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Chicago in Winter: a bluelove rush |
You must walk Michigan Avenue in the snow, the heroic South to North mile
over the Bridge of Angels and cross ancient Chikagou Creek for the street shop
bookstore where the café is warm and the cups filled strong and lovely with lemon
grass and coconut tea three stories above the crowd and watch as the after work day
unwinds and sweetens into twilight, your book of poems open on the table left unread
for the real love stories of lives unfolding below on the street under flurries of stars
falling onto the heads and faces of the people – how purposeful they look there at the
light waiting and ready to cross over to the other side as the moment splits, the light
changes and in a single flash of bravery they simply step off the curb together and rush
forward into their moonlit destinies as the blue eye of a breeze off the lake sweeps past. |
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& the diplomat’s wife |
At black tie dinner parties
she crosses her ankles
& listens intently to
the men weaving
silken destinies of countries
& women chatting about
the fate of nations
& newspaper horoscopes how silent she is sipping
heavenly pearl tea from a china cup,
the Washington Post reporter
gossip & scandal on his mind
about a senator sending his naked
valentines to secret places she dreams of her husband’s
marble love, as the apostles
watch her spooning sugar
from inside the wall |
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An afternoon spent watching flights |
To know the migratory patterns of birds:
how their flight is faith, even after they lose
their way & have to circle around Somehow it all makes sense:
this lovely gravity holding our days together
those birds, their faith – our lives |
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Clothes my brother Bob wore |
You wore a necktie to St. Columba Catholic grammar school, pulling it off before
you shot through the doors, the church bells ringing behind you as you ran. You wore a scared grin and a dark blue suit and tie that was too big for your eleven
year old body for a picture someone snapped as you knelt at your father’s grave. You wore a white Jockey t-shirt and baby blue boxer shorts when you went to sleep
at night, the radio next to your bed playing I can’t get no satisfaction. You wore a black leather jacket when you were hip, smoked Kools and even your hair
was dark and slick, except for a couple of stray curls on your forehead. You wore a white Jockey t-shirt and dark blue plaid pajama bottoms while you made
fried egg, onion and mustard sandwiches those cold, sunny winter mornings. You wore a bleached white sailor’s uniform when you came home after you enlisted in
the Navy until you went AWOL and then you wore a dark button down shirt and pants. You wore blue jeans and black wrinkled shirts when you spent afternoons drinking
Schlitz and listening to Inagaddadavida and Lucy in the sky with diamonds. You wore heavy boots with metal toes, caked with dirt and grease when you worked
midnights plus overtime in the steel mill for one long summer. You wore cool black every night whenever you drank beer and shot pool with your
friends in the smoky basement, Light my fire playing on the radio. You wore a tan jumpsuit when you walked through the doorway, into the visiting area
of Stateville Prison where you went after selling heroin to an undercover cop. You wore mismatched, wrinkled clothes whenever you were getting high, shooting up,
drinking Bud and Robitussin with codeine, nodding off to A day in the life. You wore dirty blue jeans and a ripped black leather jacket when you took the South
Shore train from Chicago to Hegewisch home for the last time. You wore a military green sheet or was it a blanket? over your naked body, your face and feet uncovered when I saw you there lying on a steel gurney in the morgue. |
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On reading an inscription in This Side of Paradise |
If I can only imagine the snow swept streets of 1920 America when Paul gave
Marion a copy of This Side of Paradise that Christmas morning and what she
must have thought as she unwrapped the ribbon and thin paper of his gift and
touched those lovely pages with her fingertips while Fitzgerald, even then was
traveling toward some palmy Hollywood studio backlot, his hands wringing
and desperate, trying to write a fine line or two and my god, how it all ended
up for him after the glory and Gatsby and who knows what happened to Marion
and Paul, how their lives were shaped by unforeseen tides and how it happens
that on this sunny Wednesday morning in March in Florida, 86 years later, I take
their book off the shelf and touch Fitzgerald’s pages wanting to write something,
anything this morning and know another Christmas looms – even as the roses &
geraniums outside my window proclaim paradise. |
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Writing |
Writing is a long summer of sipping soft clouds of words through a straw, riding a
bicycle with your best friend, climbing up to your secret tree house, lighting a candle
with matches you're not supposed to have, playing paper-rock-scissors as water glimmers
on the lake of your mind and you peer into this solemn place where two children tiptoe
onto a pond of ink, skip across an old wooden bridge over a deep wash of river and you
are anxious white for them, but they forget danger like a mouthful of cotton candy and a
carnival of memories, memories being the alphabet desiring the open field of dry paper,
thousands of letters escaping in a marching line traveling across white plains to meet the
two children who can walk backwards to catch a fish or a train or even fly, but not at the
same time and often enough, they just wait alone at a bus stop on a crowded corner in a
noisy city or take two steps back to the witch's palace without stepping on a crack, but
eventually, they run away to be with you in your small room, where you sit in your chair,
at a wood table, the thin paper fluttering in a breeze slipping in from the open window,
the pen poised in your hand, your fingertips resting on the page, remembering the long
journey of two children when a door opens inside your mind and you finally make a
single mark, then another and another. And another.
