The Morning Shift

There is a comfort
To the morning register shift.
The early risers come to and from their coffee
In the yawning light,
Two dollars, a dollar ten, eighty cents
Impatient in hand,
And I know they want a newspaper--
The Sentinel, or The Times, the slim Wallstreet Journal--
As quickly as possible,
Never mind the pennies.
I really have no idea what people want the rest of the time,
Just that we are running heavy
With everything we want to spend.

Parting Gifts

You returned everything
Except my goodbye.
The one thing I wanted back.
You kissed and watered it
Just a little,
Just enough
To keep it growing.
I tried to drown it,
But it proved to be
Too a thirsty young thing,
Pretty,
In its delicate, carnivorous, melancholy.
It's funny--
What looks good in a vase--
What eats you alive.

In August

In August,
Demoiselle Cranes
Stretch their slender necks
Above the dying grasses
Again, for the first time, or the last,
Preparing to throw their improbable lacework
Against the eternal teeth of the Himalayas,

The hawks, and hungry canyons,
Trembling wings, and purple storms,
Season after season,
For the distant emerald certainty
Of home.

In August,
Two hands often reach,
Hover on the uncertain breeze,
Brush palm to palm,
Fragile as paper kites
Against the long blue of the sky.

Between reading Sheila Callaghan and Erik Ehn, my brain is getting funny

Peter Counts His Darlings, he doesn't know how

Flying is just falling backwards.
I fell out of nurse's pram,
Tumbled starward,
Never never looked back,
I think?
I don't remember.

Michael has puns
That are too old for him,
They stick out through his cradle
Like too long toenails,
Wendy snips them off with doll's scissors.

John is fighting to pulse through
His own machinery,
Sometimes he is a clockwork crocodile,
But not as hungry.
Wendy complains at the steam coming out of his hat.

Wendy,makes every corner a throne,
Her eyes sparkle by needle-light,
Nothing in her face is anything I understand,
Her heart is a bird, beating against a closed window,
She tells me that flying is just falling upwards.
Mother,
I think?
I don't remember.

Some Mary Oliver for the Solstice

Poppies
Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

Mad Women Do You Love

Soo, I may have been watching the show Mad Men a little. Or a lot. This happened next:


Mad Women
Do you love

Lucy
Brick-a-brack brightened
Smile curved string of pearls
Do you love

Patsy
Swollen voice
Bruised lovely as a tumbling car
Pouring out past the wreckage
Do you love

Or hate
The signs on fountains
Wire and bone
Curled tight as your hair
Around your middle
Back straight
Do you love

Sexton
Or sex
Are your children bird-tongued
Indecipherable as your hands
Cramping for wonder
Do you love

Sylvia
Oven dreams
Crowding the bedside darkness
Anxious with thirst
Or cold
Do you love

The curlers
Tin cans
Books hidden under the bed
Do you love

When everything is either
An outside cardigan
Or an indoor plant
Do you

When you smell Marilyn's cocktails
And lethian fumes in your baby's shampoo
Love

Yourself inside-out
And back again
To you

Love.

To David Ferry's "Seen Through A Window"

You say she has plump milk arms
(The woman at the table)
Flowered with a blue bruise,
A cornflower kiss,
From some menial task.

Maybe her husband beats her,
Or perhaps he printed it on her mottled skin
With the hot and tender mouth
That even now gently masticates his food.
Perhaps they cannot wait for the end of dinner,
And bed.
Perhaps they are dreaming of other dinners,
Tables, and different chairs.
Yes, they are very beautiful in the green light,
Bearing each other up and down
Through the years and body of the room.

As seen through windows,
Aren't we all stones singing underwater?
Whatever we know of each other,
Is like these blue and milk kisses,
Is like a stone.




Here's a link to the wonderful David Ferry poem that inspired this one:
http://faculty.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/ferry.html
(sorry, seems you'll have to cut and paste it into the browser)