Lay Down

orange as

paint’s reply to sunset
on a day of tornadoes
                                  touch by touch

the brush wets canvas          invention’s
slash of colors

apple knob
                 banana moon
       Saturn stripes

paint by paint
more palpable than nature.

We know
              we know

the adamant whimsical mind
(not confusion
                      not shaming muddles)

colors life brighter than real
to reach through.

We may shadow anyone.
Let the screens shadow the strokes
of our hands
across screens            shadow.

The replicating strand
magicks fruits

                                     sky.
                   turbulence

wheat fields

[I wrote this poem in the summer of 2010, discovered it online yesterday, still searching for the inspirational photograph]

Fox or Coyote

Grizzled gray bellied in red, deft

hurrying strides across a shingle roof,

from limb to limb up an Atlas cedar

to pause, to lean & yawn, a spare

silent, uninterpretable gesture,

communication not at or to us,

the creature doesn’t care to know we exist

because of our creations — concrete,

semis, YouTube, cages.

Why do coyotes howl in full light?

Now the dogs bark too. Are coyotes

coming to an end? Are foxes?

Final bow, center stage.

The Vagabonds

Who knows what gender Mom presses

on me? So often she lies. Dad refuses

to let me be a Susan. Second try

fingers a thespian, a male Sax,

first name Carol. Is that why

I diss my female for fifty years?

Google Books reveals that Sax

becomes the artistic co-director

& designer — costumes, that’s rich —

for Baltimore’s Vagabonds, our

oldest little theater. He authors

a play titled The Legend of King

Aarym and the Ant. Wow. Such

inklings of fluid gender & lunatic fringe.

Red Light

Two red beacon lights shine

above the eastern tree line

precisely where the sun will rise

this time of year in Santa Cruz,

two lights as if the pink sky

weren’t signal enough for dawn.

How many folk of this urban tribe

are sufficiently unengaged with yawns,

family, phone, dollars, work, caffeine

to pause for the first glimpse of real light

climbing through pink toward

white-turning-to-blue sky — aubade to

devices that blink & ping, crush of concrete,

forgetting the lure of wild life.

Herons

Crossing the harbor bridge hear

the great blue squawk though you can’t

see it. Notice the otter. Pass

the fish-cleaning station & nearly

forget to notice the bevy of black-

crowned nights, asleep. Gasp,

look up. Blue glides

toward a treetop, shies

away, strokes a circle & angles

down again, gracefully lands.

High in the foliage not to be seen.

Hadn’t you noticed you wouldn’t have known.

Great blue steers obliquely to

this place & ruminates alone.

Final Cut

Keats dying in Rome

wrote this living hand

that red life might stream

again. There she stands

hand on sofa back,

pausing to say fondly,

Good morning. Her luck

dies at one syllable,

the missing morning sucked

airless away, the visible

remnant not Susan,

fast emptying crucible

now requiring dozens

to tend, to mourn, to ask

why this loss, for no reason.

Susan's Here

To ward off cold she gave me

a yellow chenille throw to wrap me,

a down vest, teal, too small

for her, thus perfect for me, & an extra-long

red neck scarf, also chenille —

she made it for me. She gave me a bookmark

scribed with the Chinese character for harmony,

a great blue heron bookmark,

a large silk carry-all bag gaily

printed with salmon-colored whooping cranes,

& books, countless books, which books

I forget, & she told me, read these books.

What I gave myself: three portraits

of Susan, smiling out from plain frames.

Georgetown in September

Walking along the Great Pee Dee

I stop for a rail’s deafening clatter,

study the river scape but cannot see

the bird — no surprise, such a hider —

now high-stepping one-track

paths only marsh-dwellers know,

spartina-spun polygonal darks

beads of water gleam through.

My mid-morning stroll proves slow —

flooded streets, discouraging heat

though what did I expect? Georgetown in September,

snowy egrets dipping for chew

beside an up-on-blocks fishing boat,

blue tape between fresh tempers.

