Category: Poems & art

Most of you might have seen these two pieces already, but since I never got around (’til today) to post two links to work published at mnartists.org–here you have them:

The Trousers

and

Birdman

Be well and think happy thoughts!

Peace out.

[Another poem by my son]

HOPSCOTCH

I feel happy

When I play

Hopscotch

It’s long

Jumping

Jumping

Red, blue, yellow, green

Squares, rectangles, and numbers

Hop, hop, hop, hop, hop

Chalk is

Pink, yellow, green, red, white, blue

I need to gather energy around these shoulders like a cloak of clouds plump with rain. I am the thunder and lightning to come and the purple silence that follows.

My eyes remain sharp-focused on the prey, which is, after all, a potential life, my heart, a reason to live. I track what moves inside across open field, watch it travel through broken stalk and chaff. I am the hawk of prayer.

I save myself from the click of sharp teeth tearing into dreams unrealized. I can lead it to the oak shade, to the circle of riverside stars pulsating blue light.  My great-great grandmother with no teeth says to these dull brown seed eyes, grow. I can’t fit in a fist of should be. I am a copper wire snake. I shine. I can make it across a field of broken and rejected things. I am a coil of passion, an untapped spring. I won’t hide from shadows above or crouch in furrows. I am what crawls onward. A spirit like me searches for what is born from sun and rushing water.

If death decided, now, I’d break free, a storm a thousand hooves wide, clattering across earth, ocean, and sky. I am a dervish in search of the center calm. Nothing satisfies my thirst for the river song, no one staves this hunger for the sleeping stones the meandering water swallows whole.

Below are two drawings my son made back-to-back as he examined himself carefully in the mirror both during a brief crying jag and after his full recovery. He labeled them accordingly.

(University of Minnesota Arboretum in autumn, 2006, photo by me)

This poem is a prayer for space and solitude and I have built it
word by word, star by star, leaf by leaf, and snowflakes
times thirty three. It stands here like a red brick house
constructed with sturdy hands and baked in the oven
of sun and wind. It took time to settle. A fire crackles
and nearby cat and god, entwined, now sleep.
Four windows provide what I need: a birch, a maple,
a weeping willow, and a cottonwood, respectively.
Today its walls muffle car horns, tire squeals, silence
flags flapping greed, and no one knocks, dressed
in vinegar or bile, on the door. In simple words, I’m free.

This poem reminds me that breathing in & out, or out & in,
is not quite what caged gerbils racing round on wheels do,
nor is a life best patterned after others—who tie themselves
to desks with electrical cords—doing this & that, that & this,
and, then again, this & that, frantically never reflecting
whether it’s necessary to be poster children
for chronic stress and certain coronary disease.

Today I climb inside myself, brush away cobwebs and sweep
dust bunnies out my mouth. Let these tasks erase from me
all deaf & blind labor. Time to refuse more dreams of me
in muddied jeans scribbling binary code compulsively
into the flesh of infinite fallen, rotting trees.

I am not expecting this poem to be strong enough
to be the savior of my tomorrow nor will it disclose
the mystery of the disappearing honey bees. Nor do
words alone hold in their possession a golden key
to release the overworked & underpaid from ending up
six feet under the cleats of ugly-spirit folk in red & blue
plaid slacks who drink gin on the final 9th tee.

This poem, at most, blooms briefly as a lilac bush in Babbitt
or emits a spice as faint as a tiny orchid on the hillside of Kauai.
Here I can cherish the smallest hint of beauty
(of which those, so ill, seek to trap, to stab, & categorize).
I built a hut of A-B-C & onto to Z to restore an ability to love
myself, my life, and to acknowledge my neighbors
who suffer near me. There is a polar bear at Como Zoo.
His grief is written across a blue sky with repetitive somersaults
and mad splash. Today I am cradling his bloodied head
against my chest, whispering him our dream, a kiss
of sleep, of reverberating tundra and expansive sea.

Up in that land where bears snore under branches, bellies full of blueberries,
where a ferret in a white fur snowsuit bounces across the fields of fresh snow,
and the heat of its small engine emits bursts of mist from its throat, Uncle
holds in two hands, like a prayer, a white coffee cup full of mirrored
blackness and watches the memories of the day reveal themselves there.

