Published poems

Sorry I Had To

 

locate her name in the global directory

not sure of how

many matches might come

 

and perhaps you didn’t think

of this tool, this landscape.

 

I had to know

the shape of her name

each stroke and incline.

 

You thought of my geography

not so good.

Forgive me

I could not resist retracing

the broken lines on the map you left.

Winter Moving Into Something Else

 

The cold push of day into evening, as the sun resists

the heavy clouds. 

We stop and watch – our free hands locked together.

Will you know me after the last light of day?

Winter fades into a moon sliver and satellite star.

There are two wishes.  We already made ours.

Our free hands locked together.

 

Will you know me after the last light of day?

We will always know more of each other.

This body is yours, but it was mine first.

 

We skirt around our histories

like the tide coming in to collect stones, picking up the lightest

ones to carry.

The rest left on the beach to be, or tell new stories.

It depends on whose hand touches them – decides

how they were formed,

where they have been.

 

For a moment, we polish stones

say, this is my stone.  This is how I was formed.

This is the shore I chose to wash onto

so you could find me. 

New. Worn. Knowing.

We hold our stones, caress them, and throw them back into the waves.

Our free hands locked together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suspended

 

While the rest of the world sleeps

we watch movies.

 

We eat ten o’clock dinners and pretend we’re in Europe,

lie down for sleep at three a.m. – these nights that predict no work

in the morning.

 

We watch our kittens play, and forget about

the oppression of bosses and lunch breaks, and still

I play a tape in my head over and over, holding in

the success and failures of jobs.

 

Our kittens finally stop – and curl into balls

too tired to run and scratch. The plastic jingling ball, an elusive thing

they can’t quite dig their nails into.

 

 

 

Fingernail

 

No matter how much I abuse my fingernail,

it will always come back.

This protective shield – why don’t we have more of it?

I never respected it before, instead tore off its head like unsweetened rhubarb,

then complained of the raw bruising.

Hard as nails, we say.

Why only a shield for digging, a tool for ripping and scraping?

Such a vicious part, like teeth. 

How else would we get inside everything?

I rarely buff them to razor sharp, but admire a tall stalk of nail

until it snags and breaks – then curse it.

Break it off; reprimand it

by pulling out splinters of keratin and skin that make the nail rim

gouge and bleed, harshly groom my cuticles to reveal clean, white moons.

I don’t often paint my fingernails; there is a practicality at work,

why advertise it?  Let the colour chip, fade, and decay.

Little daggers, groomed and polished;

a means of injury.

Marker

 

In the trim grass, a rough-cut stone

small enough for a first initial, a last name.

There is no date, no epigraph.

The marker is not pink granite, nor marble,

nor slate – just rock.

The nearby sapling is now a fir tree, and lends

some needed shelter

from the soil and rain corroding

his stone, the name.

 

She bends to touch it, traces

the cold, unfinished edge,

turns her head and notices

the tall and decorative grave markers, the stones.

There are people around her.

The are old – they talk of other things.

Because You Love Me         

 

I will spill drinks.

I will break things unceremoniously,

stick my foot in my mouth,

but never chomp on my tongue.

 

Because you love me I will forget some,

but never the scars you hold;

everything you say in quiet darkness.

 

I will say the wrong thing,

still sound awkward on the phone,

bang my funny bone.

 

Because you love me I will sing in the car,

challenge yellow lights.

I will tell you off in jest or no –

 

I may have one drink too many,

burp like a man,

eat with my hands, order squid,

wrap up restaurant dinners.

 

Because you love me I will stay where you are,

be the last voice you hear before sleep.

 

 

 

 

Song for the Song of the Abandoned Piano

 

A graveyard of keys, and the dormant sound of Mozart,

Pachelbel, chopsticks, maybe Swanee River.

With a three-foot tall critic in the house

the songs are short, too, and rudimentary.

Your un-tuned ivories, now used as miniature speed bumps

while my nervous fingers twitch

a forgotten melody.

You are a shelf for all the things that keep us apart; another counter space.