Dear Susan,

2 August 2017

Not a day goes by. You haven’t emailed since June 17th. Your last twitter poem posted on June 20th. I suppose you’re awfully busy. I continue my side of our correspondence as always. I suppose you’d find me grim. I do. Nonetheless, I’m not idle. A week ago I traded in my Subaru for a Toyota Prius 2. I wanted the safety features. As if safety could be found in a car. Drove a whopping 120 miles in this first week, & the gas gauge is down by one sixteenth. At this rate, I’ll buy gas six times a year. Actually, some days, I’m idle, like today. I woke up feeling like sludge. Tova increases my heart beat, but I still find it difficult to smile. She’s putting up with me. I suppose she thinks I’ll recover. A woman in the old folks home next door moans for help for at least an hour every day. I don’t even bother. I’m reading Augustine’s Confessions, & a self-help book by a Buddhist hospice director, & Kinsey Millhone novels. She’s a soft-hearted hard-ass P.I. I scarcely try to figure out whodunit. I just spend my evenings with her. Write if you can.

Love,

Carol

Blue Major

Rhapsodic about freedom since we dumped

the tea, our muscles stronger than our reason,

is hierarchy baked into our bones?

Woman/slave, you will wear a master’s name.

Child, you will wear the school tie.

Fresh beings, you will suffer hazing

under upper class beings. Meanwhile

one summer night a crowd sprawling

in folding chairs they’ve hauled to a parking lot

alongside drink bottles & funeral fans

waits on Gershwin’s Rhapsody beamed out

into melting air, this best rhapsody

some would say, for symphony & jazz band —

is it better than cicadas?

Two Old Women

— after a 1937 photo by Margaret Bourke-White

The two ancient, skeletal white women

wear hand-sewn dresses in cotton print, one a collar,

one not, one an apron, one not, they look out

across the dirt yard or back at their long lives

now nearly over. Hollowed temples & noses,

sinewy necks, fish-hook jaws, swollen blotched feet

stuffed into black broken-down lace-up shoes.

The chair legs hand hewn, the seats straw. Likely

these women raised so many children, raised & killed

farmyard fowl, cut wood, built fires, cooked & cooked

& cooked, boiled sheets & shirts & overalls & skirts,

carried water, first welcomed, then tended, then endured

obstreperous men. The plank-sided house they sit before

the house they’ve lived in most of their lives.

Their faces noble as Auschwitz prisoners, their bodies

sexless as fence posts, yet imagine if a child approached

how smiles would crinkle & crack their faces, how

brown-spotted knobbed fingers would pull the child

onto a bony lap, feed it a sweet, croon it a melody
older than they are.

My Going Stays

United movers showed up the day

after high school graduation

to ship us south. Pissed & mislaid

I loaded my 53 Pontiac —

washed-out blue, the cream seats

napping out — backed down the drive,

turned right on Van Dien. The chariot

steered me under the tracks, around the curve,

up the hill toward my best friend’s house.

What I would do next — what I did —

I can’t remember. Only my going stays,

etched into canon, how I cut my ties

at 17, stared over the hood,

elbow out the window, the sun’s rays.

Not Cast Away

a castaway washed to the edge

of desire, beyond which

I no longer know how to live

— Kay Byer

Is the edge of desire as much desire

as you could possibly have

or so little that you can’t remember

what desire might once have been —

where I have been for a long time

the Bobby McGee place — nothin’ left to lose —

in that place, where I thought I was when Susan died

nothing turned out to be someone too big to lose

too present, too comforting, too unexpected,

a Southern gentle woman moored fast,

rocking softly in the middle of my life

the touchstone I touched daily & was touched by

so often we would post our poems

within moments of each other

across the country (the world) from each other

ten plus ten fingers tapping

Susan recording an armadillo

while I set down another sudden bloom

how we called out to each other

& never failed to respond

this is what I now know not to be nothing

to be the something I held closest & most dear

no longer castaway, my fingers & toes

cling to what is not empty space

what is all solid ground