85 degrees and dozing from the cough syrup
evening, too cool for the end of summer in the south
only one of us complains
where do we go from here
but back to where we always go?
the comfortable and the comforting
maybe it’s not so bad or the end
we’re here listening to frog songs
you can call mourning or jubilee
it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak the language
you’re lost in the pull of leaving light
maybe I’m just high from the rising tent of sleep
I tend to like endings
that hand over peace wrapped in swaddling
and ask me to walk gently
for as clumsy as I am
I do fall like feathers when I want to
I want to go gently
the sun, warm breeze
evening, 85 degrees
– Jeanna Paden…
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And there appeared a great wonder in heaven;
a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,
and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
–Revelation, 12:1
It is but an assumption—Mary, in readying herself to
die, began to cradle the earth in her feet. Remedy for
flesh and bone as fragrant as the blooms that dared to
endure in August. As in the third hour—but all the time,
more endured than imagined: white poppy, hyacinth,
dandelion. That Mary forgot not the pink of her finger
and thumb once able to fathom thorns into roses for
plucking. Stars from within the splintering of the cross.
What better to impart unto paradise but the attendance
of her eyes? The eternalness of dirt on her tongue?…
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The bearded lady
at the freak show
Coney Island
never got your
pharaoh fame
and now that
Koko the Killer Clown is dead
the freak show is not
worth the $5 admission
there is no guide
and jester left
to give meaning
to the front house receipts
…………queen/king
…………this is
…………a revolutionary age
of transgressive days
where from the top
of the Wonder Wheel
you can see
…………the Nile
and the green valleys
– John Greiner…
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Elephant grass turns auburn in the wholesome cold
of October one. The month he’s due,
I took Temodar, once upon a time. In the fable, my father
boards an airplane for China,
never to return. Back home, full-bodied cherry tomatoes
pop off the vine and my Chinese wife tosses them
to the dog. My best friends have all been dogs.
While one snatches the red gush out of dry October air,
another leaves his wife, daughter, and unborn child
to take up with his mistress in Chicago.
By now it should sound familiar.
Yet I wonder where all the birds have gone
to hunker down, why only crows are left
to laugh at us, and why is it always October, the dust
in their feathers, that brings us face-to-face
with the worst in ourselves.…
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“The nighttime sky is all about yesterday”
– Robin Schwartz, Night Swimming
Parked there, in the silent fade-out
of a motel’s parking lot, three cars:
a 57’ Fairlaine, its front grill, ridged
with five long metal lines and taillights
that resembled a startled vireo’s eyes;
a 66’ Oldsmobile Cutlass, its face
squinted, and chomping fresh silver,
and a 1973 Buick Electa, its rear end,
slim-finned, and rectangular taillights
swallowed into the long bumper.
Something magical in these cars –
angels creeping past them; summer’s
fertile design – at the outskirts of
everything; these cars, like chapels.…
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There is a chug in her lungs
put there by robot musicians
who told her she composed
of machinery, but never of girl.
I learn to rebuild instruments
Of more honey and flesh designs.
She is beauty, she is girl, she
is more than a piece of machine —
She is a piece of a red meat
topped in the sweetest cut
of pepper. Fat juices of her
deserve to run down creamy chins —
She rebuilds herself —
converts liquid fuel to blood,
and oil to hemoglobin.
She doesn’t know anatomy
but she knows his roommate,
flesh — the huge metropolis
selling body parts on street markets.
We buy the rest of her from a cart,
glitches of limbs wrapped in
peach and milk until she is skin
tumbling down bone like an avalanche.…
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At the funeral home, sad figures murmur
patting one another on the back, gently
the way we soothe children
gripping each other’s hands, reluctant to let go
then moving on to the next
as if underwater
in no hurry to say good-bye
to our casketed friend
his cooled hands folded, a crucifix on his chest
a still life framed in black and white,
a boxed gift nested in tissue paper.
And why stop there?…
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