At night, I clean off the debris; tune your hidden strings,

teach you to sing again

in a sound-barriered world; a place with no disturbances

where the notes fly up

like birds, their hard-shelled mouths open in time.

 

 

 

 

Return

 

My mother stood on her front porch

after she helped carry the heavy hope chest

and watched me carry it out again.

She’d raced me home to avoid this:

 

The man crying at the foot of her driveway;

his temporary tears.

 

 

 

The Visitor

 

She raps the rhythm of a secret knock

in her sleep –

the one she learned in a dream. The hallway is so long.

When he lets himself in, she will know him.

 

She lives alone, surrounded by her antiques,

refuses to fade into the decor and become another

fixed item in the room.

She refuses to surrender this place.

All this place knows is time.

 

She waits for him

while the milk sours in the fridge

and everything else is past its due.

 

She waits for the guest

who never arrives too soon.

 

Between her afternoon naps, she reads the newspaper

to learn what she will be missing.

Reads Dickens,

memorizes lines from Austen.

She keeps everyone’s past alive;

the last one to tell the stories.

 

She envisions her visitor as a dark stranger

from the Bronte books – perhaps Heathcliff –

or her husband

come to gather her fragile bones in his arms

and carry her

down the long hallway

as he did on their wedding night.

 

She is a widow now, a grounded sparrow,

still lingers beside her tree

she tumbled out of three blocks

from her birthplace.

 

She waits,

falls asleep in her chair.

With one ear buzzing,

she listens for her secret knock.

 

 

 

Unwritten Letters of Eloisa and Abelard

 

These morning confessions make me want to sin.

A game of which nun has the best story – shock our Father,

in his stale box. He wants to hear it all.

Well, you know, I have a story to tell.

At curfew, when the other nuns retired to their holes in the wall,

I found a secret passage to somewhere new – to you.

Brother, did our Father want to hear

about the rough knot holding your once-holy tunic?

How smooth and how easily it came loose?

How we tunneled through to be human? I dared not speak

the language of your flesh, until forced to, a prophecy

or your tongue, a thin wafer on my tongue – the body and blood –

and why did my habit not burst into flames?

Know this, I am kept in a tight wrap of mourning –

when all day I pray for you and night’s black robe to fall.

Still, I pray for you. After all

our confessions told, and you – paying the highest price

of men, before death. You are a man, still.

That part of you, now gone, was not the only part I desired.

I want you still, after the bruises and gouges of my own flesh

in my confined stone space.

And why are mine the only letters written down?

The stones stacked in my walls wait to be thrown, but who can judge us?

Whose skin is unmarked by beating out the demons denied?

Your silence is my punishment – know this, they have not conquered us

so long as I can remember.

 

 

Oh God, her letters sting me; small hooks in my body.

So long as we can remember –

Castrate my heart, my brain. All sensation linked to her.

I want to write –

 

Sister, sweet sister, half-sister –

no, you are other – something whole.

I betrayed the Mother and called you lover.

For I no longer worship sunrise.

I, too, wait for moonlight,

try to find comfort in safer passages

to lead me out from underground

to assure me this lure is also sacred.

I find none in such archaic pages, and question if

my religion is to gaze upon your bare head,

 

as I tarry in my hair shirt, porcupine vest, an unnatural animal

whipping myself into submission, a bleeding heart.

 

 

 

 

Willow

 

The tree in the backyard, separated

from my yard

hunkers down

with her rapunzel hair

no one climbs.

She sits on her haunches,

studies the dying grass, her arms reaching down

to touch a distant relative, offering her dandelions and cat willows –

The autumn flowers that survive.

 

Does she know how lovely

she is in her dejection?  A long breeze.

She is Daphne, hiding from her lover:

a bird she evades, finding it difficult to rest

on her branches.

 

A Garry Oak towers nearby, his arms

reach up toward something

that looks like hope;

although, his leaves are dry and ready to fall.

 

A stag waits in the grass, muses

on the light interval of rain.

The way it falls, and doesn’t.