POEM A DAY 2019

#1

what you say flatly out loud to someone else is sometimes more true than what you say over and over to yourself

Trying to Poem

GLUG

Would the grandmothers
have been proud?
Were they there
in the steam, the dark,
the nursing room,
the party's crowded core?
Similarly sweatered,
similarly soothing
women –
easier when the blood's
mismatched,
easier among caricatures,
easiest when the lineage
is liquid hot
and we drink up
together.

Virgo

I keep staring at the horoscope
Hoping to pull meaning from the vagaries
Wide open for interpretation
Brushing my hand through
The meadow grasses of what could it mean
It seems
We caught different insects in the field
My grasshopper saw the world expanding beneath
Its leap airborne unknown
Your sweet steady ant made new pathways in
Its home grounded comfort
“A tree with many flowering branches”
Well that could mean goddamn anything
I realized as we smiled at each other
Presenting our bugs
A convincing entomology of what we each want
How do we devotedly stay the course
When this meadow path forks
And we forget to check the stars
In each other’s eyes
This horoscope
Promises deep-seated future messages
So I keep glancing at the phone
Hoping to see you texted back
Because that is a clear sign and
Because loving you is so, so easy.

12:50pm

softly tilting forward
D's revving engines outside downstairs
downstairs sound studio
sounds around surround sound styrofoam
B cuts through the proof
-proving-
D's quiet now.
now just the birds.

cooking lesson

pulled pork
in adobo? gochujang sauce
red onions, pickled gently
plantain mash, lime zest, chili
guac
a-mole

carne asada
seared tomatillos
corn, cotija, lime
greens, still deciding

TO HOPKINS ON FAMILY LIFE

“Pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder ring”
As my husband would likely answer you, GM: “indeed”
But did you measure only the oak of sorrow’s seed?
Here joys likewise schooled by forejoys louder sing.

Marion at the party

Maybe she’s hungry
Smiles, cries, watches, nuzzles in
Wouldn’t we like to know

Waves

new waves  / old waves new pains
old pains / come and go
                     in waves

soft music takes the numb away / now i think
         i used to drink / drink to not feel
a thing / oh yes
alcohol burns my thoat  / and cigarettes
                 only a shadow memory
      of who i used to be /
keeps me sober

old waves new pains
old pains come in waves
come look for me / come and go / like the shimmery grays
          and winter blues
ahhh but the stars
they are still here
            to light my way

       

King of Bedtime

I stayed in Monteverde for three days
pulling weeds from a vegetable garden

and sleeping on a hard floor. On the fourth
day I walked down the sun baked rock

toward a pasture where cattle grazed
far from the barn. I lingered and listened

for the call of their farmer, dreaming
that I might follow, fade, and find

a new home off the map. The line
pulled at my chest, back up the steep

path through jungles with vines that
strangled giant trees, tugged by

unborn children who dreamed of
growing up in a row home off of

Locust Street, the 100-year-old brick
growing moss while the rain slinks down

into the cranky Philadelphia sewer.
And isn't it strange, Ariel, how you search

for horizons that aren't there? How the future
is a vacuum that the past rushes to fill

with anything that isn't secured to bedrock?
The night fills with the voices of souls

waiting to be reborn, the child's chubby hand
smears the watercolor world as you create it.

Sand State

Chuntering up the zig zag.
A slope, my calves,
ruined now and on a beach day,
chafed feet, sand thumbed between
and out.

The sand as straw and the mother deal brokered,
plaintive incantations towards the cliff top, if you can do this, 
then

You can and you will

As the ice-cream tacks, forms rings round my wrists, I am, with sand.

And sand, with me, my feet hawed in canvas, towards the cliff top,
I was once with sand, it should not be,
with me.
You leave one state, enter another, and always now in leaving;
I am surely better than this,
and in leaving, just know why.

1982, an early flicking of the Vs,
it will not rub me raw,
I am better than this.

poem #1

it's a teal ring that holds a promise
too tight around my finger
most days
i pull it back and forth
hoping something will change
my finger will get smaller
the ring will get bigger
i could wear it on my pinky too loosely
but then no one would know
we made a promise

Elsewhere doing

My ambivalence that can't get shook.
My shadow thought
My misanthropic tea
        steeped strong.
Who is that ancestor telling me
to keep looking for greener greener pastures?

A house again,
slipped through on gliding socks.
Backsliding to that
Thing we do:
Being elsewhere -
Save a seldom flash of
here-ness
just past the horizon