Blood Sisters

My best friend, Evelyn, had a deaf sister,
so she knew sign language and was glad to teach me.
She shaped my fingers like the letter ‘y” to say ‘I want to play with you,’
I learned fast, put my mind to it, later they said I had a good ear.
Evelyn liked imagination, she almost went into trance
when I told her that the gold clouds making a tunnel
in the evening sky were the gateway to heaven. Skies were often gold that year.
We sneaked into the Fountain of Youth near our neighborhood
but couldn’t find the water, just forlorn gardens wilting in the sun,
and a statue of the Virgin Mary with peeling feet,
like the old lady who lived across the street, probably all the rain and sun did it.
We cooled off in the damp shade behind the sign
that stood in front of the old water wheel, we shoved it, but it didn’t budge.
Secrets shared were a delicious trust of ten year old girls left to run loose.
‘Let’s become blood sisters,’ I whispered, and Evelyn, catching my tone,
nodded gleefully. We had to cut our fingers and share the blood to be forever pledged.
Finding a piece of glass, pale brown and triangular, I brushed off the dirt,
peered through it toward the sun which beamed and split into bronze rays.
‘You go.’ I said. Evelyn cringed, shaking her head.
I told her the oldest must go first, her birthday was in March, mine in May.
She hesitated, and her eyes began to water. I realized then
that I would have to prove my courage, and with bare-faced bravado, I took a breath,
made the cut, grabbed my finger, and panted, ‘Hurry up, you go,
we don’t want to lose the blood.’ Evelyn, inspired,
cut her finger just after I offered to cut it for her.
We placed the bleeds together in a gripping hold, chanted,
‘Wire, brier, limber lock, three geese in a flock,’ and pulled apart.
Sucking our fingers til the blood was gone, we spat ceremoniously onto the ground.
‘Now we are forever bound, our secrets can never be told, or we hope to fall dead.’
Evelyn nodded solemnly and a tear rolled down her cheek.
We skipped along the shining tunnel of our street, fingers intertwined
with cuts of thin red lines, under over-arching shade of Live Oak trees.
When we reached her door, Evelyn turned back and signed: ‘I play you tomorrow’.
‘I play you,’ I signed back. In the soft and pastel afternoon,
I looked for the golden gate to heaven, but the sun shone high in a blue sky.

~~~

Terrible Beauty

She’s calling, she’s calling,
it’s too late to close the door,

Laughable to shut the windows,
to huddle on the floor,

The blast that met your summons
has blown apart your roof,

Now must you lie there naked,
undone, rendered and proofed.

You asked her to come to you,
invoked the grassy glade,

Bright lit in dim woods,
the trysting place you made.
You risked an invocation
you knew at best in part,

Now, ‘they know not what’,
repeats inside your cringing heart.

You thought you were the catcher,
the weasel in the rye,

Yet you never wake to sunlight
no matter how you try.

How reckless your decision,
not to tremble when you should,

Not to recognize the sunlit space
is purposed by the Wood.

~~~

Eidolon

                          She knew
                        she was his
                   Eidolon, unhappy
                         as that was.
                                  He
         needed such a haunting, and
       she, curving and self possessed
      fit the space. It was tiring at best.
     Sometimes she erected a copy of
              herself to hang, foggy
                        in the air, to
                         escape. He
                       did not seem
       to mind or notice, kneeling
  as he did, seeing through the eye
of wafting need. She came back with
 armloads of daisies, dumped upon
 the altar he had made. He tore the
   petals one by one. she loves me,
         she, under one sun, hot,
                           loves me
                                not.
~~~ 

Rocking Chair

Carrying a sleeping child
evenings in spring,
she climbs the stairs
while the night birds sing,

In the room, with beds in a row
they sleep, breathing low.
Here lies happiness, their health
Their deepening minds a stored wealth.

She walks between the sleepers
gentling silken cheek,
smooths the linen ruffling
at each breath,

like the treble sound
from throats of nesting birds
audible in quiet nights
on the spinning earth.

Rounds made,
the rocking chair winds down,
memory’s thread
is imperceptibly unwound.

Passing youth
as ebbing dusk
an offering for time
its implacable thrust.

~~~

First Born

It was cold the day you were born.
spring bloomed near the creek
and daffodils promised
yellow sun for little girls.

Your Father brought us violets,
you slept, eyes closed as yet to beauty,
They were hand-picked lavender
and purple. The color of kings
and princesses.

Your Father and I were all in,
for tiny pastel frilled wonders.
Pillows, naps. and tea in the cup,
good in March.
The months swooped on,
as we ran to keep up.
Soon you learned to climb
into our bed, a mattress on the floor,
we tucked the comforter
under your chin.

You grew so fast we were out of breath
for first words and birthdays
when cloth diapers froze on the line,
and you howled at being put to bed.

