On the road

And then the car stops beside the freeway, 

alongside a meadow of red blinding tulips, and we 

step out and wave goodbye to our new friends, 

and then hold out our pretty young thumbs, the nails 

like clear unpolished stones pointing to the road ahead, 

when another car pulls to the side and we run heavily 

with our mounts to meet it, smiling at the drivers, our new friends, 

with grateful exuberance. 

Because everything stirs, piques, us, 

and so deeply. Everywhere we point and gasp.

So this is England! 

So this is Scotland!

So this is Italy!

We lick the rain drops from our noses, noting 

a sweet foreign taste, a marvelous scent.

So this is Greek rain!

So this is Swiss snow, so light, so white! 

So this is Turkish milk, German bread, 

French cows, Dutch wasps. 

We bow at all the sacred places, 

remove our caps, our shoes, touch the crosses 

and swords.

So these are their skulls!

We walk the catacombs, gaze long into their memory, 

and at the graves, sometimes, we have no words, but always, 

always we are certain untold numbers of translucent 

beings walk with us, a delegation sent, the past looking at us, 

judging us. We welcome it.

We long for its approval.  

Would I be a better woman?

People wake from their trances when

my father passes by

in uniform as if on parade

while I skip behind trying not to step 

on his very shiny shoes 

that blast up the street 

like torpedoes.

Then comes that moment--
I can touch its contours, 

I can call it forth any time--

when I reach for the soldier's hand--

when I feel mine fit snug as a shrimp 
inside its shell--

that’s how I want it to be. 

I want him to claim me as I claim him.

I wonder now, would I be a better woman 

had he not yanked his hand free, 

had he not said, I don't have time to be silly,

had he not meant, not now, not ever?

I cannot believe it

I just can't believe how much it hurts

to watch the Bee Gees' One Night Only 

concert on TV. As if the Seventies 

weren't a decade 

of missed cues and dread.

Yes there was that.

But also love love love

with those broken hearts.

As if that time

had been a kind of heaven for me.

How deep was my love?

There were 9 or 10,

each eternal, each, 

one by one, took over the center

of my life.

I also hitched a ride to Istanbul, Paris, 

Barcelona, Rome and Athens 

twice during that time.

I lived in a tiny village on Crete 

one November.

I cried for McGovern.

That precious time.

I knew then it was precious.

I knew everything is temporary.

Everyone who jumped to her feet 

when the Bee Gees sang any 

of their six straight hits,

understands the mystique.

Those seventies.

One Decade Only.

When everything important 

had to happen to you.

How the years blew away--

balloons adrift from that party--

those rambling, riveting hours.

And now this mourning, this 

Tsunami of grief

delivered by the Bee Gees.

I cannot believe it.

At my desk

When I sign my name 

to the graduation cards I will send the young 
achievers in my life,

I think a moment on my own 
cap and gown, blue as the Spring Missouri sky 

that afternoon at Grandview High.

My family not present, mother not able to stand

the sun, her Army wife nerves too raw, 

too keened after five moves in four years

with my soldier father 

who bunks in our house but doesn’t 

make eye contact.

In my family, graduation 
from high school is a duty 
not an achievement so there will only 
be ice cream and cake after dinner.

Still, I walk off the green lawn, my diploma 

rolled and ribboned in my hand.

Its power pulsing through palm and fingers.

Thin paper with little physical weight

holds a transforming energy.

I see myself at the portal of another world,

as if I'd been living in a cage and now 

the hatch has flown open and I can wriggle 
and heave myself out, shake myself awake 
with a wild cry.

I am now in charge 
of myself.

In this moment

I'd like to tell you, in this very moment the ground is shifting 
and my heart is spinning around the chandelier, 
that I hear an angel singing La Vie En Rose and
I understand every word though I speak no French 
and when the song ends, I actually do speak French 
to my husband dressed as a high-ranking Arab
soldier with a glossy belt and fancy shield 
and I can see the pyramids along the Nile.  
I would like to say that now, nothing will ever be the same.
Ahh but most moments are twins with identical words, 
left and right ears and eyes and hemispheres, 
getting on and off the same bus,
watching or ignoring identical sunsets, being as we are
in our habits not all that different from pigeons.
Not to say twin moments don’t have power--
beautiful and awful--
not to say they don’t bring tears, awe, platters of sweets.
Only to say they make the past near impossible to remember.
Only that it takes work to lift a moment from its trance
into those high places where clouds take shapes.
It takes thinking more like lunatics to begin a pilgrimage, 
to become a Roman Catholic, to take a hike with someone
who brings out the gypsy in us, to prove something to ourselves 
beyond a shadow of a doubt, to try another new thing.
I'v heard there are all-night bonfire parties on the beach,
that there are people who need our help, and if that’s
not your thing, there are “laughing at death” societies. 
I want to sing now: Moon river, wherever ever you’re going, 
I'm going your way.

Doilies

My mother leans on her walker, from her arm

dangle four knitted snowflakes.
Nice placemats! I say.

NO!...NO!! THEY ARE DOILIES! 

She shrieks as if the word placemat scalds her. 

You like them?  -- in her voice such hope.

Yes I do. Only half a lie.  
The knitting's well done, the pattern believable,
and I can feel the red in my gut.

But the snowflakes stay in the bottom 
drawer for decades

until last night when I place them 
under plates at my party. 

These doilies are lovely, someone remarks and
I want to jump from my chair and dance 
for my mother and for this guest who deserves
these doilies more than I but I just 
can't part with them. 

Hard to see

Hard to see

Gray sky, gray city, this gray hill where 

now a siren rips through fog, 

some new calamity below. 

Rain juices down my face. Hard to see a path, 

harder not to think of ash, the grave, 

harder not to look over to gray Hayward 

from this gray slope 

on Fairmont Ridge, harder 

not to think of their graves on the next hill (my mother and father)

in that muck across from Kmart, so very far from their 

birth homes, in Hayward where no one knows them, 

where they came to be less alone with each other. 

Will you ever visit our grave? asks she who hates graves 

but overcomes her animus on Christmas with a small tree 

for my father, because she honors him dead more than alive, 

because now he can do no more harm,  because death 

is a big price to pay for forgiveness.