Window and chair

Maples

They might spread
Like droplets
After we’ve gone
With our children broken

like pieces of chalk, their colors
Bled with scraped knees
Empty folding chairs
Where old uncles stared

beneath the sidewalk
The footsteps of
Sisters holding children
Like crisp colored gifts

Mufflers and muffs, clouds
of heat and frost.

With no children,
No suckled parents, no
Old friends, the wild maples
will snake

through angry old lilacs we
crouched toward each spring
And through the black tardrive.
Their roots will tunnel

Our collapsed home
The waiting black birds

A sense of us breathing
Oceans of golden saplings

Lifting forward, upward, beyond
to restore the Earth her forest.

Guest bathroom

I was afraid to touch anything in the guest house bathroom. The towel, not exactly feminine but a shade between rust and mauve, looked like it had been ironed or maybe never used to wipe dripping human skin and hair. The dark scrawly sink counter was perfectly dry but shone and reflected crisp images of my unkempt head and sagging chest. There was new toothpaste, new shampoo, sage soap still in white paper in a green box, a toothbrush in plastic. Three sets of switches lit recessed ceiling lamps, over the sink, over the shower, over the toilet, which had its own enclave, a small cave where one could relieve oneself without infiltrating the rest of the pure room; this toilet space had its own switch that softly sparked a quiet unseen fan to waft away the odors. A heavenly bathroom, that is, one I would only again find in heaven. I stripped self-consciously, looked around and stepped, crept through the glass door, into the shower. Not surprisingly, the stream of water was soft and strong like a mother's womb.

Taos pueblo

Went to the Taos Pueblo, breathtakingly sad and majestic and dusty on this warm day. The Indians have profound cheekbones, and many of their adobe hovels double as shops for their humble wares of homemade tomahawks, dream catchers, carved bulls and turquoise gems. The rooms are small and smoky and their mostly small and bent owners are seated by a fire stove, one with a dirty old black dog at her feet between her knees. A gentle man with smart sad eyes hesitatingly told us stories of the poor mess of his lifetime, of his son who died, of his mother who couldn't afford schooling. He apologized, "I'm a musician, well used to be, a percussionist," pointing to his drums for sale, and I felt sad I couldn't afford one. Have a lovely day, he said, they all said as we left their dusty-floored huts, and their old heartfelt stories, behind. Driving away, Carol was thrilled to spot a prairie dog in a field but then said, "If they're out in February it'll be a long dry summer for the Indians."

Seer

Borderland

If you had a crystal ball and could see deep-

Ly through the white light just before you

Died there it would be—your true life, stories

You hadn’t realized you’d sold, children

You didn’t know were happy, a mother who

Could really sing, a playful father with

Calm eyes, you were fluent in eastern

Languages, your form on the dance floor

Graceful and full of power, you were powerful

And had no needs weren’t mindful, only

Smiles and breaths and hands that held

And aches that reminded you only that

You'd lived well.

Naked

The title of the poem is all the poem needs sometimes.

Dame Agatha

Any time I’ve taken an odd visit with friends to a rustic two room cabin on a lake with its musty smells from damp rugs and smoke that doesn’t quite exit the flue and heat that exudes from the kitchen oven and noises that flutter down from the tilted attic, and scratching noises on the floor of the front porch, and the shadows of bats over the lake against the setting sun, there always have seemed to be strewn on coffee tables and in book racks ratty paperbacks of some novel of Agatha Christie. The covers painted and glossy and creased and cracked, the pages always yellowed as if with nicotine, and someone’s name almost always written in script, in blotted ink, on the title page. “Christine Langer” in a woman’s hand, with a date, above the block letters “Murder at the Vicarage,” by Agatha Christie (in italics). Uncomfortable, edgy in a room with beams and faded window shades and an old TV, with rabbit-ear antenna,  somewhere up in a north country, the dirty old soft old book was a link to a sophisticated, well-to-do, safe world, where terrors were only imagined, and solvable by clever old Poirot, the chapters short and funny with good chapter titles, and lights going on and off and gasps and disappearances and surprising guests were all fantasies, comforts of pseudo-fear and happy endings, that helped me fall asleep and awaken to the smell of a hearty hot breakfast and crisp country air.

Backyard rink

Obstacles

I put the red wine on the back porch
behind the bag of forgotten lawn seed
beside a bent hand shovel.

A frozen pair of his sandals,
so large, slows the way,

our second boy’s,
once of the drooling smile
and little crab feet,
back when we could hold our liquor.

We tried a tomato garden one spring
and one winter built a skating rink
all posts and bright hard plastic.

The sandals are soldiers,
rigid and gaunt and solemn.

Step around them, watch the broken rake,
and brace for the cold
through the door that doesn’t close.
Go, drown those sorrows.

Schizophrenia

Apocalypse

Olanzaprine had made him fat, constipated, dizzy.

It gave him insomnia, indigestion, erectile dysfunction.

He had a rash, he was weak and fatigued and swelled and rigid and twitchy.

So now the warning voices—

his only friends except Sam the van driver who gave him wet cigarettes—

were talking to him again,

alerting him to the poisons in the electric lights,

the diseases carried in the sweaty mouths of policemen,

the knives in the nervous fingers of doctors and nurses,

sending instructions of elimination before they killed

everything he had ever loved, before all of this,

in the days of his old childhood,

when there was love and being loved

he couldn’t protect them all

but he could die trying, or before they caught him

and stabbed him again in the ass.

Disappointing food

The parking lot of the grocery store in Slingerlands NY where I spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year was this Saturday afternoon overcrowded with cars. Finding a spot was akin to musical chairs, around and around in circles until an empty spot opened up and there was a sudden rush of vehicles to claim it and it quickly closed. Inside, under yellow lights and high ceilings where a black bird or two was trapped and flying madly, the air was stale with men pushing carts, awkwardly examining bags of carrots and cases piled with containers of onion dip balanced on top of each other. In front of the seafood counter, packages-of-six giant portabello mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat were selling for $4.99. A floating island was backed up with shopping carts as crammed as the parking lot, as fingers pawed plastic-wrapped chicken wings and pork tenders, marinated and ready-to-be-nuked. There were little girls in dresses the colors of football teams holding on to metal wires of their father’s carts. The aisles were joyless as undecided shoppers glommed up the passageways, staring at rows of various crisps of cheese doodles and salted nuts. I usually run into someone I used to know, a former customer with a worried life story, an aging parent of one of my boys’ high school friends, a pretty stranger with ash-blonde hair whom I recognize from other shopping trips. But today’s group were a darkly alien group of locals who looked vaguely dangerous, ready to turn against you if your shopping cart tapped against theirs. In this small town marketplace, America was getting ready for a party by buying pounds and pounds of cocktail franks and cases of light beer and wine-soaked cheese and Triscuits and trays of bologna and pepperoni and ham and yes even crudités. Getting ready to listen to Renee Fleming sing the Star Spangled Banner, to stand around with distant friends and friends of friends and whomever they could agree to invite over or whomever would agree to come over, to eat disappointing food and watch 3 hours of football that at halftime would feel like the end of the world had arrived. I walked down the empty pet food aisle for some air, but my pretty stranger was nowhere to be seen, smart girl.