The sheer ignominy of this,
when it was clear you made the world,
and needed to stay up to keep it all in place.
We, nodding off, you still awake at our side,
could not dream how you did it.

~~~

Girlchild

Turning ten next week, my granddaughter
requests a craft set of felt animals to sew.
I go online and send it off,
that’s what you do when you have
such a girl in your life.

She is free in all actions, direct in all requests.
Even if her parents took away
her phone for a few days.
I did not ask why, she did not
tell. She did say, “I got my phone back
now.” One does not ask a princess
to elaborate on her failures.

We breezed on to subjects crucial:
the favorite character in her book,
and which was mine?
the most confusing character, we agreed
on that one.

Taken back to childhood, remembering
the contentment with my small world,
when much was sensed but not clear,
of diffuse worlds that lay outside my reach.

She has finished all her homework,
is going to see a friend tomorrow,
and has decided on a new doll she might like.

She doesn’t ask anything of me this time,
just likes to use her new phone.
Yet I know what she really wants,
that which is heard between the words,
heard even through the phone, a surety of adoration.

We hang up when she goes to dinner in
her warm, bright lit home.
It is evening here too, yet I light no lamp,
happy to sit, glowing,
my offering accepted, taken up.
And I am given what is still unclear,
but sensed, something in the depths,
to be revealed in the heart’s slow time.

~~~

Daughter of Caesura

Geez, Mom,
could you be
any more obscure?
said my
editor-in-chief.
…Yes, I say,
but it is like
creating new
sea creatures
when nobody
dives that deep.

It is a mark
of old mothers
to play with
categories,
keep at bay
the cliché,
devil
on the stanza.

Dimpled caesura
on wave torn
strand,
open to what swoops
in when the tide
ebbs.

It takes dedication,
like a religion,
where transgressions
abound,
forgiveness
a given,
and the pews are full
of the gray-haired.

We rippled ones
have learned
not to be nice,
in order not to risk
ellipsis
before our time.

Cryptology
should be taught
the young,
as a survival tool,
you never know when
another Finn’s Wake
will be required,
to shuffle us all
back
to solid ground,
or sea-bottom,
for those
salt water nymph
inclined.

There are
a lot of those
dripping
in the carpeted
aisles.
They keep adding
watery verses
to the hymnals,
and screech like
whale song
before
and after
the doxology.

This is all pleasant
in a damp way,
but out of place
here in
the inner Mongolia
of experience.
We would be
better suited
in horse hide
and wolf howls

Yet traditions,
Maidens on shells,
and such,
with cherubim,
die hard,
and they may not
… die
at all.

~~~

The Grain

At end of day
the kitchen done,
laundry folded and put away
the mother finds herself
beneath the overlay of tasks,
and visits the room
of her sleeping daughter.

The floor, littered with
symbols of the world,
plastic, bendable
is full of disappearance.
The child is still here, sleeping,
in and out her soft breath.

The air in the room is close,
yet no window is opened
the outside, near enough,
will be inside
in no time at all.

Twigs unhinge themselves
from the nest
and fall to earth.
There is no stopping this.

The child will rise with morning
that pulsates blue, shining.
take as bread the pomegranate seed,
oblivious to the grain
that runs through
all things.

Burning to run past hillocks
where gathered flowers bloom,
and fall, as she must
into the furrows of
seedlings expanding,
the dark of generation,
the beginning of the body
of some woman
who will grow old through time.

~~~

Light

By the window in bright sunlight
Geraniums glow vermilion,
fragrance of Lady of the Night
wafts through the open door,
a plate of cookies, molasses
with tiny cracks and sugar crystals,
and a glass of ice water are near at hand.

I wake to the sound
of the neighbor’s dog
yelping in the yard
while the slim suntanned
boys toss a Frisbee,
in a what seems a lingering
dream. The ice has melted
to leave a clear pool on the window sill.

The plastic container
of cookies were sent
over this morning.
I called the youngest, Billy,
over to my door. Here,
I said, share these with
your brothers.

Chocolate? He asks.
No, molasses. What’s mo-lasses?
It is a kind of syrup
left over when you make sugar.
You make sugar? He asks.

His brother calls,
he runs away.
Thanks! I hear him yell
over the hedge top.

Out over the lake
the sky lowers into early evening
soon the pink light that feels
like a dancing of the body’s
cells, will suffuse everything.

~~~

Satin and Mint

Even the Clurichaun
passed me by with hardly
a glance.
Admittedly there are lots
of us out this afternoon, sunhats
smashed down, garden gloves
and long-sleeved shirts
against the sun.

Remembering when
glances came my way,
I laugh inside, invisibility
is luscious.
I smell the roses, he smells the
mint, the seductive scent
he can’t resist.

I know he will be back at dark,
I have seen the trampled green
stems,
and once, by open window,
the spearmint sweetness
woke me from a dream.

He’s getting stiff, grey
hairs jut from his hat.
He thinks he’s hidden in
in the shadow of the wall.

It is sultry sweet to lie
awake under my roof
as I hear him bend and grunt.

Old thief. I lie back,
grinning in the dark,
under the dome
of the satin soul of summer.

~~~

Plundra Conundra

you, tender,

flash asunder
leave splendor,

me younger
under umbra

hunger for
thunder wonder

~~~