A Quiet Town A Father's Day Poem

Once I wrote a book of poems
about my father

but they do not reveal the man
with a raccoon's blue eyes

who brewed beer in the basement,
who drove off every Friday

and returned Sunday nights with
a buck tied to the roof of our Rambler.

The poems just sit up all night 

thinking how my family feels like

a quiet town with an old mystery
that no one talks about
but me.

Tides A Father's Day Poem

One long ago summer after an all-day drive from Indiana in our station wagon, we arrive at grandma's beach house on the Atlantic.

A dozen laughing men and women put down their highballs and cigarettes to hug us.

They are my father's mother, sisters and their husbands and they engulf my parents as shore birds merge into formations.

We four kids sit on the porch sipping cherry cokes, not speaking, our bodies busy sponging it all up:

this vast watery world,
the merry traffic jam of strangers
who seem to care for my father,
and the sudden levity in his body.

It feels strange in a good way
to see enjoyment on him.
He wears it well.

I like the tiny stars that appear in his eyes.
How his hard mouth breaks into jocularity
at things they say to him.

The ocean thrashes before us on the porch,
a sound like Indiana rain storms.

Suddenly in the moonlight the tide spits out waves
of giant horseshoe crabs that grope forward on the sand.

Black helmuts with 7 tiny hands and feet
barely moving but drawing closer.

The sight so beautiful and foreign
like my father's happiness emerging
from his own deep hidden tides.

For the drunks I used to love

I address you as if a chorus,
each voice silky and prized
but all
singing the same song.

Our fascinations still
move a bow across
my spine
though nothing went as planned
      and the buzz-killing
moments can't be swept
under the rug.

When you fell asleep
with my nipple caught
        in your mouth,
the gorgeous cello
of your back
      no longer mattered.

And when
you did not fix the sink
you broke with those same
       helpless hands that
flew along the metal strings
sweet as feathers
on Leonard Cohen tunes
while I paid a plumber,
the way your neck widened
at the shoulder and
       then narrowed
and widened again
      stirred me less.

I will forgive the yawning
when I read you my poems
if you
       forgive me for casting
myself head first
into life
without you.

And if my refusals still sting,
        remember
it was not they that made
our fortunes
but what we did
        next.

Let’s forgive.
The best and worst
of times now seem more
myth than matter.

At every crossroad, we followed
our own disappointing dreams.
And there was mercy
between us:
afternoons on your boat
       under setting suns,
our bellies up.

Where the arrow points

The doctor's wrinkles hide his thoughts
I cannot see what he feels as he
speaks to my love about kidneys.



The trained hands hold an image
to the light to show two dark fists
spread like wings
across my darling's spine.



A million tiny filters are failing
in their God-given duty to cleanse
my husband's blood

so a new diet is ordered,
without a hint of taste,
that must begin tonight
if we are to rescue those
bean shapes off the cliff
from which they dangle.



Only a month before, he says
Let's go to Spain.
He longs for a shaded cafe,
a sip of Tinto Fino.

In his dream, he wears a long white shirt
and a black fedora
and he admires attractive passers by
and they in turn admire
his avalanche of white hair and even whiter
teeth and that leading man jaw.



He leaves the office nervous
but optimistic.

My man does not understand
the next 2 years may be a slow,
moonless descent.



But I do.


I see the levels on the doctor's chart.
I see the arrow on the word: dialysis.
I see no arrow points to Spain.






Rising from the lawn (Mother's Day)

Because she's gone I can talk
about my mother.

I can say she was not the best
nor the worst on the spectrum.

I can say she was not really
like a mother. She was ardent

like a lover, at times
like my worst enemy.

If she were here, she would be
a 101 year old chainsmoker

with hair arrayed like a wedding
cake that would sag under her laugh.

I can say she would scold me
for being too serious and when I

complain, she’d recite an uplifting
line from a famous German sage

fortelling how people cry out
for their mothers

once they are gone
and then cast her eyes to heaven
like a wounded bird.

She would remind me how much
angst she endured for her children

and tell me again to spade her
beside my dad and to visit her there

often because it's the only way
she can rise from that silent lawn.

Avelia's 38th birthday

Our oldest little girl just turned 38.  

Once her beauty
took our breath away.
A rare gift
to be so lovely.

Alas the gift comes with
strings.
Some life-enhancing skills
failed to thrive.
Like speech.

Damn Aphasia.

She entered the world fighting
gravity--the fate of kiwi birds:
Rising above the ground
a forever struggle.

We tried to help her fly but
no matter how often she flailed
her hairy little wings, she could
not rise.

Not built for soaring
like seabirds.

And one day she burrowed
with another kiwi
and behold,
a baby boy.
A seabird.

Imagine.

The kiwis panicked.
Gravity again.
Too much gravity.
One waddled away
in his direction
and ours went
in another.

We do not know what
her days are like

and frankly
we do not want
to know.

The kicker is she’s quite content,
More than many highflying
seabirds we know,
including me.

What luck.

I never imagined
this outcome but
it deserves
some measure
of gratitude.

New anthology by Maya Stein Grief Becomes You

Four of my saddest poems have found a home in this just-released anthology featuring poems, essays and other narratives and images from nearly 60 contributors.

"Grief Becomes You is a tribute to loss, an offering made on behalf of a desire to give voice to the quieter, more shadowy, more elusive aspects of grief’s landscape. The work in this collection reflects the breadth and depth of that real estate, and my hope is that it provides the kind of navigation and comfort we often need most when we are lost in our grief: to know that we are not alone."
--Maya Stein

Print and download;oadable versions available here:
www.griefbecomesyou.com