It all adds up. |
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Aunt Julia's lover |
You giggle & twist your shoulders for the photographer trying to
catch your yearbook smile in 1930 – at seventeen your face is
an unlocked window in the moonlight, a waltz, a whisper of passion
under the smile of a sailor’s arms, alongside your mother’s cherry
tree where school days slid off your shoulders - the pearl button
falls from your blouse – with your soft voice onto the grass Somewhere, deep inside a drawer, I have the silver spoon you
saved from The Palmer House Hotel - I imagine this tryst,
a stolen rendezvous with the sailor - spent holding hands across
a linen table, how he must have carefully unfolded the lavender
starched napkin onto his lap & later unfolded you under the sheets
while you watched a piano playing secrets in his eyes, waiting
for the rest of your life to begin in that single afternoon A husband, a house, a baby carriage, a life that never came true,
staring in the mirror, angels at your side - it doesn’t work to close
the years in your eyes – you never found the map for lost lovers,
children or lives - you died before you were born, in a glass room, darkly I imagine you now, a ghost of a girl, silky blushing blue as you
swan into pale city streets at night, searching for your past life to
wander a world of hallways & rooms inside The Palmer House
where you & your sailor lover once slept - folding back warm
sheets still damp & twisted - you feel a familiar soft sush across
your cheek as his fingers touch your face & you look up to see
the threshold of his smile, a flashing snap of bright light that lifts
& carries you up and into a wedding of forever |
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Red is a boy you once loved, the fireman’s son and you remember how you were a shy girl in a bedroom playing Solitaire when he tapped you on your shoulder, took you in
his arms and that first kiss felt like a deck of cards shuffling fast inside your chest. Red is also the strawberry field town where you grew up, but your eighteen year old
self had to leave, so you packed a sleeping bag with apples, berries, clean underwear, cotton socks and poems and on the road you never missed a moment of merlot or sangria or beer and never failed to say: let’s do it, come on let’s just do it, we only live once. Another red is built with bricks from the ten thousand memories you have known: your grandmother’s kitchen where you sat drinking a glass of milk or sneaking cherries from
a bowl meant for jam, the skip and trip down the front steps, your skinned knees, when the flag meant America, when the long-haired boys of summer raced their Pontiacs and Chevys down Baltimore Avenue, when all you needed was love, these are the moments you saved under the glass of your mind. The best red is you, still eleven years old in your bedroom sitting at your small desk and none of your childhood friends have died yet: you stare at a sheet of notebook paper, awk written all over it in teacherly ink, you chew on a peppermint as you erase dragons and sentences and words, the paper cuts your small finger, you watch a drip form on its tip while the snow swirls silent and lovely outside the window – your life is officially a metaphor – or as the freckled boy who sat in front of you in class used to call it before
he died that spring: methaphor. |
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When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
– old spiritual wisdom
I had a teacher, a guide to help me understand the wonders and mysteries of life.
