Leonids Shemonids

Meteor Shower

For a moment we believe:
Rush to the back deck,
Grip moist wood curling like soap
And crane our necks skyward.
The night is a sponge bath.
A pumpkin softens at our feet.
We hope to see meteors falling
The way I’ve hoped for snow,
Spring, autumn, even in places
That won’t hold their promises.
We gather the night’s skin,
Strip clouds like fat from meat,
Seeking brightness, seeking it bald.
The oaks are green the color of velvet;
Palm fronds droop into sleep.
Spanish moss shimmers on branches
and wires, on us if we keep too still.
Only light the kitchen light.
Only sound the washing machine.
I breathe detergent and rotting pumpkin.
I wear slippers knit by the girl before me,
And your pants pulled up by a drawstring.
I want to believe in us for longer
Than a moment or a meteor,
Longer than seasons or falling snow.
I want to remember you smelling
Like rain on a night that never rained,
Your body earthed against white sheets,
Colored a dozen shades of brown,
Fleets of light dizzying the sky above us,
And my body curving to you, a crescent moon,
My heart a wildflower named for the shooting star.

Two Poems for a Monday

These are from a gorgeous new find, Aleda Shirley. I love how measured and composed her work is with still so much boiling under the surface, and how each one of her poems has a distinct color palette. Both of these are from her 1996 book Long Distance.

Fourth and Magnolia

Roused this afternoon by a phrase of oboe
moving from my neighbor's open window
across the courtyard into mine, I imagined
the light falling across the bed

was a comforter of orange and silver satin;
in a single breeze, I smelled honeysuckle,
mown grass, wild onions. Last winter I spent
hours painting trompe l'oeil shadows

on the floor; at any given moment, I could conjure
sunlight. Last winter. Driving the freeway,
taking a bath, telling someone new my name,
my job, and that, yes, a drink would be

lovely--all the while I was composing
letter after letter to you in my head.
I can't remember how they went. And
I don't know why, tonight, I've returned

to the park where a year ago we said goodbye.
Soon, soon, a woman whispers to her children
at the bus stop. Velvet the color of scarlet
and orange leaves flares from the stage;

a rehearsal of Shakespeare-in-the-Park.
The actor playing Othello mutters soliloquies
into the dusk; how is it I find in him,
and only in him, proof you and I were ever here?

A wino grunts at me and I light his cigarette,
so crumpled and stubby it might be a joint.
It's time to go: trailing bright grey exhaust,
the bus breaks with a pneumatic hiss;

a boy dunks the ball a final time, tucks
it under his arm; so smoothly does he slide,
on his skateboard, into dusk, dusk might
well be a destination instead of an hour.


Shades

It takes more than a door painted blue
to keep the ghosts away. All you have to do
is live long enough and they will come.

Beside the interstate the old road still ran,
though it ended abruptly in a field of sage and mist.
That road seemed like the future: an emptiness

that could turn, at any moment, into beauty.
I stopped in a small town in Oklahoma--
a liquor store in a bad neighborhood,

old men and teenagers standing around our front,
a radio crackling in the dry wind.
Did the old men come this far and stop?

Smoke from their cigarettes disappeared an instant later.
In the darkness nothing was visible but the darkness.
By dawn the road was the color of silk

gone orchid or violet when tilted to the light,
the trees on the side of the road permanently twisted
from the wind off the plains. On that leg they bent

toward me. I stood some distance from the car and felt
the dry air whipping my skirt around my legs.
I realized I'd forgotten too little about my life,

that there was in sleep and inattention a kind of salvation
and I wanted to be saved because I no longer believed
any one place was different from any other.

Being haunted means you never feel wholly abandoned,
and as I drove past the blinded diners and the shells of old trucks,
I gathered it close to me, all of it, and went on.

Poetry World, Look Here!

http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v11n1.html

Two of my FSU profs (Kirby and Suarez), own of my fave writers (Sherman Alexie), and another one of my all-time favorite writers and good friend Ali Stine!

On Coming Back to the Home I Made for the Woman I am Now

A road named for a river

a river named for a road.

I follow the maps of my schooltown
a year after I have moved on.

Here, I know the white dogwood,

the redbud,

the sleet-bright fences,

fields tasseled in living gold.

I have driven down these fields,
ones that look the same until you notice

they are not, the matted fur and bone crunch

of possum and deer, picked to their meat
by turkey buzzards, our school's mascot.

