She Got a Way

 

Back to early dream words that got away,

monumental soldiers still shouldering their weapons, not immortal because still alive.

Not original, as these thoughts have come from somewhere,

from someone no doubt since we all know that words have no wings.

 

We all see the stacked black tires and where the asphalt meets the sand and

little weeds –with all the tricks and odds, put down their sure bets on some survival.

I beckoned you once as a lover from another time and when you showed up

with your suitcases and shopping plan, we barely could wonder what to do,

barely could pull it all together again to say hello as if we had other, more important

thoughts to think and words to say.

If only we had each other and the morning.

 

If only sleep moved us backward in time and youth was wise and sure,

taking time to pick the path and prize and means.

We are no such thing.

The smoke is there from distant burning,

while the long lines, close at hand, sway though the morning is still,

responsive to some other kiln heating the earth from within,

belching poisonous but invisible atmospheres, gasses,

influences we breath in deeply despite the deadly tarnish to our lungs.

 

Another poem about the moon and grass and Autumn’s endeavor with the paradigms

that maybe once walked the ideal earth but have clearly gotten away.

Do we need it and do we dare?

Grey men in spectacle suits like sleeping, matted bears at the zoo or homeless coats

curled at the subway entrance.

Of course there is a man there, stubble face, broken footed and

woman is of the same course, hanging her sashes of contention in the closet for now,

perhaps both wanting to make things better.

 

The song and song again, leaving or leading us at the gutter and the corner,

another cross roads, another splice to the brittle film

that crackles in the projector once the skilled hands have it mended.

The fixers and story tellers, gesture of dance and paint, frozen, “almost like real”.

The spooling film and fishing line carried downstream on its bobber to the limit of our line,

dodging snags, tempting nothing really but our time.

 

Time to pack up she says as for the long journey

mirroring the naiads with homeless hearts.

Waiting is no solution for our timid mortality.

Pride is no key to the secrets of sorrow.

The gulf of grief is not its own reward

but a shore too well known to be worth mentioning again,

even at night with its rustlings

as if a thin moon sliver were just about to rise.

It is our toe nails paired off in delicate arches,

our bodies projecting as if clouds of stormy rain lived in our eyes

to weep for the ship chains of our spines,

for the hair fires of the horizon,

for the lost homes of flood

and the turned boats of refugees on high seas,

never having seen snow or learned to swim, now saying, as to the North Atlantic:

“Help me”, raise me on your swells as I raise this breath in my chest,

full to hope before going down.

The old ship tale, the coming home,

the moment of release for nature to claim another form,

unguarded, unlimited in ceaseless foam.

 

The poet has her place to write,

 back in a little garden cove, a glen, a corner beyond the heat awhile,

with maybe a drip of water now and again.

Say “claim” to the drowning child, maim of the prison guard years later, nursing disability.

Say on and on as other or renunciation,

be the prophet of health and true wealth.

Simple sunshine. 

Dark night.

Knowing need, humble as pleasure is to relief.  Never quite enough.

About a biography, she once said, I was on the land, upright, gathering in the sun.

A performance space off a back lit alley.

The monks come on spare time lined up like lucky penguins with a ticket to sin,

guarding the young.

The dress makers, set designers, railway men came too, deigned, drunk,

driving on the story like a hearse parked in front, a police van, closing night,

the immigrants finally fed and warm.

She holds no artifice in capturing the suffering

as if in their faces the dance, the flight from Mt. Aetna,

still dead as dinosaurs a thousand years on.

Dead as a bill of sale.  Keep the record.

She has a vision and a dream to complete.

I have my little garret.

I can’t paint by numbers.

The magpies have come to duel with the chickens.

The flat matte of tan sand and gesso white on a canvas of screams.

Of ships going down and waves that pound through hull holes and slosh the bilge.

The cumulative effect of all downy dreams named for swans and ashes

that rise as the snow eventually falls, steady and even,

covering the broken walls and re-bar,

requiring a historian of letters to re-connect the Cyrillic onslaught of pain,

the assaults on sense and decency that slip beneath the waves,

below the drifts,

on the back end of the train pulling away.