Two guides actually: Jack & Jill. They weren’t related because he always kept
a hand on her ass whenever I saw them together, which was quite often. Jill
would say: paint your miserable yesterdays black and you’ll never feel guilty.
Then Jack would tell me: sleeping with that guy would do you some good.
Stuff like that. My guides don’t have the highest I.Q.s and their messages
are often a kind of unwisdom. For example: Jack thinks I should carry a loaded
gun in my purse. Jill thinks if I lock myself in the closet and chant a mantra or
even just a strange syllable, my life could be charmed. Charmed. I know they’ve
made sacrifices to bring me this information, but I desperately long to tell them
they can leave. I have a new teacher: the guy I met in a bar last week, the one I
think I could love, the one my friends keep warning me about.
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California red was everywhere
a feverish light swallowing
all our days as we drove
on the freeway going toward
or farther away from home
until it became a question of who
had the lovely recipe
for this stream flaming
the twilight sides of our lives
who planned these scarlet eyes
to gaze back at us knowing
the rains couldn’t soften or close
them with its wet humming
up and down along the hillsides
then someone on the radio claimed
it’s an artist with no money
he came back to town a month ago
to look for his botanist girl
only she fell in love with someone
else but forgot to tell him
her old lover standing there everyday
on the side of the freeway with cardboard
signs in his paint spattered shoes
and those crazy tattoos
of small broken bones
falling down his naked chest
and his desire to find her find her
find her and tell her he knows
how to love her and copy right nature |
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A, you were my first:
I remember your strange angular
red face looking up at me
my fingers tracing along
on the wood block of you
you stood for something, but what? A, you flashcard into my memory:
I remember a safe tee-pee to dwell in
before I moved onto B, C or D
or tried to figure out the mystery of X
the odd nature of Q or the sinister Z
& never mind the craziness of K A, you with your 3 sturdy lines:
you saved me, reminded me of home
when I was scared to open the door
of my kindergarten classroom
I saw you above the blackboard
standing there waiting for me
at the beginning of the alphabet A, you showed me the 25 others:
but you went first, pointing the way
unafraid, so all of us followed pushing
& shoving each other along the thin blue edged
line wading brave into the deepest paper quiet
drift of white knowing we’d make up stories
for the rest of our lives under your spell
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on reading news about mapmakers who erased
Poetry Tulip, Georgia from the maps in 2006 Poetry Tulip along with other
towns like Dewy Rose, Sharp Top
and Experiment are too small
for today’s twisted atlas of the world.
Be gone, the mapmaker in her office
decides one blue morning
as she palms her pink eraser
or glides her cursor across a
swath of land in Georgia making
the towns disappear from her vision.
Whoever heard of a town called Sharp Top?
And Poetry Tulip just clutters up the page. Tell that to the birds who still read Poetry
Tulip on their flight onward to other places
or to the boy and his sister on their way to school
holding hands and kicking through piles of leaves
on a dusty path along the road below as they look up
and she asks him if the flock of birds above will sleep
tonight in the airy trees of Sharp Top or vanish
somewhere between Dewy Rose and Experiment.
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| Before school Harrison Ford kisses
my adventurous forehead, lips, breasts
Indiana tells me we must do it, do it, do it
I’m not that kind of girl, I giggle
driving in a red convertible flashing
past watchful angels sitting on treetops
sliding down water slicked glass streets
that circle through the lost center of town
where my high school sits, I can’t be late Mother leans over me, wake up it’s time
for school girl, shut off the damn alarm
did you do your homework assignment
last night, study for your chemistry test
today yeah, yeah, yeah, Dean & I spent
all night on the periodic table
the elements are burned inside
my mind & body: K is kiss me, He is
hold me, Fl is falling in love One windy August night, 9 weeks later
we’re in the backseat of Dean’s car
parked in a cornfield, tall stalks ranting
and waving against a hot, naked Indiana
full moon, my reflection in the car’s
window shows me I am that kind of girl
I’m not the first in my class
to find my awakening inside
a boy’s dreamy plum sweet softness
before I realize I’ve lost yesterday
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