Sand and Rock Streets

When she was small she played in sand and rocks,
With broken stick etched roads that a flat stone had
Graded. Knobby knees dimpled with gravel, a brush of
Hand, maybe twice, moved and shoed dust and
Dirt. Grey clay swirled in hot arid air while grit settled
Brown around once white folds gathered at her heels.

In those days her socks were always white from the package,
White from bleached laundry hanging on a wire in the sun.
Brown and crusty laying on the floor near the door, shaken
Outside before making their way back in. Something like the
Gritty smile of a kid who plays with lizards in the desert. Gravel
Streets meant bandages were always at home on those knees.



This poem was prompted by Poetry Thursday 's

streets i have known...

Nine Days

We lived in a netherworld
For nine days. Time ticked
From drips of machine-metered medicine.
Daylight fled, strewing mocking glints
Ephemeral in its wake, hissing and
Humming. Sighs and moans decreed fierce
Night-watch vigils. You were our nurse, too,
Those nine days.

Nights spent hoping not to hear
Alarm, struggling not to doze, bleary eyes
Alert for any movement from our patient or
Caretaker. We are inept
Witnesses riveted by unknowable signs.
Your steps a nimble balance of kindness and
Science, solid warmth and blue uniform -- personality
To mend and annoy, inhibit and console.

You gave hope yet said so little,
Just the incremental facts of life: numbers
Counted and procedures executed
In those nine days. Dread
Eclipsed the sun. Our primitive souls shook,
Unsure if her radiance would return. You were
Shaman -- peering, listening, measuring -- unable
Or unwilling to counsel past each night. Her

Pendulum swayed back and forth in a rhythm
Out of sync with shift changes and daily
Reports. Recovering tempo labors all, an
Imperiled body breathing by tubes
Fights to find its own pace, its place either here
Or there, yet each day is a day. We were the lucky ones
Standing in the hall, stewing and fretting
This time.

Was it your care or her will or our cries that
Urged a bruised heart to beat again?
If not to meet old age then
Mark, perhaps, five more precious years.

Guess the book...

Guess the book...

Fun little exercise found at Cam Reading (due to influences of others) by way of Poetry Thursday:


1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.


As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
11.
Given the memorial capacitites of architecture, it cannot be coinciden-
tal that in many of the world's cultures, the earliest and most significant
works have been funerary.

I did cheat, in that the closest book in reach at the moment, Design Like You Give a Damn, had a photo with 3-line credit on page 123.


















Answer: Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness. Lovely book.

Mom at the Circus

He winked at her. He couldn’t help it: she was sitting in the front row, grinning up at him. It nearly hurt to see her mouth stretched that far, her eyes glowing with awe and astonishment, teeth sparkling, giddily absorbing all the wonder she could gather. She stood first. The ovation would have happened anyway, but she stood first and clapped as long and hard as she could and he winked, at her—standing just above and over her in his crazy-clown costume—master of ceremonies, leader of light and song. She had gasped—screamed really—earlier, when one of the acrobats glided over her head like a bird soaring through other-worldly heavens. As confetti roiled through the tent, we were all transformed, caught in a snow-globe—gently shaken.

I wonder if she remembers, the last time we were at a circus together, when her stepfather took us on a four-hour drive to see Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ Greatest Show on Earth. There were three rings and elephants and lions and tigers and high-wire acrobats and clowns stuffing themselves into tiny cars. I thought she liked it. I liked the toy monkey-on-a-string souvenir—I never have cared for clowns, they always seemed sinister and conniving. Con men. I learned much later that her stepfather, an ex-con himself—convicted in a barroom brawl murder, had abused her. Until she told me at his funeral, I hadn’t realized I’d never been left alone with him.

Driving After Accidents and Other Tragedies

Cautious and watchful. Keeping a close eye on traffic all around, having checked and rechecked rear and side mirror alignments, the position of the wheel and seat, all just right after infinite adjustments. Odd how proper body position to set a side mirror is cheek to glass. Dancing with my reflection, marking that cold glass plane as a dog would, less happy but just as anticipatory. Like a shy child at a party, I am following far behind others in this slow lane—I would have made fun of myself before.

