Strength – flyingtrapeze.net

October 11, 2021

I Wanted to Be Enormous: 45th Post

NO SAVING

In the night a car plowed sideways through our front yard
and left a tall cedar pointing into our bedroom window,
like a prosecuting attorney asking who
did what, when, where.

“Did you put on gloves?” a friend asked about my being
first on the scene. God I forgot. I wanted
to save someone. But limber as gymnasts
the drunk driver and passenger stuck their landing.

There was that time when Chris came shouting
into my kitchen and I tended her cut scalp,
tried to get her to call the police, stuck my anger
behind my face and just cleaned

the red sink, red counters, red floor.
No gloves. No saving.

And the time a man who needed a bath and clean clothes
heckled us marchers at a Pride parade.
Most of the women said Have a nice day and kept walking but
he called me a name whose invisible weight

tilted a scale inside me. I didn’t aim
for his face and miss.
I aimed for his hat brim
and it took his head with it.

What were you thinking? my lover shouted
as the man walked away fast, muttering.
God I don’t know. I wanted
to stop him. I wanted

to get his attention.
To make him afraid.
I wanted to be enormous
to save someone.

February 3, 2020

Roots and Branches: 42nd Post

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THE LANDSCAPER

He feels for the roots
pushing cracked, lined hands through the soft dirt.
He removes the intruding hedge’s dark knots
to spare the thin struggle of a tree.

He wants assurance
that his new lady is the right choice.
He rolls a stone into place while
the earth turns on its axis.

I think of the farm my partner and I didn’t buy,
how we came to this house with no curtains instead.
The landscaper wants to know
if he will be a good parent.

The air smells of dislodged spearmint
and crushed lavender.
The blood blister on his palm swings skyward
as he cups a drooping branch and clips it off.

He does it over and over, the swinging and cupping.
What would mean “I don’t know” in my hands
is a pruning ballet in his,
the tall tree an answer.

I think of the child we didn’t adopt,
of her photo in the book: Kristy.
She had so many letters: ADHD, ODD, PTSD.
My lover couldn’t see the girl

in the forest of letters.
Next spring’s seed catalog lies on the seat
of the landscaper’s truck in the driveway;
a diagram of next year’s garden takes shape in his mind.

He hurries to lay gravel and sand
but loses to the rotation of the earth.
“Want to save this nest for your daughter?” he asks,
laying it carefully on the porch steps.

The daughter we did adopt.
The one to whom I am a good parent
most of the time,
alone in this house.

“Yes,” I say. Yes to the lady, the good
parenthood, the nest. Yes to the removal of roots
that held nothing so strongly that a mistake
couldn’t make it all fall down.

August 6, 2019August 6, 2019

Avian Mythologue: 38th Post

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ORPHEUS, EURYDICE, AND HERMES

She remembers she was keen, vigilant, and efficient.

She remembers that the kill was quick,

that hushed bones cracked deep inside the body.

Hovering, she was All gliding, All diving,

All futures soon to shriek

kee-ahrrr down down, kee-ahrrr!

She remembers a sting, and trying to focus

in this dark place. She whose electric glance

could track the wild tracings

of a fly two worlds away,

dazed, injured, unfocused.

She is in the dark for many futures.

Then Who-is-larger comes beside her

and pulls on her feet,

makes her feet go to him.

Pulling air with her wings she tries to escape

but Who-is-larger holds fast,

murmuring like leaves in autumn.

Together, for her feet seem fastened

to Who-is-larger now,

they move through the darkness.

II.

The sun puts its rats through their mazes,

sucks the waves from the sea,

forces open the reluctant lilies.

Its grief a white light on all it can reach,

the sun can do nothing

without looking.

III.

Stepping from the darkness

Who-is-larger closes his eyes against the bright light.

The sun, ecstatic, covers everything instantly.

She, tilting her head, with one eye glares skyward

then turns away

blinded, focused on nothing.

Powerless, now, to reach her,

the sun, severed, floats on, grieving

blood-red at the last.

May 17, 2019

Wishing for Harmony: 37th Post

How nice it would be if both one’s internal and external dialogues could be peaceful…

REHEARSAL FOR AN ARGUMENT

I am a square-shouldered
decision, a kite
snagged long ago,
my tedious semaphore
unrelieved.

It’s snowing, but
I cut the sound:
everyone’s already heard
bloodthirsty barking,
the scrape of claws

on tree bark.
Let them imagine
the tap
of each crystal flake
shattering on impact.

Placing my ear
to a rock,
I wait patiently
for the translation.
A thousand frosts later

the answer is
mine in a
mound
of sturdy flour.
I spit

and knead:
a lunge of knuckles
and there’s bread
and blood
all over.

August 18, 2018

The Good Girl: 33rd Post

While the meaning of words can and often does shift over time, there is often an echo of the original meaning that lingers.

Urtext

The Good Girl sleeps quietly
with other women’s husbands.
Dimples cast in concrete,
she cleaves a breast of white meat;
a potato bursts in the oven.

At first, the word ‘win’ meant merely to struggle.

Homeostasis: maintaining a couch,
a fire, a coffee table behind your ribs,
fine art on your turbulent heart.

At first, ‘attack’ meant to stick a tack into.

The Good Girl has forgiven music
for the pain it has caused her.
Bathing herself in vanilla and almonds,
she gets a job and keeps it,
collecting her pay like rainwater
in clean pools and pockets.

Here are the morning, the noon, and the night,
her silent partners, investors
in waiting, their solar and lunar coins
strung out like a dazzling bracelet
shimmering a dance of lust.

