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Poetry

Child's Play

Lying awake
My tongue searches repetitively
For the hole left by a missing tooth,
My first tooth lost to time and trauma,
Phantomly aching like an absent limb
Replaced by something new and foreign.
“I know it’s no big deal”, I lied to the dentist,
“But could I have it, the blackened piece of bone?”
(The talisman to change?)
Secretly I had planned to pierce it,
Hang it from my wrinkled neck.
The nurse grimaced, too late,
She had thrown it in with the hazardous waste.
So much for the necklace, not to mention 
The tooth fairy’s inflated sum,
I had to let go of my plan to go out 
With all that which I had come into this world.
“It’s no big deal”, I lied to myself,
Mourning the molar, my grandparents’ farm,
The death of my father and two good friends,
My first black kitten, my frolicking Lab,
The countryside full of trees,
A landscape I could actually see,
The handwritten letter, the milkman,
Silence.
My tongue slides up and down
Over the porcelain smooth surface
Of the computer-generated fake.
It reminds me of picture postcards,
How they tend to spoil the real thing
That when you finally see Niagara Falls
The mind’s jaded image cannot be overcome.
Sadness lives forever in facsimile.
I will never see California again
For the first time;
That is the vague ache of maturity,
The loss of a world untouched and innocent,
That place where children play.

The Autumn Gardener

Late August
the garden is overgrown,
suffocatingly verdant.
I perch restlessly on my Adirondack throne,
Clippers in hand, and wait.
I am sick of maturity,
Tired of grown up things that do not end.
My memories lead nowhere but into
Overgrown thickets,
Tangled, light deprived hedge rows,
endless thorny brambles
which have seen better days.

My most beautiful specimens,
the rubrum lily,
Siberian iris,
are being strangled.
Weakened by overcrowding,
they must be yanked out by their roots.
dusted off and put away in a box,
somewhere dark and cold.

Reliable raspberry patch
can not muster fruit;
blue pole beans slowly succumb to the
aggressive urban beetle.
Myself inert with hesitation,
I switch the cross of my legs,
Turning the thighs inward to ease the pinching pain.

Bracing against the flooding tension
I know I will have to begin extracting,
Both the living and the dead;
Cut things down
Pull things up,
Remove the over ripe veils that hide the bones.
I need to see where they are broken,
where they are weak and need shorn up.
The graying dirt must be churned up with air.
I like that thought of everything being bare,
Empty of a past that is missing breathing organisms.

But the trees will stay,
Bold and brave, 
Unflinching witnesses to the reconstruction.

Pure White

Thirteen months have passed since I visited
the carcass of the dead horse
decaying in the Pacific sunlight.
I have wanted to go,
Waited to go back like a kid waiting for Christmas,
intensely, with anticipation, with awe.
The bones, the hooves, the teeth
were what I longed to see and touch,
Without the flesh,
Without the declension of earthly weight.
I imagined the great bare rib cage
Heaving up from the grassy hill
Like a shipwrecked explorer,
Plain and simple,
Bleached dry and smooth.
I dreamt about coddling the
worn hooves in my aged hands,
Piercing the teeth for an adorning talisman.
I loved that horse,
Imagined its day of cantering and chewing,
how it must have instinctually climbed
to the top of that heavenly hill.
I envied him his death,
The way he found the highest place,
The loveliest place near the wild sea,
Surrounded by the softly contoured breasts
of the green Big Sur hills,
the scents of eucalyptus and redwood;
Warmed by the temperate January sun.
I think about him daily,
He is in my spot!
I want to go back,
Lie down beside him,
Bleach myself pure white.

What I Owe

The dog is busy with dogness
as she leads into the woods,
glistening yellow coat and velvet muzzle,
A perfect measure of what I owe
To innocence and helplessness.

It is spring,
interior season of hatching eggs.
Underfoot tender purple violets 
make me pause in familiar underpulse,
for the long ago days of the child
who never wanted to go inside,
who wanted to remain in the open,
become part of the grass,
the wind, the trees;
to live under the sky.

Bracketed now by ‘pre’, ‘perio’, and ‘post’,
life has moved on through ‘next year’ country
not knowing that it is a mockery,
Believing the frustration will eventually end,
Maybe with love or with child.
But the heart and mind are still longing.
It is not company for which I yearn.

Rambling walks with the dog,
Stumbling upon a dead horse,
a huge, startling carcass
of hooves and teeth and bones,
now talismans,
sacred in the morning sun.
Eyeing the bolting patient 
screaming obscenities at the technicians
who surround her and drag her
back inside.

Ambushed almost
by the media of a culture
who considers me a statistic of interesting hormones
(if the funding is there),
labeling me and assigning me
as if biology and sex were the end all.
I am not ready to become invisible!

I look down at the forest floor,
at the shy, ball-less violets.
There is no implicit faith in their outcome,
and yet they keep returning.
To where I’ve been walking all these years.
Are these the same blooms I trampled on then?
If so, I do not know for what they are lobbying.

Being no child nor bird,
I whistle for the dog.
She gallops toward me,
tongue hanging to the ground
smiling from ear to ear.
Falling to my knees I nuzzle her neck
and lean in to whisper in her floppy ear.

If we cannot accept our fortune,
Next winter we will leave here,
Cast out and fruitless,
But never alone.

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