Mindfullness

What I came for is here:

Grasses bending to the breeze

Sun blinking when titan clouds pass by

Warm wind pounding on my back

A dear friend who loves it too nearby

Perfect sand dollars at my feet

I'm not hot or cold, no thirst, no hunger

A mind as fine, inert as sand

No woes will find me here

Just those my heart let in.

The Good Old Days

A garage door rumbles up slowly. 

He must have seen me coming 

in my navy blue pleated skirt 

and white cotton blouse

walking home from school.

BAM!  his pants drop to the floor,

he waves congenially at me,

my eyes follow his 
down to a dangling 
turtle neck.

I won’t tell my parents about this old man 

on our street--They’d not let me walk

that way again. 

But I know what lurks 
on all streets leading home 

in South Bend, Indiana.

A stranger in the park tried

to coax me to his car,  my
father's friend, a captain,

trapped me in his bathroom 

with frantic french kisses.

That  Peeping Tom (one of many)!
My neighbor caught him

pulling on my bedroom window
while I lay dreaming
just blocks from Notre Dame.

And little Ronnie Gloster hung himself
when he was 10.
His dad knows why.

Tonight an author on the radio

speaks sadly about the good old days

when a child could walk to school

and home again without a care. 

I want to call him on the air.

There were no good old days
in South Bend, Indiana.  

Tick Tock

Between a tick
and a tock:
calamity ducks

or it may not.

In the crack from

tick to tock
life flows on


or maybe not.

A thing to fear,
a thing to knock
on wood for:
some luck
between
the tick and tock.

But not my son,
the cocky jock.
He fears little,
he fears not
the ticking
of the clock.

Howl

After lunch I wash down the kitchen counter 

And notice the Hackberry tree outside the window

Has grown taller, its branches much lengthened.

Suddenly I think of her

Among those green buds sprouting

along the skinny outstretched limbs

that point south and north, east and west.

Which way shall I look?

The question bursts like a bubble.

It’s not not heavy. It knocks me

into the chair. My lips form a zero 

and I howl like a dog tied to a tree. 

Reading Sharon Olds

“I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,

Then I lay down on my father’s grave....

When I kissed the stone it was not enough,

When I licked it my tongue went dry a moment, I

Ate his dust, I tasted my dirt host.” -- From The Father

Such wild, such passionate 

       

exaggeration! 

The way this poet makes oceans 

       out of tears, 

     

volcanoes from pimples— 

     

         entire solar systems—

from self-immolation,

writing herself into its burning center, 

    

 shining so extremely, 

    

     a star on the verge of collapse,

gulping her father her mother—

     

       those lifeless planets trapped

     

in the poet’s gravity. 

The mass of her grief astounds me—

      

      light years thick with pain—

not theirs--

       but her own unquenchable.

It’s what draws me closer, turning the pages.

Her  ache at first unimaginable, 

     

       but more and more real 

and becomes my own. 

With every line, she peals away

     

      my peach skin, cuts me open, 

drops me pitted 

    into her deep cup, 

into its radiant sludge, me too 

     now soft and bruised,

so tender she could eat me

     with her gums.

Scents

When he opens his mouth, I inhale the hops

of Papst Blue Ribbon, the toast of Lucky Strikes,

Gillette's sandalwood floats from him, so too the

copper scent of deer blood and the opossum he slams 

against our house and boils unshorn. 

(He could have shot it--he keeps

rifles in the house.)

He’s not a family man, my grandmother warns

but my mother runs from her broken down country,

its wiped-out illusions, to New York and then regrets it 

immediately and every morning to that morning when my

father’s liver gives out and even after that, right up to when 

my mother takes her own last, she regrets it.

He tells her he’s sorry. He says so just before he points

to eagles circling above his bed. 

He says, I know when I'm right and I know 

when I'm wrong and I was wrong.   

That’s not good enough for my mother but it’s good 

enough for me.

The Boy Next Door

My room is small. 
A twin bed stands
beneath a window
where every night
across the street
Tommy’s mufflerless
chevy rumbles

up to his house 
with a boom. 

And next to the bed, 
a long dresser

with a column 
of  mayonnaise jars 

where lightning bugs
flare like comets.

I count the comets 
until a light
shines on my window

from Tommy’s house
and I hear Tommy 
turn on his shower.

I count the moments
until my room turns still
and dark again
and I go back to counting
the sparks
in the mayonnaise jars.