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!

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.    

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.

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