Not your standard guy—put a shift kit in the automatic transmission of his Boyd Red 1990 Ford Mustang LX 5.0 coupe, changed the seats from black vinyl to cloth: made it turn-on-a-dime crazy ‘round a corner, full-out perfect snort of heaven off a light and down highway 99. No one could catch me, he grins, unless I wanted them to.
Nothing mechanical in the way he bends over the lifted hood of my car or lays back on a creeper and slides beneath the undercarriage, one foot sneaking out. Maintenance is key, he says, and starts the engine, pulling a rag from his pocket to wipe down the dipstick and check the level and colour of fluid.
His hands are stained and scarred, look like they would labour all their life to love a woman the way they love the complicated innards of a car: with brains in his fingers, and ears that can translate rattle and whine, deep knock knock knock under a hood, reversing the strange or troublesome into something familiar, worth repair.
Many thanks to The Writers’ Cache for including this love poem for my husband in the just-released anthology “Joyride” (Pg. 40), available from Amazon (US) and Amazon (Canada)!
In the cathedral of this forest while birds sing unseen from the vaulted shadows, I sit in the hand-carved pew of a sawed-off cedar trunk and think about last night’s
argument, a congregation of notes falling, rising, coins of light clinking into the basket: the dappled adagio that ministers a tight staccato heart.
Century-old trees stand like mossed-over crosses unbroken in their silence, upholding the climb of secrets: the whispers about living on what’s left over from
the cacophonous demands of a day, the scraping of those plates to give again what is left over, love quietly shrinking from the beginning to the end of a word, pursed lips praying but little abiding as prayer.
Yet here, in a green profusion the curling ferns, the pungent earth and the soaring branches cannot hold all the love that grew them, nor can the birds so tirelessly singing, nor my dog chasing a squirrel chasing a squirrel.
The math is simple. There is no subtraction. Love’s pulse is steady and it loads the woodland table, as it must, even now, heap a forgotten room in us.
Another poem that first appeared in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art in 2017. My thanks again to editors Veronica Golos and Catherine Strisik for including it.
Always, in returning to the house of my farm-grown summers I come home to the wild oat, the whole grain of me. Riding bareback again through the fields of a long-ago self, who I was rises golden and green in a warm wind: Bud hasn’t gone crazy yet. Audrey and Rose still live. The hayloft babies are hiding in the rafters of first love, waiting to be born. The lake’s so deep you can swim one step out from the bouldered shore. Blind Grandpa keeps his pockets full of change. Cackling, he leans on his cane, throwing every quarter-nickel-dime onto the ground. He listens as we fall upon them like scrabbling crows. Gran scolds but he never stops making us rich. Dad shows Bob and I at 5:00 a.m. how to hook a worm (I’ve been saving them from a dry street death ever since). Later Gran, with a shake and quiver of strong, baggy arms, scales and cleans eight small bass in the kitchen sink. Uncle Jim drives his tractor in a pressed white shirt. I slip out the door, running past rabbit-friendly trees to hide among sky-driven stalks. Lying down, I press my body into sweet conversation with the earth. Here, no machinations of the soul, just secrets told, flitting like fireflies through branches of maple, alder, birch. Who I became is the land that grew them—a defiant wave of long grass beside a paved road, a wealth of open sky, water deep enough for a man to drown in, the flickering light that might save him.
This poem first appeared in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art in July, 2017. Deep thanks to then-editors Veronica Golos and Catherine Strisik for selecting it.
Fasten me to the morning, to the note that woke me, this deep, soulful river now flooding my body, bringing wondrous news.
A poem from many years ago – one which accurately describes my recent boating sojourn of almost 7 weeks, mostly off the grid, attending to a different kind of news.
I recently had the good fortune to be filmed reading a selection of poems from my chapbook “Irresistible”. It was my brilliant son Stewart’s idea and I really enjoyed the experience! Please do check it out, if you have 20 minutes to spare:
We did this inthe Carcross Desertin the Yukon. The wind was howling and though we found a fairly protected spot, you can hear it gusting here and there in the video (as well as the odd ATV gunning it over the dunes). Many thanks to Stewart for his expertise! Here he is at Bennett Beach in Carcross:
Happy to say this little poem has just been published in the 2020 print edition of “Crosswinds Poetry Journal” along with other finalists and winners of its annual contest. The poem was inspired by an eagle seen flying at sunset the last day of September and the boating memory of another eagle which was carrying a 3 foot long snake home for dinner.
It’s been ten years since the accident, and now
he’s a grocery boy in an older man’s body,
still dreaming—like any twenty-year-old
before a major head injury would—
of the beautiful women yet to come.
And come they do—to the stocked shelves,
pushing their carts like baby carriages,
strolling the aisles of their good lives.
No stroll for him though—his body
moves, but stiffly, accommodating
his intentions as best it can, as if he
were remotely controlling it for the
first time. But it’s his limbs seizing
the courage to keep moving
that mercifully fires his separate parts
into agreement. Nothing remote about that.
He carries the heavy bags out to the large
shining cars. It’s hard for him to speak
a sentence and be understood, but he tries
anyway: each word fought for, dragged
from the bottom of the laryngeal sea,
while his listeners fish for patience,
a few turning away with quick thanks and
driving off, their own tongues floundering.
He opens his shirt collar: Jesus hangs
from the chain around his neck—
the reason he’s still here, he says, and why
every day is “awesome”—because blue
sky, black sky, brazen eye of summer,
that’s the view the living have, and snow,
rain, wind are all two thumbs up
on the scale of tingling his skin.
With the light of the world glinting
in his eyes and the bleached sands of
his hair, shoring him up against the
cruel twist of the years, he writes down
his number, wants to talk longer, later.
Let the beat go on for the heart
that insists dreams are meant to be
reached for, not shelved.
This poem first appeared in the anthology “Best of Kindness 2017” by the Origami Poems Project. My thanks to judge Mary Ann Mayer and editors Jan and Kevin Keough for its inclusion, and to Kent at my local Safeway for its inspiration and for being such an inspiration generally!
When Camel-heavy lungs finally shrank
my father’s world to a bed by the window,
on sunny winter days his bed
became a beach where he lay,
pajama top unbuttoned, hairless chest
exposed, the whooshing surf
of the oxygen tank now pleasing.
And the sun, unmitigated by a pane of glass
or the pain of a rationed breath,
was kindness itself, bestowing the
warmth of many hands it seemed,
keeping the dying fire inside aglow
long after it reached the end
of his square footage of sky.
Today’s sunshine reminded me of this poem, first published in “Best of Kindness 2017” by the Origami Poems Project. My father never lived to see this poem but he told me that the best last days of his life were as I’ve attempted to describe.
My poem LIFE – A Snapshot is now live at Recenter Press Poetry Journal! This poem was written a very long time ago – many thanks to editor Terra Oliveira for including it in Issue 3, alongside other insightful poems. And thanks to fellow poet Robert Okaji for introducing me to this journal, whose purpose is as its name suggests – to recenter!