See their flocks blackening the sky.

See them circle the hills beyond hills,

a blood-dark spiral.


Everything here reminds me

of a winter night, the way I wept
into my palms with a coat on my lap,
the thigh-clench chill of wrought-iron stairs
where I gave way after running through snow

purse-swinging

knife-breathing

from the town bar. You gouged out a piece of me

I thought I had buried beneath the dirt
beneath last year's fallen leaves,

a crumpled girl-thing in a world

of hairy wrists and loud-mouthed desires.

For you I was naked beyond clothing, beyond skin,

let you count the hungry whites of my ribs,

the aching push of my lungs,

the veins knowing better, averting

their blood from your eyes.


These days, you are the gray-thick cobwebs

that crowd my path,

the hound-dog ghost that drags

along my ankles in the mud.

One day I will kick you to the highway,

and I will laugh

when you are struck, burst

and splattered

among the animal shit and scrabble weed,

dirt for buzzards and criminals to clean.

Thrust of the road, I will run you down

over and over and over and over and over and over and over again

till you won't look like you,

till you won't look like anything

but something that has been hated for so long.

And perhaps the day will come
when I have grown old and summoned
the curling softness still mewling somewhere
inside of me. And perhaps then I will come back here,

kneel beside you, and oh--

I will gather the strength to touch you finally

till my fingers stain,

forgive your clotted pieces rotting

into cigarette butts and dead tires in the mud.

But for now,

this is the place where I will return.

I take my coffee, touch the fences and trees,
lift my eyes to a sky spinning with turkey buzzards,

dark and bald and beautiful.

They watch over me.

Passing the river, passing the road,

I drive down the old fields once more.

Today, they are bright and yellowing

with the estrogen of summer.

Older Short-Short

Perennial Losing

I kept the farm after you'd gone. You went fall harvest when the orchard branches ached near to bursting with black-red plums and apples mottled pink-red, green-red, red-gold. Our earth churned with late corn and pumpkins, misshapen like children, with winter squash that reminded me of the ways you needed, the ways I learned to touch you. I yanked them from the ground. I tore the fruit from the trees. In our kitchen I punched dough and slaughtered apples into the fritters we sold at the local bakery. This year they tasted sweet enough to make my mouth bleed. I thought of us straining against the counter, my hands scrabbling beneath your shirt, your hands clawing at my hair, the oven timer shrieking, the dogs barking to be let in, the drawer knob knocking against my hipbone and turning to a crescent bruise that refused to fade for so long.

Winter ice storms battered the thin-armed maples and telephone wires, and draughts of snow sunk the pines and wooden lawn chairs, the old door we laid out as a fishing dock. The pond froze thick as a mirror. I awoke daily to the sounds of wind and fighting crows, but from our bed I longed for heirloom tomatoes and pink-veined begonias, us crouched in the garden, our hands kneading the dirt. Your lips seeking my neck, my ear, my collarbone, our breathing a rainstorm keep on keep on, your fingers unbuttoning my work shirt, the damp earth pushing in. I hid my face in the pillow and pummeled the marriage quilt with my fists. Outside my window the wind gasped and rattled.

And now I drive into town for the June market, and I sell our wares alone. Your mother's almond granola recipe. The berries that inked our fingertips and stained our teeth and tongues. Japanese white irises and pink dahlias, you spreading clumps of dog hair around them to keep the deer away. The blue lavendar soap we made together, our hands chapped and red-raw, holding. Potted chives, parsley and basil that still smell like you. The sunflowers you insisted we grow because they made you think of the way I looked at you, eager and open and utterly unafraid.

People pass. They carry cut flowers and bundles of asparagus and babies. They laugh and touch one another on the crook of the arm. They sample from the bowl. The knowing avert their eyes from me, but the ignorant ask me questions. I press caked soap to their noses and point to the strawberry-rhubarb pies--my recipe, mine. No one buys.

I don't tell them that you left me. That you fell in love with the city, with a woman there whose hair is red from the bottle and is slim-calved and firm-breasted with fingernails so polished they glitter. That you told me we should remain friends. That I could keep the farm. Instead, I offer up cartons of wild blackberries and pots filled with water lettuce and stones. Look here, smell, taste these. Instead of the word leave, I say over and over, gone.