A normal family gathering cycle: weddings and births turn to graduations, weddings, and funerals. These sequences unhinge at any time—unexpected events careening and crashing headlong into one-way streets, oncoming trains, ambulances. Tears streaming and staining faces all blotchy red and snotty. Clutched tissues bedraggled and knotted, shattered fragments, retelling of old stories shared among happier times. Sadly spilling senses astutely aware and flaring, crackling nerve endings keening. “We have to keep in touch, visit more often”—in truth tragedy brings families together. Bittersweet treasure, reunions, at times like these.

This resolve will last about 24-months. About the time it takes for visceral memory of squealing tires and breaking glass to fade and for fearless living to retake its place at the controls. This resolve will last about 24-months. About the time it takes for promised letters and calls to be forgotten, trips taken to elsewhere—more fun—recreation; we need a vacation vacation, not another family visit.

Nesting

I wish they would nest in my tree, would not just gather but deposit, sticks and snippets of grass and brush, weedy remnants and debris. I wish they would create a ramble shack platform to spill a new generation of raucousness around me.

A nest would validate my home, it would say, yes, this is a good place—a place with resources, insight, position. I wish they would not just eat my food or drink my water. I want them to glide in and out with purpose, possess the bubble of homeness that I call mine and remind me that I am only a squatter.

Screens

Would I rather live with crawly-fliey-bugs in my house so to see backyard birds—they eat gifts of hydrogenated suet—clearly from a study window? Would I admit the buzzing interruption tormenting the light hanging above? Screens: civil separation.

Aging has been hard on my eyes—squinting gives only poor relief and increases the creases bracketing my eyes. Not brackets—more like lightly wind rippled pools tracing a middle-ager’s traveled passing concerns. Too much pre-sunscreen desert tanning and post-surgeon general’s warned off cigarettes? Happy moments; sad. Angry. Dusty screens like cobwebs clouding understanding, a receded memory that won’t quite come when called. Stubborn, distracted, misplaced. Circling around like a cagey mongrel, one of those poor souls that can’t look you in the eye.

Discrete youthful moments when clarity is piercingly confident and brash, long gone; cataracts creep like a cancer. Clouds your minds eye like a dirty swinging porch door. Blink and squint—it doesn’t help.

Zinnias

I don’t care for zinnias. They are much too bold and breezy; their raucous carefree hues belied by reliability. I would adore them if they had a fatal flaw, a stem too weak to carry their weight, like the dinner-pate peonies staked in my yard. No, zinnias bright colors are compromised only by a common daisy face and weedy stems wilted by fierce desert sun and wind and dust. They survive an arid wasteland, if watered daily during summer’s raging heat, and grow well from seed—and so they played a perpetual part in my mother’s garden. Always placed in the same position, year after year; set and corralled—as befitting ill-behaved perennial or progeny. Decide where the specimen goes and there it stays. Neat rows, alternating plastic colors, nothing random—everything planned, no surprises. A model of my mother and what she hoped for me.

Her penchant for routine is renowned—daily patterns set standards of regularity. Nine on a Saturday morning, every week till death intervened, would find her calling grandma, who waited by the phone. Shopping and Banking is Monday’s task; Laundry is Tuesday. Both bathrooms are given the once-over daily, no toothpaste smears or loose hair resides more than 24-hours in her basins. Thus too the stray bill, never a late payment or speeding ticket. All records are flawless; safe and steadfast are her keywords, routine her heart, her savior. She is never out of groceries the way that I am. I ring her at odd times, different days, not always from home, mostly from a moving vehicle. I am scattered while she is focused. I am random where she is regimented.

