Poetry

Those were the longest nights of summer—
the small-town airplane hanger 
used only for two-props spraying poison over 
corn and wheat and us until November.

A new pilot, eighteen-year-old learner’s permit,
he sailed endless Kansas sky, much farther
than the fields barren of timber:
unclouded eyes and thoughtless, an explorer.

At sixteen, I’d never been kissed, his neighbor,
then I dissolved under his hands, darkness no longer
as our mouths crimped together like pie crusts in the larder.
Paula Abdul sang “I Need You,” and I wanted no other. 

Too young to date, I asked permission of my mother,
who loved him because of my dead brother, 
born a week apart from him and us in October.
His mother, weeping, walked the ER corridor to see her. 

We’d fly over the fields, through the ether.
What youthful evening could be finer? 
Our small lives filled fully, kernels of grain: our hunger 
for more life beyond this and one another.

We’d land, then lie in his Dodge Caravan, naked upon the leather,
mapping our fragile ankles, spines, and necks with tender
kisses and the hands so grasping but still lighter 
than the air, the plane, the summer.

He left in fall for college to become a preacher.
I write him a long, then longer letter.
I wait until October, crying harder.
I drive out once to the hangar.  Nothing hovers.

Ignorance remains
the steadiest path to mistakes/errors
“hey I didn’t know” is slightly
superior to “I was drunk”, or that
chestnut, “it was a long time ago,
things were different then”.
Don’t fall for it.
To hit your kids is as wrong
in 1970 as it is today, as
wrong as princes in the tower
or cigarette burns on a toddler’s back.

Night, the anger rises.
Rage, rage, rage against the
Perceived slights of today,
not paid enough, not promoted,
night shift chain smoking
by the hour, this job deserves a
walk out, but to where?

Later, a hit down, swing low
to meet your self esteem,
those little shits need to learn
to shut up.
Survey the wounded.
Bathroom door, photo frames,
dog cowering by the door.
Patch the sheetrock, make
apologies with pizza, toys.

Research reveals that the abused
so often become abusers in turn.
Poor fools, quick to anger and
quick to self delusion. Poor excuses.
Social Services knows your family name.
The same smile, bad teeth,
good with their hands.
That one was a star athlete.
Dark rivers run strongest at night
as owls regard the trailer with
wide, wide eyes while the moon,
Uncle Moon, looks away.

                                 Tiny one bedroom flat
                                 space heater-warmed 
                                 with a phone booth closet 
                                 that could store meat - 
                                 a kitchen with southern 
                                 view of tattooed 
                                 John and Rose’s porch
                                 from where he’d flick
                                 his Camel butts
                                 into the seven clumps
                                 of withered grass
                                 trying to be a yard
                                 sans noticeable success.

                                 Residents from the
                                 local sheltered home
                                 with a labored walk
                                 shuffling to work
                                 carrying a Thorazine high -
                                 off to bag incense
                                 eight hours a day 
                                 without complaint -
                                 but needing to stop
                                 at the corner store  
                                 for their morning 
                                 sugar fix of candy and coke
                                 just to feel alive.

                                 Seven years of fun and games 
                                 with a revolving door 
                                 of friends and lovers –
                                 teaching reluctant
                                 urban teens by day
                                 who taught me
                                 all about the blues 
                                 I sought out each night
                                 up and down
                                 Lincoln Avenue bars
                                 where legends
                                 like Dixon, Wolf, and Waters 
                                 laid down the timeless licks 
                                 that everyone listening knew –
                                 then drank too much
                                 as the nights wore on -
                                 just like the rest of us.

Far flung waves
faintly calling from
my garden's end.

Each cycle of the moon
they grow braver
in their greeting.

Fences fall.

The
crashing
of
the
waves
rises.

Awoken
from sleep
as it wraps on my window.

Bricks falling
into its foaming mouth.

The girl got him a bracelet
for his right arm, already holding 
twelve bangles of silver and of gold.  

He never wore it, said, instead,
each circle had to come to him 
by chance:

the Middle Eastern deli counter man
who’d given him the middle one,
the New York psychic—grabbed his arm

and told him to beware.
They couldn’t just be gifts, what with
their implications of enclosure, continuation.

And so, the brass loop was stashed in his backpack,
the same one he would drop first on her floor.
 She never saw what else might be inside

but wondered if, like the circle, 
known by many as a magical space,
it held nothing in its center 
but air.

*On August 9th 1914, British troops departed to Germany for WWI. By the end of the barbaric war, 3-4 million women were estimated to have been widowed. 
 
Baby August has told her first untruth. 
Buds bloom no more to meet a genial world. 
The widow seizes all the pendant flowers  
with which she sought to bid her spouse farewell.
An ave before he was enmeshed in war.
Candles alive to witness one more love 
have danced themselves to death and killed their flame. 
She cannot rid her coverlet of wrinkles. 
She cannot clasp a glass of wine without  
scowling askance at its momentous shade.  
She distrusts the cup; trusts more in malaise,
distrusts the very fairness of her skin. 
She finds her pallor does not need her hug
to blanch her husband; fear can do as much. 
Azures darken with the smoke of chimneys 
whilst vaguely through an open door, she hears 
her curtains, bandying with winds of fate. 
He breathes, he breathes—can she be widowed thus? 
She strips her newly funereal bed,
dethroning love through taking down his roses. 
Yet neglecting some petals on her sheets 
which mourned their king’s expulsion when— 
having washed them too—mistakenly—they  
tinged her covers in a cruel crimson. 
Then when she made some play of them in hand
the reddest of the petals poured their flush. 
Purpled sinks, bloodied hands but—of whose blood? 
She has read her husband’s fate upon their walls.
Interpreting the muteness of her home
and wordless corridors as signs to know,
that though he breathes—she is a widow.