Dead Man’s Quintet
i.
there’s pasta water / boiling on the stove / “your poems are mush” / my darker angel murmurs / you’d think that wisdom / came with age / but I have only tropes / to slide around / dream lover’s scalp / of hissing snakes / a pot of noodles / simmering
ii.
snow-salted branches like the gray in Dad’s / hair while he lived this winter is a shaggy / spruce I’m shaggy too and we are sprucing / up the house by sorting winter clothes / and making piles of giveaways my wife’s / got turtlenecks and sweaters stacked I offer / up four flowered shirts their brightness faded / styling out of date so much like me / a gauze-gray sky and every Friday black / my bedside-table catafalque of unread / books is gathering dust and casting shadow / listening to Brahms I miss Beethoven’s edge / which makes me think I sharpen worn-down wisdom / wear the pearls or else they lose their luster
iii.
Trey trotting with me / now he squats two turds / lie steaming in the snow / a metaphor I fear exploring / I look up away instead / gray sky Midwestern winter / age has taught me / how to love each change / yes even my imagined final one / no hurry it will come / a string quartet is humming / through my headphones / the cello like a low-voiced / woman in my bed / I’m only here to dream
iv.
sunshine and snowflakes come / and go awareness makes it so / and I am laboring / to make my strangled mind sky-sized / the book I’m reading now’s / high modernism footnotes fragments / and allusions like a person / traumatized / reminds me of a horror / film I saw last May called Men / and this reminds me of / a supermarket shooting / of another at a church / and yes the cellist / in that playlist string quartet is sawing / pine-boards for my coffin
v.
she’s cutting cookies trees and Santas / playlist rollicking snow blowing / like the ash of Armageddon / there’s still a cup of coffee left / to bend my mind stop worrying / what day this is such drifting hard / to know how much has fallen sideways / flakes or floaters in my eyes / our thoughts aren’t real remember this / mid-middle age its worry and / complacency complicity / in others’ suffering as well / I’m hardly tragic actually / already dead I wonder just / how long it’s been right all my life
Family Matters
Trauma, drama, dream. These family matters
more familiar to me from movies or
TV. What did I miss? A plane flying over
the Mediterranean, the cabin losing
pressure, the paper cup covering my nose
and mouth, funneling oxygen. The airport
in Athens, Mom buying me a keychain with
a miniature harmonica attached.
Earlier, in Frankfurt, Jean-Marie
and I running the bases, round and round,
at Dad’s army-post softball field, she
afraid a plane would land on her head. Later,
Ankara, me entering the house of Turkish
friends, rose water sprinkled on me gets
in my eyes, I cry. And later still, it’s Christine
in an oxygen tent, her baby teeth
bared, rotten brown from all the medicines.
Why does my mind leap, hurt animal?
Last night I dreamed I met a coyote in
the woods, I thought it would fear me, run away,
but no, it came on, bristling, grimacing,
fanged, and fierce. My waking saved my life.
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