,

This was a fun day, mom!

I wish I could rewind it.

First Date (Poem A Day Project)

He talks alot about Lulu.

I know what she likes by the way she meows. 

I can see that cat purring against his chest.

Feel his hands stroking her nippled belly.

 

Taste the kiss on my mouth.

That warm tongue lapping 

the little puddle behind my lips.

I can hear him listening raptly

to my meows.

What's in My Journal (Poem A Day Project)

Inspired by a poem of same title 

by William Stafford

What’s in My Journal?

Highly  wrought notes 

of discontent--

ungrateful children, 

husbands, colleagues--

their slack performances

portrayed with cinematic flourish.

A messy tableau of anecdotes,  

occasional self-immolations

rescued  by exuberant affirmations:

There's magic when you’re not afraid!

Moods of rapture but also

a tiresome focus on death,

mine especially.

Bursts of discovery: 

Sand pebbles made of crushed bones, shells, 

no two exactly alike!

The incomprehensibility of everything:

What am I but clumps of wildly spinning atoms? 

And questions: Why only two genders?

The search for consolation, 

for understanding,

trails of failed attempts,

of early understandings, 

evolving understandings, 

riotous misunderstandings, 

and despair 

of ever understanding. 

Dismay the mind is immaterial:

nothing solid in here, nothing tangible

and so totally prey to chemistry. 

Protestations about life, 

about this sea of chaos, 

about the absence 

of a universal moral code. 

A fractured collage of memories

I never tire of:

full moons, shimmery seas,

snow peaks. 

Much recanting, anxious dips 

into redemptive fantasy:

A divine creator? 

And blessed moves into mindfulness:

I am the universe and it is me.

But mostly, unconnected thoughts 

that struggle

to connect

for decades,

verbatim,

but always

peter out.

Clutter (Poem A Day Project)

My daughter looks happier

than her baby daddy.

At least in this picture 

in my hand, the same hand

that used to hold up

5 fingers to her five fingers 

and 

waited a decade 

till she could count them.

No surprise she hooked up with him.

But astonishing how these puerile 

minds pilot such beautiful faces

(like a plow pulling Arabian horses).

Her beauty still stuns me: The face

of an ageless innocent 

(despite the later mayhem).

Funny how my whole world can

be captured by a single photo,

a thought that sets me back in motion, 

clearing the shelves, ready 

to pack up all these pictures.

I rarely even notice the faces anymore,

Only see the clutter, the absence 

of symmetry in the frames, 

all of which evokes 

the constant need for tolerance 

and proves how many ways things go wrong, 

how truth can be obscured but not changed--

It bashes me in my own home--persistent

and powerful--but I’m impressed

that such an imperfect life as mine

remains so eminently liveable.

No Exit (Poem A Day Project)

On this late afternoon, a yearning overtakes me
when only my eyes and nose stay dry as islands
in a plenitude of liquid and heat,

all the rest submerged,

thighs bobbing, hair spiraling 

like seaweed.

The radio makes noises my flooded ears

have lost sense of, 
steamed skin, cooked bones.

I feel a self disperse, float high
into insubstantiality, into delight

into the last drops of density 

light the window with haloes,

push gently against the glass

ready to make a graceful farewell 

when there's a knock

on the bathroom door, 
a chill in the water

and the noises from the radio 

make perfect sense again.