Today the image of Linda Krachek’s smile, her two front teeth, slightly crossed
like Snow White’s folded hands, gleam as she sets down his breakfast special:
two eggs overeasy, two strips of bacon, and one buttered toast, cut into
triangles, with a packet of blueberry jam. He is Man of the Northstar Grill,
her eyes flash emeralds. Whenever she looked into his own,
they held him tight.

A ferret jumps in and out of sight.

His niece, his Mouse with rat-nest hair, the one unafraid of delivering earthworms
and leeches to the old fools who fished all day in sun or rain. She who hugged him
as if he were a Hero of the Great North, as if he were Paul Bunyan himself. She left
years ago, in awkward puberty, when Uncle became a person to smile at briefly
on her way to the bedroom before closing the door. Last he’d heard she lived in China.
He imagines her elf face darkening into a sunset, like a cinnamon stick in black tea,
and on each finger, a leech is twisting like the fingernails of an ancient Chinese empress.

A ferret jumps, switches directions midair, leaps and tumbles.

Little brother, Mouse’s father. His laugh would crack across ice like lightening bolts.
People crowded around him, their messiah of mirth. Uncle Bud nearby in the shadow,
older, the other brother, the fumbler, whose jokes fell like geese full of buckshot. Best friend, comrade in frost and fish, a right-hand man, to the one who fell in a lake and fell silent.

Brother underground for forty years, Linda married, then divorced, sitting under a thinning quilt, TV on, for twenty-eight, Mouse a wisp of a memory, lost in an adult shell. Here Uncle is, King
of Memories. We were wordless when we posed before his Polaroid, but he knew. He gave unencumbered love, and for that, we stay near on winter mornings. We hang like crystal from the window ledge, immortal beauties he cannot reach or save.

(painting by me)

My Ears

A dog is barking terrier terror
and the sleepy young man jumps
into a jumpsuit of fear
before crumpling and slumping away.

My ears heard it happen and told me so.
They are my little boys eager to help.
They sweep floors, humming, chittering
about who said what on that table
or this sidewalk, nosing dust like pups,
and they’ll never grow old or bored
of smalltalk.

To some, ears prove an embarrassment,
an extra pair of primeval hands
they muffle their ears with long hairy gloves.

But I like to fold the cartilage
into those tiny pop-up books
filled with tales of Van Gogh on trombone
and listen to their ocean waves roll
and bask in the applause.

These immature wings love me wildly
and I love them back the same.
If only they’d develop a little more finesse,
I am sure they’d flap from their silken nest,
flutter about like pale butterflies
and return to me chockfull of good news.

Mirrors

At breakfast I told my husband about a study showing vegetarians
have high IQ’s and in the matter of a few sentences I had begun to talk
about cannibalism practiced among starving WWII Japanese soldiers
on a remote Pacific island. I am my mother’s daughter, I concluded when
he waved his hand as a roadblock to all things morbid, sad, unbelievable, yet true.

At the bus stop I see how the elm tree across the way spreads its branches
across the road, dancing its slow dance of balance and growth, reaching
for the intangible. Roots do the same underneath the grass, another world
of darkness where growth, as slow and as delicate, occurs in moments
whether we stand above, staring, or walk past, whistling.

If we are trees’ siblings, where are the roots? Did we lose them when born inside
porcelain, steel, and recycled air? The girl born outside today wears handprints
of her aunties on her skull forever. Her mind soars above the world
far from its dry cough and fever.

Maybe roots are invisible, like the red thread of destiny tying together those
meant to love, and maybe we drag them behind like entrails in each step.
We don’t care for them, we don’t see them, we never stand still. Our roots
capture bits of hair, lifeless ants, and candy wrappers, until we become burdened,
and we fall down before we understand a simpler way to grow.

Yet, then again, maybe my roots were never mine at all, but are my mother’s
and my grandmothers’ and my great-grandmothers’ and their mothers
and on and on. A seed sprouted from the heart of southern Africa where
First Mother sang. Words are then not mine to choose. Words began in the sigh
of hydrogen combining with oxygen, times two.

Whatever we utter connects us to dark and to light, burrowing
inside the roots we have a song kept safe, even as each word leaves.