Tourist

I barely move now. Nearly still.

Crawling beneath a shell, 

the past stacked high, scales 

for every memory. 

Inside each, a photo or two. 

Some letters. A wool cap.

With my load, I amble 

along, here and there. 

No sense of where. 

The question every day, 

where now? 

What is life without a hill to climb? 

There must be a hill to climb.

A widow must step outside 

and look around,

pick up a tool and get to work. 

She must choose a path and clear it, 

then fill it with flagstone. 

No good to stroll about  

like some old tourist 

in Chinatown. 

Gutttural sounds

Oh honey, look at me.

Sitting here and must endure

your failure to be present,

to suffer the deficiency 

of you all by myself,

endure the lack of you 

without you.

Here and now this paucity 

of you must be gone

through so alone.

I can’t remember all we did,

only how you nursed me in the dark.

I have memorized your eyes on me.

I could not love you more 

than I loved myself 

but I loved you enough, 

or so you wrote in every card 

piled here on my lap. 

But just when I need you most, 

you are so absent,

so enormous this gap.

Groomed

His grooming strikes you 

the way a green golf course in winter 

calls out 

for a long long 

glance. 

His love of it speaks

no words, 

there’s a shyness in him 

toward the art 

though he entered the world 

knowing 

its schemes.

Even when the nurse wheels 
him to dinner, 

you must look at the man 

with waves of white hair 

in the knobby whelk sweater, 

those dark eyes open and blank 

as a mounted stag, 

but my oh my, 

what class, what rank.

One last bite

Just before life spirals down 

into the waiting game bag like a bird 

shot in midair--

it is still summer, 

the summer before 

it all begins to end--

he wakes from a nap

and wants a burger; one crooked wing 

reaching up, his hand clawing mine.

Such strength!

Still manhood in it!

(Even the fire fighter who lifts him 

from the floor five times last month thinks so.) 

And he scolds, Come on! Help me up! 

This impatience hurts me, but I say, ok! ok!

I'm doing the best I can! 

Which now I regret; how I regret it,

this, all my corruptions.

And then my arms wrench under his pits 

and lift him as the feral wife and forklift I’ve become. 

I lift, lift, lift my man’s heft, his clots of skin,

his flossy egg white hair leaping from his head,

until he stands, 

wobbles and shuffles, a man on a ship rocked by storm 

and I drop him into the wheel chair and bend down, 

nose to nose to cream the bruises on his cheeks 

as stars and tiny warships dart from his globes.

I don't see my groom in there and this drains 

hope, the blood of life, from my own body 

but his hunger galvanizes us so I pull

his bird feet from the floor onto the footrests.

He repeats, I want a burger with everything on it! 

How shocking. 

He has not eaten in days 

and now when all is lost, 

when his mouth 

and vital organs are going berserk, 

he craves life--one last sweet bite of it--

and so I rush to the door, lay down the ramp, 

push the wheel chair hard and fast 

over that ramp because it is a bridge 

and we are rolling, rolling 

over water that is rising, ever rising

ever.

Golden Gate Bridge

A marvelous sight. 

The shoreline shines into view 

before it's swallowed as the bright blue door 

of sky opens 

and closes in silence. 

And the ocean restless, without rest

pulls back and forth and heaves itself onto bluffs, 

a wind on its heals blowing grayness fast and furious, 

fog rushing like tumbleweed across the land 

while the bridge stands still and silent as a ghost

lurking behind the curtain, another world.

I love the bridge hidden in fog, the bridge of memory.

I love it hidden as much as I love it clear with red steel rising.

I forgive all whose arms winged from it. I can see all

through their eyes vanish into whiteness, 

then darkness, churning their souls clean. 

The moon

How big the big moon tonight;

how it stirs this heart 

with its perfect swollen shape, 

with its dazzling light--a great celebrity 

in that world of night. 

Forget its cold truth: waterless, airless;

not a better world--it would kill me given a chance. 

Still I never tire of the view. 

Every full moon, half, any phase

feels new and gay and wonderful. 

My astronaut eyes fixed on earth, 

brocaded blue, unguarded in the path of sunbeams. 

The shock of that empty awesome 

surrounding black would change me. 

Even decades later 

while brushing my teeth, the image assails me--

our patterned earth circling in the ink of infinite deep. 

The mystery of it. 

The total mystery of it.

And no one to turn to. 

How I'm feeling

Don't ask me how i'm feeling. 

Please      just      don't ask. 

Because   I      am     reeling. 

No no no      ask me.

DO ask.

Because I’ll tell you 

even if you don't inquire, 

even though I'm drained 

of all routine desire. 

I want to tell you. I really do. 

I   do   not  want     to  be alone 

emoting blue. 

I need to report it. 

Or should I say, deport it. 

But the right word for 

this anguish, what is it?

What explains my hot weeping? 

These pounding moods 

that hound me like a shadow

that follows me around?

That when I see a bridge 

I want to jump!

Is the word....the diagnosis.....

Donald Trump?