Say Cheese

There are maybe 6 photographs extant of me that I've ever liked, so few in fact, that since the time Japan's car industry overtook ours, I've taken my Aaron's Rod cane to any of the paparazzi daring to snap me aboard my yacht, on celebrity beaches, or escorting starlets to film judgings at Cannes.

And my lawyers always win.

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What Life Feeds, Art Becomes

Mother died February 1, 2000, the morning after I had left her in the hospice room she had just got delivered to and in which I was instructed about the way bodies shut down.  

They knew she was virtually gone -- the hospital had rushed to contact me about okaying her need for hospice care (and thus covering the cost), and the director of the place ran me through a whole bunch of paperwork while mother, not conscious, was being settled into her room by orderlies, female and male, one of whom I could see partially from my glimpse down the hall, had an odd smile that -- I thought -- must indicate that the body movers inside that room must have been executing some 'work joke', the morbid humor of people working around the dead and dying.

Plague Europe, 1347, burials and burnings.  Think of the joke possibilities!

I wrote a long poem about the experience surrounding that.  Obtaining death certificates in order to establish legal death in order to validate my relationship rights.  The room like any fit for a Department of Motor Vehicles.  Shrieking kids.  Language slowdowns.  Frowning, burnt-out bureaucrats.  I must have brought a book.  I wanted zen patience, but found only 40-odd, ill-read pages.

Then I caught the flu.

Later that year, we went to Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  How removed from hoi polloi.  Yet I was they (a formulation that, astoundingly, may be grammatical and socially accurate!).  There I stood imaginably plump with the ghost of Henry James and palpably thick with Renaissance reds and yellows.  A young attendant almost seized my mechanical pencil as I tried to take impressionistic notes about the place on a check deposit slip.  Soil entering the sanctum sanctorum, I.

Mother, flu, art.  Then fine crab meat.  My life had turned a corner.

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Canine Woman

At the Starbucks, a woman in sweats 

And her hopping dog, trailed before me.

A red and longhaired dog and his mate.

I held the door open for her and the pup, 

And listened as she stumbled her faux-straight words

For water in a cup, in a voice estranged 

At the edge from which we caution ourselves.

The baristas gave over a slosh and Watch out!

With professional (but suspicious) cheer, 

Eyes following the pair as they left the shop.

I ordered and left, and just stepping the curb, 

I heard Sir! Would you have a dollar to spare?

I said Yes (expecting) and peeled off a bill.

Her eyes and cheeks, punchdrunk from abuse,

Held a thousand-word secret,

The thousand bad words we don't want to hear.

I gave her some good:  Take care of your dog.

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Borscht Belt

They're so poor, they can't afford the water that goes into the popsicles.

He's so cheap, he chews with only one tooth.

She's so old, she gets spa treatments at a crematory.

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A Din

A bowl

A spoon

A carb

A sauce

This Song Is You

Small talk's not to be avoided.

It's its inflatable nature that's its genius.

It's the motive for the melody, the sonata's two themes,

The two parts that grow into duet.

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Stage Craft

When they say no one seated after curtain

and I ask how many intermissions,

I can, after pausing, look them straight in the eye,

knit my brow, and say bladder problems.

Old enough now that they nod and say two,

but for you, three and we both get a laugh.

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The Discriminator

Each morning, this college term starting a bit later than my really early morning gigs, the traffic is thicker, the light evident, no darkness keeping drivers in the house for a last few minutes of cave life.

So the roads feel denser, the cars ride higher, the bustling more assertive, the nerves more anxious to beat a clock, the competitive edge of everyone at a level fit for arrest.

Life among others. 

A seat at the Monster Truck Rally.

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Reshingling

Squirrel-scurry at a mound of cones, then chattering away not seen in the boughs.

They throw a language down and like what they hear or don't -- that sense in what just is.

Roof gutters brim with twigs, all sort of debris, more with each fanning of Spring 

Rain, the toss of clouds resaturating what's below.

Spring throws us in and we find us what to do, or not -- that's, too, the 'real' of it.

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Foretelling

Rain squalls, grey and threaded over the west islands

Soon to make us bird-naked places

Air needled with wind-driven pats and patterns

Interiorizing us, the need-to-do calmed,

Steam off the coffee, blur at the window


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Erotica Shmotica

A full five minutes on shoe size

Gadgets

Style perusal, virtuoso singing

Centrifuge, DNA

All parties ultimately polite

'All quite natural'

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Immersion, From Afar

Wet T-shirt competition:  baptism 'in the Jordan'

Fancy Pants

High-waters

Flares

Baggies

Bells

Stove-pipes


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The Way Memory Gets Shabby

In moving to Florida away from the father remarried to a gold-digger, C took custody of the white cat, then 20 years old who had been part of her adolescence in California.

Now still off the Atlantic, rumor telling of her bad divorce, sour in her despair, C has taken up the misanthropic tongue her father had, in his case when he drank, in her case when she witnesses her own hurt and exercises overly-forearmed defenses against any comment designed for sympathy but which she takes as shallow patronizing.

The money lost.  The old beaux.


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3 Times Three Little Words

Food

Home

Love

Sing

Draw

Act

If

Unless

Because

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