Friday, December 26, 2014

busy month! Happy New year!!

knitted ornaments

knitted ornaments

window shopping

luke calls it a cave

Bailey made cupcakes

swiftmas happened

luke and bailey
the office
pretty things
knitting happened

7 months!

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Some Things Remain the Same. published in the Long Island Quarterly in the early nineties

Some things remain the same 
I am carried in a rickshaw
Only conscious for the epiphany from one tableau to the next, bundled like a cocoon
strangers speaking in muted voices so as not to wake the sleeping child the patient the victim
The smells are different in each recollection
The wallpaper a cipher the clocks tick rocks bound
Each to its own rhythm a separate rendition, 
This torturer in banana curls this one on a bicycle - these a pair under the bathroom window squealing and squirming in gleeful whispers trying to espy the child naked and unsuspecting. 

Sometimes the language is not my own
The food smells overwhelmingly good
It makes me want to live again to inhale to taste 
To be a member of this table or that one 
To be a known member of this tribe
No secret customs or furtive glances no secret codes of conduct
out of my reach beyond my ken.

What remains the same is the need to stay
as still as death as silent
as twilight falling snow
til they have forgotten you are there and
you can join them with your shadow self
annihilating your own bulky needy presence 
to become a member at this table
no terrifying unknowns no treacherous unraveling edges
no children unprotected no un tendered questions. 


I awake in each new tableau as from
an interminable unconscious state.
I do not remember who I have been,
if I have made ketchup and eggs for my daughter this morning
or watched as they took my mothers furniture down the narrow staircase and loaded it onto a truck
destination undetermined.
Some things remain the same - there are the smells of the food cooking- there is the silent interrogation of a strangers eyes, the hollow reproach of ill spent youth
and always the accursed bounty of other peoples tables.    

Friday, December 12, 2014

revision

sometimes poems get revised and become new poems or better ones. I do not know if I have put this here before but here is it revised. It is called

Undisclosure

I.
I raise my body from the couch and scrape the leftover oatmeal in my bowl
into the noisy aluminum waste bin
and notice the crumbs left on the shiny winter table
II.
In a dream I was invisible and therefore had the power to glide unseen through infinite aisles of a heavenly supermarket
to take what nourishment or luxury I wanted, unheeded.
Unheeded, not like in the way when you complain about being starved by your mother and they respond,
‘Oh honey, some day she will be your best friend’
unheeded, as in you can have as much as you want and no one will stop you, 
nor shame you for your profane need
III.
(when I married the first time it was because of 
the act of food as love,
it was as though I was full for the first time)
IV.
I did not have the vocabulary to tell
our story, then, 
or what portion of it was left for me to discern
to trace like finger prints upon a frosty window
or the breath caught in that place in your sternum,
just south of a full breath.
V.
be perfect in this one moment
allow the present to swell in your breast 
the moment being perfect itself
That is the lesson I have learned, that  
there is no wrong or right way to breathe,
no moral to the story, just the listening, and discerning,
and we are all already connected more than can ever be told with fragile homilies,
or removed with insane malice.



Monday, December 08, 2014

poem of the day- 100 words

snowflakes
december 8
hardly noticeable and yet they are there

frenzied frozen 
tiny whirling 
dervishes

alighting on your face
just a speck of wet

a droplet of water on your eyelash
a blurred lens
the smell of snow in the air
the wind is picking up

a nor’easter the weather beings toll
like the bells in buoys 
they way they used to toll
softly caroling in the night

but that would come later when we were separated

beyond the arc of time and place

I do not know if you ever sensed the impending storm 

or heard the buoys chime