When my time comes
may solitude be my company.
May the room’s only shadows
move beneath the clock hands.
May I not be stained by tears
nor deafened by the deep moans
of weeping that arrive before the hour.
If I need water, give me a hard
nurse to bring it quickly and go.
My will is left to you who loves
me most: Please celebrate
the comforts we gave to each other,
the peak where we look back
down our lives.
When the clock strikes
and they cover my face,
see me as chrysalis
about to butterfly.
– Robert S. King…
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Painting by Marianne von Werefkin
Who or what holds strings over us,
lifts our arms, crashes
our bodies together?
We move as we must, enjoy
the dance even as we resent
doing it. Perhaps the “real”
marionettes on stage enjoy theirs too—
they come alive, blood circulates,
ideas birth where there had been
only wood. My lover will be
famous, perhaps remembered
like Wateau. When he’s dead,
no one will know what moved his hand
when he would have preferred
to rest. I can’t say what moves
my own hand or why a dark
blue light can wound or delight me–
we keep trying to break
whatever holds us against
our will. Color, a scissors,
almost cutting us free.
– Kenneth Pobo
Author’s Note:
“Marionette Theatre” is from an ekphrastic collection of poems that I’m currently working on. …
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Hands
We weave our fingers together before we fall to sleep
and I notice yours, nearly slender, your infancy thinning.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////I did not notice the shape of those hands
————————————/////////–that gave you to me, that still hold so much of your story.
Your life line, your love line, both too small for me to get
a good read in fading November light.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////It is the back of my own that concerns me—now
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////more my mother’s, her mother’s.
You tap my palm in drowsy patty cake—mark it
with a G!
/////////////////////////////////////////////You will have no memory of what yours will become.
Connective Tissue
I might be smothered by
////////////////////////////////the love she causes.
Mornings I struggle out from under, our heavy sleep
breaths pull it down, down, and down overnight.…
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My mother is afraid for me, but my stepfather says, “If he wants to go, let him.”
So I’m on the plane alone. A stewardess with white skin and orange hair keeps leaning around her work station to smile and wink at me.
The man in the middle seat has gas and smells bad, like cow manure. He wears a smudged ring and I wonder if he’s someone’s father.
Where I’m flying to is flat farmland. Acres of wheat. Tractors and combines. In the winter the snows get so deep that locals drive snowmobiles on the streets instead of cars. I’ve never been, but I know because my blood father wrote me long letters that I’d find torn up in my parent’s trash.
When I tell the stewardess I’ll be nine in June, her smile lifts like it’s a hard trick she’s doing.…
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They called it something brand new.
Said it surpassed hard candy, snuff flicks,
or huffing Jefferson airplane glue. Pink
lemonade, a chaser: “It gives you a nice blank
feeling,” said the bleach blonde on QVC, quite
unlike snack cracker, creme filling or Mars
bar, clumps of wet sand squeezing through
the sun burned toes, erosion on the banks
of hometown rivers; they called it something
almost (not quite) Frank O’Hara with no sweat
in white linen suit, buzz cut and serendipity, ripping up
Lotto tickets on the sidewalk because there’s nothing
else to do. “But only the fact, that there’s nothing else
to do,” they made Frank say it “nothing
else to do.”
In a moment some cube of lemon light went
down, on cue, dappling the basement floor, about four
by eight inches fugitive from dirty casement window to
concrete; it was like that, and nothing more, although
they swore up and down it was so original, nobody
had ever seen it before; not in the purest torpor of three
thirty death in the afternoon, nor bubbly gin fizz
as bas relief etched out of pores, when you
know it in your funny bone, they said sit up
ram straight as a biker passing through, they
swore under a ton of sun, it was a new thing, a new
thing too precious to waste, or hesitate; I bought it
for awhile felt quite silken, as folds of alien skin.…
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The Meaning of More
We stack glass jars in the hallway,
fill them with fireflies and nails.
From the bed, we discover
walls move like water.
The blanket is a psychic’s tongue
draped across our legs.
What is more but what we can’t
really touch, your body sliding
down the shower wall,
where you end up when you
are gone. Spaces left
unstirred down my back.
You can bury me in your mattress
and dig me out later in loose threads
unstitching music notes,
the cigarette-glow
of need. We are objects
just like the things we keep
stored in attics and boxes,
these lonely trinkets, bed sheets.
Keep the pillows from long ago,
your lovers’ names sketched
inside each one, languages
of dead petals, wild pearls.…
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