Arranging a visit is difficult; my mother’s frail body—abused by years of illness—can’t tolerate elevation of flight, the eighteen hour drive is hard on her circulation; my father can’t tolerate being trapped in a terminal or taking off his trophy belt decorations and pocket contents in security lines. They tend to travel here in winter or spring, when the weather is at its worst and irregular, when it’s hard to plan an outing, to break the cabin fever and monotony. They establish patterns while visiting, set schedules and tasks in order, they don’t allow for unanticipated discoveries. My mother reminds me that I transplanted myself, that if I were closer it would all be so much easier—better. So I go to them like a weedy thistle—springing up, eventually.

Suppertime Trailer Park

Warm early summer wind beating a tether rope and hook against hollow aluminum pole—pronng, pronng, pronng—no other sound casts such a long shadow of complete isolation and aloneness in this emptiness. The world has disappeared, school is out and vacation begun: Gravel-crunching bike tires crowding out the buzz and hum of insects. Turning pickup truck wheels into carport, soft slow hiss of radiator cooling. Metal clicking and popping in the twilight. Faint radio scratching gentle background noise, announcing local activities: Kiwanis social and Odd Fellows fish fry and county fair and gymkhana, floating broken-like blossom fragments on a breeze. A June bug drones.

Birds scratch amongst the grasses and low whirring humming of a trucker’s air-brakes down-shift the interstate not far away. If it were deep night, the train whistle would be moaning lightly its warning against cross-traffic, children necking aimlessly while drinking. No thought of destruction, metal to metal to glass holding flesh hostage, losing. Cottonwood poplar leaves rustle, gently.

High piercing cry of a hawk; backyard dog yelling over and over and over—hey! who’s there? get out! Hey! Slam of screen doors over and over and over—kids in and out. Oven and icebox doors open then shut. Timers presaging some movements, countering others. Spittling whistle and clatter of a pressure-cooker, clank-clank-sigh beating tempo against its lid. Wiz—wiz—whoosh. Melmac plates slap-circle-slap a bargain early-American table standing on turned wood legs, scuffled and clawed, flatware knives and forks land on folded paper napkins with a muffled clatter, a rasping scrape sounding their final position right of plate. Toss the fallen salt over you left shoulder, and wish.

Walter Cronkite’s voice muffled as water hits the rim of a turquoise sink. Glasses filled with cubes from metal ice-trays, ratcheting arms pulling heavy and bending slightly before clattering out and clinking heavily into jelly jars whose softly crocheted socks soak up desert condensation. Life in a 1960s swamp-cooler world sighing sweetly. Choice of sweet tea or milk, if not water. Chairs scraping backwards with positions taken, predetermined ritual of who-what-where-why lining up lives. A brown wiener-dog sneaks up for a treat and hastens back, chastened. Murmurs and scratching of aluminum on plastic. Pass the salt and, please, how was your day?

Egg Carton Ikebana

Her sweet husband is quietly complicit when it comes to one of her quaint habits, an odd quirk. She likes to balance eggs. Not balance as would a juggler working a routine—would that she could juggle raw eggs. No. This is a different equation, one of extraction. A balanced separation of contained from container whose resulting emptiness creates pattern.

Her favorite works result from an 18-set. There are more variations, exponential combinations really, past those of merely 12, though she admits 12 is the classic number and, were there a test—a qualifier, a board examination for missing-egg arrangers—that 12 would surely be the test given to certify minimum egg-blankspace competency.

She doesn’t cheat and work only in pairs. She’ll try to make a lovely pattern when faced with odd numbers, when complete symmetry is unavoidably unobtainable. There have been those tempting moments, when a casual break of a yolk could mean lightening the carton of that odd egg, when adding cholesterol to the day’s diet would ease a composition. Where compromised unspoken rules result in a readily achieved arrangement. It is then that she thinks of ikebana and the loveliness of asymmetry and she puts it back, in place, just so.

She can tell her husband must enjoy, or at least benignly tolerate, this simple obsession as much as she does. In following his cooking it is clear he, too, creates pleasant emptiness. She is quietly disappointed when friends and their cartons reveal assembly-line leavings.

She wonders what this might reveal about her chosen childlessness. Or how what is left is as important as that taken.