July 13, 2018

Good Writing Habits: 32nd Post

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Not About

Poems often are about
exactly what they are not about.
This poem, for instance,
is not about the person
all those other poems were about.
Good writing habits forbid my telling
what this poem is about, but I
assure you
it is not about
what it is not about. Here
you see no mention of smooth hands,
no sly references to sex disguised
as descriptions of long train trips,
rivers slamming into bridge pilings,
or autumn trees bursting into flame,
no metaphor comparing that person’s eyes
to whatever the next best thing was.
Not even anything like a simile.
Not in this poem that is not about that.

June 29, 2018

We Eat the Seeds: 31st Post

This poem first appeared in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2.

FIVE PEOPLE (HOMELESS)

Sally, Inauguration Eve

This dirt gone?—white. I am
and Everyone says He’ll do the job
Give us hope but I was
wearing wool A-line skirts with
the very clouds above for shirts
last time, when my opinion
meant something. Click click
my tiny Italians on polished
boardroom floors Gentlemen,
I said I fail to see I
did fail to imagine this cardboard
throwing its brown cast on me.

This Red Scarf

White clothes mean sticks in the arm
but if you stay clean sheets
one night or two. On the lake bank there were
white trees! I had ice skates.
They had no leaves so the light came through.
The Polish girls wore scarves tied under their chins.
I was no Polack but see, I tie this scarf
tight and keep my head down
watching for ice. You fall here
no boys laugh or help you up.
But if they stick you
they help you up real nice.

Richard

I’m used to being in charge
so this will be about you.
I want you to know I appreciate the aluminum cans
so neatly stacked beside the trash can.
I see you see me take them, see you hurrying
to meet my six o’clock pickup daily.
I admire your scheduling abilities:
kitchen scraps to the chickens before work,
the soft globs of their droppings to the compost heap
before dark; the garden weeded Saturday mornings,
fruit plucked and distributed to neighbors in the afternoon.
I would have hired you in the old days—
kept an eye on you, as they say—
recommended you.
I keep you a secret now,
for the cans.

K.L.

What’s left of this planet is my home.
Birds are not afraid of me, curled in this bush,
unless I jerk my legs, dreaming
I fly with them over the roofs
and across the highways.
We eat the seeds that drop
and peck at the not-ripe pears,
scattering when the farmer comes
to nail his straw-filled savior to a post.

When I Was One of the People

All these things I shall tell you are true.

When I was a warrior my skin flowed yellow, red and green

like the sashes of the old ones.

When I was a warrior I devoured the night

and spit stars at the immaculate moon.

When I was a warrior my courage rode in front of me,

a blind slave stolen from an enemy camp.

When I was a warrior the wind and I embraced with great joy

and we brought forth spring, summer, fall

and the weaver child, winter.

When I was a warrior I kept sadness behind my eyes, mute as light.

When I was a warrior I could swell until the earth was inside me,

feverish and bloody,

and I could sweat until the earth was healed

and I could bleed until the earth was whole.

I am the owl and the darkness now.

I am the hawk and the light.

I am the crack in the clouds now.

I am the wind in the night.

June 8, 2018

Freaks: 30th Post

Well, we’re all freaks, of course, one way or the other.

THE MAN WITH NO WRISTS

cannot twist a poppy to pluck it
nor see in a single movement
the entire surface of an apple held aloft.

He admires the resilient wrists of women
washing clothes in the river,
the blurred wrists of pear packers,

the sturdy wrists of boys playing tug-o-war.
He watches the violinist’s bow arm
dance its sexy hula,

sneaks a look at anybody’s watch
at every easy chance.
Drunk, he slobbers over his mother’s

lilac-scented translucence
until she powers a slap
to his wet cheek.

The Amazing Man with No Wrists!
I bought a ticket to see him.
In the audience a woman waved,

her arm a fluted column,
fingers swaying like palm fronds.
A man threw pity like a discus.

Where can he see his heartbeat?
I wondered, looking at my slender table
with its feast for slicing.

May 1, 2018

The Mockery of the Swollen Garden: 29th Post

Sunflower & bees

After the Death of His Twin

—for John Fuller, age 80

The solo creak of his Naugahyde chair.

The excess of fruit broadcasting its ripeness.

In the closet, twice the needed pants and shirts, twice the needed gaping shoes, worn at the heel.

The nervous voice of his landlord, trying to remember which one passed.

The sniff and yip of the dog, double-checking under the table.

The mockery of the swollen garden.

The sports section left folded with the classifieds.

His unspoken opinion of the news story about welfare mothers.

The uselessness of the second bookmark pressed into the novel.

In front of the TV, half the snoring noise to waken him to his started insistence, “I wasn’t…”

The other narrow bed, tightly tucked.

The hearing aid left on the end table for the first time.

In the bathroom mirror, only two hips, two nipples, one penis.

The surprising regularity of his heartbeat.

April 7, 2018

We Call Our Game ‘Knowledge’: 28th Post

What It’s Like to Be Adopted

Ah, my pretties, there was a stillness—
think of it as sphere-shaped
a ping-pong ball without the ball—
and perhaps before that grand explosions
around other emptinesses. Our stillness
collapsed, smashed itself white and blue
flew red and purple
out, we say. Flew to what
we call here and there.

Sweet ones, the pieces moved this far and
that far until
divided by now and then we called their changes
speed, their journeys time.
We call our game knowledge
as we hold hands and live its fun and terror
for, dearest listeners, each particle attracts all others
so we know of gravity, love, luminosity,
and the shifts of momentum called history.

We play here
in this tiny history
the balls we toss falling
(where we call down) like the bits
of what we do not know
flying toward the center of another
stillness
before they what we call begin
what we call again.