"Be a Well of Fairness He Said as I Left for the Desert"
July 4, 2011
I am such a deep well you
Cannot even see the
Glimmer of your own eyesWhen you look into
Me. I am such a
Deep well a pebble that you
Let fall from your
Elegant fingertips
Does not offer up itsSplash to your cocked and
Eager ears. I am such
A well you should take a big
Step back, my friend,
Lest you fall head
Over heels into me,
Lest I should offer
You water.
"If It Fits"
April 16, 2011
If the shoe fits, if the
ball bounces, if the weight
of this world is not
too heavy on your slim
shoulders; if the sun
rises in the east or sets
in the west, then
lace it up, don’t
double dribble, stand
up straight, and give
endless thanks for all you
are so privileged not
to ever deserve.
"Spring Tease"
February 17, 2011
The birds were twittering again at
first light today, and you were out there
floating in the early clouds of morning,
doing a backstroke, I believe, through the
pale skies of this February mourning.
The bells up high in the campus
carillon rang out with such exuberance that
the notes of their song tumbled like
somersaults down a green hillside or the
colors in the dryer at the laundromat, the
one with the round window set in
front. The crowds in the State
Capitol chanting the mantras of
democracy swarmed like Sufis in a
kaleidoscope or a mandala swirled in
tinted sand on a windswept Tibetan
mountaintop.
Spring is not ours yet, but
she did let show the lace of her prettiest
petticoat as she swirled by in the clouds
today, in the clouds in the crowds past
the crowned heads and clowns, past the
crowsfeet and the cloned sheep of
our daily visions. One barely notices
that the hem of her well-worn wintry
gown is stained with road salt and
deicing agents, as well as the toll of
sweat and blood and tears this
endless winter has extracted and
exacted.
And then some unknown schoolchild
who has slipped one hand into yours,
uninvited, tugs at your overcoat sleeve
and asks you Why is that cloud up there
naked and is it the same one I saw
up there yesterday? Whereupon you
glance quickly at me and then say with
just the slight arch of one eyebrow,
“Should we go home together now?”
and I say, “Yes, please.”
"Answers in the Wind"
February 1, 2011
Where did this movement
begin? Some say Tunisia. Others
say it came from an unnoticed
martyr: Shaheed. A child, but
what did she know, ventured
that it came from a tall dark angel,
smelling distinctly of rosewater. The
internet forecasters,meanwhile,
looking backward, pointed their
noticeably stocky forefingers
at the Front Range of the
Rockies like blizzard winds are
all we are talking about here.
Let's be clear. We are not
just talking about a snowstorm,
even though the slashing
snow is presently lacerating my
wool coat like hundreds of
pale and pinch-faced shirtwaist
workers wielding needles like
bayonets on the Lower East
Side long ago. Long ago. This wind
goes from my world of ice and
drifting snowdunes and the
monstrous scraping plows barrelling
down the wide avenues with
some tangible sense of superiority to
your world: Sun and sand and stone,
highrises and pyramids and the
tanks topped with implacable
soldiers barricading museums full of
our earliest artifacts. Yes, ours.
Yours and mine. Yours and mine and
yes those of the same skinny, hungry,
angry seamstresses on Hester Street
whose relatives are right now
watching Cairo from comfortable
kitchens in Haifa and Tampa, clucking
their tongues and clacking their
knitting needles, saying how
Mubarak wasn't really all that
bad, was he? He kept the peace,
now didn't he? He was; he didn't
he. He locked the door on the
seamstresses when the Triangle
factory caught fire way back
then, and he still smells like
sulfur when he passes. Let us
hope he passes soon. He blows,
and the sands of the Sinai
slowly cover the bleached bones
of his tenure. He blows, and the
shingles of my old house yearn
and pull at their ancient moorings,
remembering. In Egypt, my own
daughter waits for the wind to
pass, for the sky to clear.
Here in the snowy north, I
too wait for this violent storm
to subside. But not tonight. This
wind howls like wolves only do
when starving, and I have
nailed up all my heavy blankets
to keep the desert sand from
drifting in my doorway. Across the
wide world, Hope, my white dove
in the distant Sinai, tucks her
head under a sprouting wing in
her made-for-the-Arctic downbag,
while beyond the flap of the
fabric door,a circle of all male
Bedouins puff and chortle around
their campfire lighting the side
of Mount Moses.
Writing in Ink
November 2010
I have never been all that
good at sleeping through the
night. It’s easier to sleep at
the office where nothing very
interesting is ever really happening
and much easier to sleep in
churches, especially those of a
protestant variation; grand cathedrals
have a way of inducing an awful
wonder which tends, once again,
to keep me wide awake. No. I wake
up at all the odd hours of night
and early morning: two forty-seven,
thirteen past three … four seventeen’s a
particular favorite. Perhaps you’ve been
there with me one or more of those long
nights, perhaps I awakened you with
the way I shouted out your name or
even not your name into the widening
gyre of my own darkness; perhaps
you answered me before I dove back
under the comforters I heap upon my
mattress like a princess. Did you?
Would you? That would seem so
awfully kind if when I screamed out
“NOOOOOO!!!,” so loud, you calmly
replied to me, “Maybe.” When my
baby died, I just plain screamed into the
nights: I had no words left. The night was
sliced into slivers with my wakenings then;
knives and razors glistened and hissed in the
black draped like heavy curtains round
that bed. “If you can’t sleep, could you
please at least let me sleep?” my husband
(then) would quiz me, rousting my limbs
in the general direction of the guest room.
And so I became a guest in my own
house; I became something of a
boarder. I paid for my room with favors
of a non-material nature if you know
what I mean and I mean what I say: I
paid for my passage like a woman does, has
always done. It had nothing to do with
sleeping or really, for that matter,
with sex. Eventually he tired of me.
And now I am free to wake
myself up in the middle of any
night I choose, with shouts of
joy or fear or longing or just to
reach out to the bedside table to
grope for the pen and paper there
and write you the few bare scratchings
of this poem and my heart’s
baleful midnight song of how I
once lost my life and my words
and then found them again in
the night’s silence and this page.
Writing in Ink
November 2010
