May Gardening

Last year’s habanera stalks lay sapped
like the wooden bones of prehistoric birds,
full skeletons collapsed and broken, wrapped
in winter grass and ivy, spelling words
in a language that I’ve lost or keep forgetting
year-to-year as every year I stare
into the ruins of the fall, the netting
of a shipwreck, feathers, bone and hair.
The months ahead will shift through garden rakes
and Sunday afternoons spent with my daughter
tending peppers, yellow garter snakes
in dusty sunlight, chlorophyll and water.
This afternoon I start to clear the ground,
distracted in this brittle lost and found.

Recession

It settles in. And mornings are the worst,
as recent memories emerge from dreams
through which we grind our teeth. Recurrent themes
include the trial, the errant lover cursed
by issues of identity, the plane
that smashes into houses down the block.
We barter fifteen minutes from a clock
alarm that rips like lightning through the brain,
postponing our recession for a space
of time that passes in another flash.
Outside an engine idles. With a jerk
it lurches to a nearby can of trash
where story arcs of fading dreams retrace
familiar faces on the bus to work.

Small Change

Malik came in from Washington to hook
my laptop to the network: “This will ease
your access to the e-mail server… Look!”
A Windows® message popped up in Chinese.

I left him tapping and I took a walk.
This kind of thing’s been happening for years—
the “simple” fix, the crash, the techno talk…
When DC gets involved, it ends in tears.

I bought a deli sandwich down the street
and found currency, again, retooled!
“It’s got a purple ‘5’— I think it’s neat,”
the cashier said. I don’t. I’m overruled.

It’s entropy. Perpetual decay.
The only choice you get is “click OK”.

Souvenir

I.M. Ray Pospisil

We had our maps of Paris for November–
Ray would be vacationing with Anne,
And I’d be on my own. I don’t remember
Why we hadn’t thought ahead to plan
A rendezvous, in light of all the time
We’d spent in cites like Atlanta when
We worked together in the eighties. I’m
Haphazard when I’m on the road. But then

I saw him walking toward me through the crowd
Near Saint-Germain-des-Prés on Friday night.
I recognized him in the way you know
You’ve spotted a celebrity. The light
Preserved his step and shadow in a cloud
Of silver halide by Les Deux Magots.

2-14

All around the world,
every boy and every girl,
need the loving.
The humble and the great,
even those we think we hate,
need the loving.
Soldiers of the Queen,
all the hard men that we’ve seen,
need the loving.
Babies at the breast,
those in power and those suppressed,
need the loving.

Andy Partridge (XTC)_____
Image: Patricia Wallace Jones ©

Photographs of my Father

They make their way upstairs into a pile
Atop the mirror table in the hall,
These musty snapshots from the basement file.
Nostalgia. Someone’s periodic trawl,
A cruelty, unearths the Polaroid
And moldy Kodak pictures from the mist
And mice and floods I’d hoped destroyed
Them since they last resurfaced. They persist
In cyclical recurrence and decay
To taunt the negligent historian
Who wills that family records fade away,
The second-generation Dorian,
Who sublimates the portrait. There’s a salve
Of ultimate delusion. For we have….

The barbeque. My father rakes the coals
And shares the sidelong laughter with Marie,
His tennis partner—neighbors, kindred souls,
Suburban archetypes. And I can see
Them now exactly as I saw them then.
The only difference is the understanding
I have gained of negatives, the zen
Of capturing relationships in standing
Water in the basement and in space.
The photographic evidence is there—
The yellow halo circling his face,
The faded shapes obscuring half her hair,
Which filled an upper corner of the shot.
The question of what’s there and what is not.

And next we have the master of the bow-
line: Navy man-cum scouter with a hat
Like Smokey Bear, a neckerchief below
The double chin. It’s black and white. It’s matte
And inaccessible. A world of codes
Cut out for him that cut him off from us,
Suggesting secret week-long episodes—
The trip he took to Philmont on a bus
In ‘69, for one. I’ll never reach
Him in this missing space. He was the master
Of his own domain in which he’d teach
Me, on our one vacation, how my faster
Way to tie the sheep shank didn’t work.
He laid the cotton squarely with a jerk.

And finally the photo of a ghost,
A recognizable exchange of air
Across the grass at springtime with a host
Of garden angels gasping in despair
From sodden marginalia. Here he’s gone,
Not merely on his way but actually
Upon the other shore, another lawn
Beneath my mother’s ornamental tree.
I know exactly where his feet would touch
Despite the crop. A sloppy Windsor knot
Reveals he’s finished leaving us as such—
A businessman some paparazzo caught
Between the missed appointment and a scream
That fogs the glass in a recurrent dream.

I lay the photos back where they were placed
On purpose, on some level, I’m convinced,
Their presence timed precisely. The erased
Is etched again, or traced, and acid-rinsed
And misting at the bottom of a box
Beneath convenient flooding and some rocks.

Club Night

On the George Bellows painting

Emerging wet-on-wet from black to blood,
The fighter tangles, pounds into the light
Of his opponent, arching in a flood
Of shadow and cigar smoke as the fight
has drawn a club in force, tuxedo-clad.
And yes, that urchin in the foreground, head
Foreshortened, turns to us and laughs. A bad
Banana, him. We’ll watch the crowd instead,
Where clubmen in their truest nature rise
In slaps of pancake carbon black and zinc
To orchestrate the background as a blunt
Ballet of Swing-an-Arm-Before-You-Think.
And some fall out, and those we recognize,
Delighted as that bastard in the front.

Reports of their Demise

The radio reports of bee demise
Are, frankly, troubling: The British Isles
Bereft of bees, unfertilized for miles.
The murmurings are numbered. No killers rise
From Mexico–no NAFTA-wide trifecta
For the monster-sized. That’s good, I guess,
But what about the honey bees that bless
The gold tomato flowers? No more nectar?

I’m moping at the silent garden gate.
But wait a minute, here’s a bugger preening
On a pepper leaf. And wings are forming
In that calyx. Here’s another gleaning,
Bobbing, buzzing. They exaggerate!
The media should stick to global warming!

Letting Go (for EM)

“We let our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch illuminate ten seconds here, a minute there. And then it’s gone”–Birdie Jaworski

I cradled you today in space and time
where sunlight rides the surface of a lake,
beneath titanic nimbuses that take
the bluff, the mirrored monuments that climb
across the summer vineyards to the water.
There, I held your body in a light
that moved in waves across your skin like white
reflective fire. I cradled you, my daughter.

And tonight, before I finally fell asleep,
I dreamed I had a brilliant conversation
with a laughing echo on the waves
that knows your smile and sings a recitation
to the wind, a cryptic Gita deep
yet fleeting in the way that light behaves.

Shrine to Satan

The neighbor’s child has built a muddy shrine
to Satan in our yard. And I’m supposed
to cut the lawn? OK, but look at those
croquet clubs that she used (good God, they’re mine!)
to pound her pentagrams of chicken bone
into the ground. The handles are unscrewed
from all the hammer heads. It’s kind of shrewd
the way she placed that Playskool™ telephone.

Still, little girls should not touch garden tools
or take the plastic rake out of the shed–-
she’s tied it with those jump ropes to the tree.
A shattered flower pot. The Barbie head.
Horrific how this child has learned the rules
of Belial for sculpting in debris.