Relative Issues

Because You Want All

I can see space and time fly and freeze in our parallel universes
With zippers to be pulled and arms lifted
To carry and hug, or the meat to be cut into tiny bites
The sound of the car idling as I wait a daughter to pop her sweet head
In my right door saying, "Finally."
With ice creams and asthma and all of the
Joys in tucking, braiding, throwing and catch, listening,
I can see that my life had all that.

But turning now to these lines in space and time
That wanted, ah forgive the futile attempts to
Find a completing in the days of our relating
In the ridiculousness of not understanding.
The mind has the wiring to go where it wants
Bridging the spaces that make me someone
Not fit to be seen, nor there in this form
I love the word kismet, this, and calliope
Can they shape me a Rue and and a place to name myself ?

No, Ah here it starts again, I'm baking us bread now and you are
This man entering my spaces with time, balanced and your hands
To knead this to loaves and butter for our toes
A ridiculous thing I'm showing you my drawings
The furniture I painted, my albums I'm crying
Because it's true, it really is the vacuum we can never cross.
My nature is holding on, why lie to you,
It is without logics or thought
Or anything that could be named with reason
That I loved you was always my search for more.


Now, Then, Never

The spice finch is taking a bath in the water cup flapping its wings
As if a chuparosa, it's soaking the back of my neck
The sound whirs as it goes through its rituals.
I'm eating two pieces of pot roast. I'd given up beef, and my throat
Is too sore to swallow, so I readopted the taste.
And things hurt inside, outside, but there is life around me.
Some of it I want to know, some is not worth finding out.

Cinco de Mayo, the long tale of a battle that wasn't lost that day,
Is today a day I seem to be counting losses but hoping for the time
and spaces to find the small victory of going on without knowing what we are really.
A step, a step. Over head there is the sound of a plane preparing an approach to
The small airfield close by, and the grinding of the edger a gardener
Who came here to try to find a way into a life. He is making.
He is not thinking of a loss in love or the frustrations of illness and
Unfair practices in a school where he works. He's thinking of the fatigue
In the bones carrying the plastic bins of the clippings and the next place to stop.
And of how easily no one waves as they lift the garage door and drive by him out into their life.
He's so invisible his thoughts are not seen here in this or any poem.

It's a day of celebrating the culture of this transparent worker
Within the writing of a person with a dampened stiff neck looking out
Considering love and meanings, life and the days we mark
As ones we recognize that we are one people aware of the past but
Moving through our space into the unknown, we call it the future.
My mom is calling my attention to the warmth of the pavement
Demanding conversation, my eyes are lifting to her
As she builds pizzas by banging metal pans asking the questions
She never hears answered and mangles into another mistaken mishegas.
Pulling my fingers over these keys it's time for the fiesta but
I'm staring across a continent and falling apart.




The Fish Are Out of Food Prufrock and Your Mom is Always Calling

The fish are out of food
The fish are out of food.
Seventy eyes and and an eighty year old
Say the fish are out of food

The duck has gone and died
The duck has gone and died
Oh my gosh I see it's true
The duck has gone and died

The sink is dripping yuck
The sink is dripping yuck
A plumber needs to get to us
The sink is dripping yuck

A bird is out there look
A bird is out there look
Go get the book and see it's name
A bird is out there look

The sun is coming out
The sun is coming out
Come get up and check it out
The sun is coming out

Your husband failed to pay
Your husband failed to pay
The man is here the gas s out
Your husband failed to pay

I'm putting the roast away
I'm putting the roast away
Why can you put the beef on shelf
I'm putting the beef away

So sings the mother all day long
You'd never want to sing this song
Demanding that I must sing along
It's hard to be So sick this way
The fish are out of food.

And other tasks can be added to create a song that really has no ending.

Waiting for Mrs Goodbar

She loved them you know, Goodbars
And fudge and salt water taffy.
And right now I'm sitting watching her breathe.
She gave me my life.
And she has been my responsibility for a very long time.
She's afraid and sometimes then she hears people in her mind.
They aren't nice to her and I don't believe her.
For that she cannot forgive me,
she tells me that someone is doing this to her.
And she gets agitated, angry, bitter.
Sudden turns of destructive fury. It's hard to wade.. I've never seen her sit in a chair in our homes except briefly to eat or Outside to smoke on the wall.
She doesn't sit still.
She is birdlike really. And she relates to birds.
Always watches them, and she cooks such nice butter food.
I think she's having a major stroke.Yeah right now.
I have a few tears here to clear as I pass my night
But she is curled in this bed, waiting a little bit
And I'm held by a mind that isn't rational.
Maybe I'm talking of myself,
we both seem to have left here and now a long time ago
Because she can get so agitated if you do what she refuses
I'm sitting when we should be going.
And I'm watching her as I watched her mom with Altzheimers manys the night,
but especially when it got to be the nights that might end her days.
sitting like an incompetent nothing
For a little second awhile ago I thought that I'd swallowed my own heart and soul.

But I saw my kids and got a hold on that and shoved it down into my tummy.

My Momma is having another stroke.
And I'm waiting to do my job to make this night, just keep us going.
If I could just give her my life I would.

September 9th

Linens

Linens

One of the things I like is to pick up linens,
not massive amounts, just one here and there.
I also like to collect plates and dishes this way on occasion too,
Put into my drawings, a thing just about me, lady lost.
My linens are stored until I want to paint them.
Represent the china traditions of my woman life.

I like April Cornell linen colors.
Especially the corals and turquoises.
The passionate juicy red pomegranate.
Waiting a luncheon or my dream picnic in the grass.

When I was young I hung with many elderly ladies in my neighborhood.
They starched and washed their linens for social affairs.
Maybe that's why I've liked to iron, cook, have a home.
Maybe for Mom's day, I'd like some time away alone with mine.

Actually I sat out under a couple trees today,
Watching the leaves moving for hours like ripples in the water.
Saw the air as water. Life. Spring.
Just to see that was beautiful beyond measure.
The liquid moving the japonica, as my being alive wrestled with the vision.

Cornell isn't something I can explain to you.
Nor is skipping work watching leaves.
And I can't explain writing these pieces that also fall
or why now at 47 my mind really can go completely blank.
Wrestling with how an iron puts form into the wrinkles.

Thus you can call it meditative.
It seems to cause others a great deal of distress.
The ordinary linens to be ironed today.
Linens..oh.. Goes to my connections and past experiences.
Very nice linens. I've liked starching them.