On Growing Old

A time will come when I will no longer be able
To discern the Teapot's whistle;

The steam will rise: unheard
And I will continue sitting in my rocker: reading.

The water will boil down to emptiness,
And I will wonder how it got here.

Autumn Banshee

When fall finally comes
And you cave-in to pressing buttons on the thermostat
To gain heat in the kitchen
That cannot be garnished from your cup of coffee,
You don your red and black flannel: (the only real flannel colours)
And you stare out at broad azure sky
And grey white clouds and off-white linings and tress
Green and sometimes orange and sometimes golden
All brushed with the paint of the sun's arms
Houses across the street with shingles shambled in places: old chimney: unused
There are possums living in their attic: peaceful...

And there is something stirring
At the bottom of me
This voice that is wailing, crying, screaming: I cannot be silent - I will not be silent -
You cannot make me silent.

A Full Life

Nobody wants to see a full life in a book of poetry
They want you to spread it out
And categorize it
As if that is the way that life actually works
Like movies - taking heightened experiences and making it seems like that is a whole life
Of everyone but you
So everything we are watching
Or reading
Makes us feel crazy
Like our quirks or our boredom: those things are irregular
What is irregular
Is
The insanity of focusing on one section of your life at a time
Of keeping this neatly out of the way
Of never using the bathroom
Or making a mess on your face
Of having perfect teeth
White and not yellowed by coffee
Even though coffee is consumed in every episode

Peter Pan Whimsy

The Part of You
That is
Peter Pan
Whimsy
Striped pants with rolled ankles
Scuffed up dress shoes
Chimney sweep tap toeing
Cigar or short cigarette hanging from your mouth's corner
Black knee socks
Suspenders with thumbs underneath them
White A-shirt and slender musculature with an extra tat you didn't expect
Caressing
Mind blowing white breasts
Smoke clouds wafting over blue sky
Stars smattering blinking off and on and distant car head lights
Making love in the grass that looks purple in the moonlight
There is nothing
Nothing
Fevered
Pursued
And radiant
A sideways glancing smile
Your twinkling eyes
Your smart mouth twinkling eyes
And a young, strong, daisy you plucked from the widest field and put it in my hair
In my hair
In my hair...

You are gasping.

Reflection on the Raindrops

The rain spills over the windows
Rivulets and crests and curving silver linings
Draining into empty swells
Lonely after midnight
Drinking hard cider alone with the glow of the computer screen
And fingers tapping rhythmically over the keyboard
Pitter patta patta pitter patta patta
The rhythm of my heart
My chest
My breasts
My breathing
Un-lonliness
Tired bony brittle hunger
Thirst writhing in my ribcage like
Water
Like oceans of salt embezzled water
Like deep roots and floating branches
Like black earth
And deep tunnels of rich, purple longing -
Red stained glasses
And rings on white tablecloths
Like birds blown by the wind in a thunderstorm
Like ice on my teeth
Like flossing
Like loss...
Like the cold of the window - I press my head against it
I press my fingertips into it,
I linger and let myself feel the electricity...
Between two people
Between two walls
Between two panes of solid liquid glass
Between two steaming cups of coffee
At a too-small table
And the careful air between our not touching shoelaces
And the knot of the pine-peg between our not touching knees
And the space of safety in the hovering tension inflamed dead-ness of our not inter-laced fingers
And the breath of you on the back of my neck
And the night steam in the cold car
And the slip-slosh of the wiper blades
And the skid-scrape of the blacktop type pavement -
I am no longer waiting,
I am no longer driving,
I am not longer crying alone in the driveway...
Because I am here
I am present
I am with...
Them all.

Clotting

You watch it trickle out of you
And down the dumb silver drain
That sparkles sometimes
And other times is just
Gray and dull
Like swaths of moonlight that tumble over the outer stars;
You know,
Deep down,
That the stars and the moonlight can't ever intermingle
But somehow
When you look up at the sky
You still see it.

Forest Glade

She walks, head down, toward the aching forest,
Green leaves reaching her with their sweaty palms and dripping fronds;
She crumples mud crumbs with the bulbs on her toe bottoms,
Each itching and heaving their way into the damp blackened earth;

The wildflowers are blooming today:
Red, yellow, purple, and shades of white
Bristles that blow left and right through the current and occasional wind,
Her skirt rides up and waves to her knees:
Knobbly and cobbled with red welts from mosquitoes.

The frogs chant their peeping, bleeping, singing,
The pond is deep, the lilies green, the roots deep and sucking,
Deep and sucking down...
Down,
Into the center of the earth,
Where her soul is,
Pink and throbbing.

The Pregnancy Test.

The air is chilly
And rain falls
Slick and spattering on the muddy backyard and the black-sooted pavement in the front
The neighbors are celebrating with multi-colored Christmas lights and swigs of red wine and eggnog roasting on an open fire.

I run through the drizzle to the store and choose a small box from the shelf and take my place in the line-up.
No Santa today, and the kids are disappointed.
I calculate in my head what her birthday will be, if she is born: July.

July.  Like me.

And I silently name her Lily.  Or Jasper, if he is a He.

The woman in front of me has a small child sucking a pacifier and she smiles through parted lips and I smile back at her blue eyes and her mother eyes my purchase and then spies my ring and smiles like we have some Spectacular Secret.

The woman behind me has a test too.  Hers is pale blue to my pink one and I think she is hoping for a little boy.

It is smashed between whole grain dinner rolls and orange tic-tacs and other things we slide into our pockets.

My mind carries me to another store and another time when I was huddled in a small stall with the current boy and he was nervous and I peed openly on the thick strip and we counted down the two minutes and cried happy tears when everything was negative.  I still worried for days that the test was faulty.

I still worry as the time ticks by on the edge of the sink and I think about two minutes and all the things wrapped up in that 120 seconds I am sharing with countless other women: the one in front of me who smiled.  The one behind, hiding her box behind the bread rolls.