End of the Music

I won’t begin again
to sketch the dance, to hum the tune.
My violin fell silent—
you left too soon.

To sketch the dance,  to hum the tune
takes energy I don’t possess.
You left too soon—
but I confess…

It takes energy I don’t possess
to tell you what I lost.
Should I confess
the incalculable cost?

I’ll tell you what I lost
when you first went away—
the incalculable cost
of forgetting how to play.

When you first went away,
the violin fell silent—
I forgot how to play.
I won’t begin again.

Her childhood...

She is a baby, lying hungry in a makeshift crib.  It’s been a long while since anyone came to feed her.  She cries until she’s worn out, then sleeps until her hunger wakes her and she cries again.  At one point, she discovers her thumb.  Her thumb is always there, always reliable.  Into her mouth it goes.  Eventually, someone comes and gives her a bottle of milk to suck, or sometimes apple juice.  She doesn’t know the difference.    Bottles come, bottles run dry, but her thumb is always handy.


Years later, she shuts her eyes tight and tries to sleep on a cot in the corner of the living room, while her parents argue in the bedroom.  Sometimes after these fights her father storms out of the house slamming doors.  Sometimes her mother cries loudly after he goes.   She wishes she could go to sleep and shut it all out.  Her mother’s voice is harsh and high, and her father’s voice booms, but it is just noise.  She doesn’t have a clue what it all means, but it frightens her, like an impending storm.  The air is unbreathable, so thick it is with anger.  When she can breathe again, her stomach hurts.  So in her head, she constructs a house with fifty rooms, and begins to place furniture inside each room.  She practices keeping all fifty rooms in her memory at once, and begins to construct a new wing on the imaginary house.  She falls asleep, and doesn’t hear the door crash shut.


She goes to school where her teachers admire her cleverness but worry why she is always alone.  At home when her parents began a new argument, She retreats to her small personal space.  She begins by cleaning the entire room including the ledges on the window sills.  She uses a toothbrush for the tiny crevices that accumulate dust and silt.   Frustrated,  she tries to clear out the last bits of grey fuzz, but there’s always a little left over.   She lines up her shoes in the closet and spaces the hangers evenly.  She takes the books on the shelf and arranges them by height and as far as possible by color within height, and then sits down on the bed, exhausted, wondering if somehow the right  arrangement would be alphabetical by author or perhaps in categories related to the subjects.  She makes the bed, and then makes it again, rearranging the bedspread so it hangs evenly on all sides.  Now that all this work is done, she feels a kind of peace.  


Today, her mother told her that they’re going to move again.  The family has money problems and the rent is too expensive in this house.  She doesn’t say anything; nobody asks her opinion.  She goes to her room,  takes out her paint by numbers kit and begins to meticulously fill in the tiny spaces with the correct shade of paint. She likes the little jars of paints, and the pretty names,  titanium white, cobalt teal, carbon black.  She can spend hours with her delicate brushes to transform the clean white paper to a lakeside village.  Moving to a new apartment, she thinks, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all.  The only things that matters is this, this perfection which she controls.


Outside, in identical rectangular drops, the evenly spaced rain begins to fall.

Regrets

What do you do when
you decide at a late date
it just hasn’t been working out
and miles down the road
you realize it was SOUTH boulevard avenue and
not NORTH street freeway
you were looking for
and you are now wandering in some
unknown and probably dangerous neighborhood
where if the car’s front tires were to explode
nobody would stop to help you and most likely
AAA would refuse to come, but
at some point
you need to decide
whether or not you want to backtrack
to the place where you began
and start out again
this time with a more detailed map
or even the help of the GPS
or just stay home and spend
the rest of your time on earth
puttering around
in your empty rooms like a vacuum cleaner sucking
up the dirt
giving everyone who knows you
the unwanted gift of your too focused
attention
like eavesdroppers in coffee shops
or do you want to create some value
somehow
a rise in your stock’s price
your name in a book
a cure for something dreadful
a good deed or two.

Watch out!
Opportunities
are closing,
doors shutting and
locking
with a click
that isn’t very loud
but is certainly
very final.

Tiny Tim’s Wedding Entourage

Creatures of the night
rats under the shoehorns
the old fool who runs the corner grocery store
is selling raspberries
but he would be out of business
were it not for the rabbits who
push their noses into the corners
of the shop.
let that be a lesson to you
we were told
and let it be repeated for all to hear
that night comes but once a day
and the more the sun shines the less we understand
about fish or how to slice apricots
could you hold this for a minute while I
reach up here for the screwdriver
and without meaning to, achieve
an end. Cascading planets and astral bodies
conflict with the intelligence we have garnered
by observing the family customs of guinea pigs.
All will be well and all manner of things
will float to the surface
if the pot is kept at a low simmer
and lightly salted.  I couldn’t tell what
you meant by watching you breathe,
only underneath the bridge where the guardians stand at attention
did I have a clue as to what was going on.
And even then, it was startling and not enough.

At the Ballet

War Memorial Opera House—
which war should we remember
in this marble building
with its endless corridors and
massive velvet curtain?
Gilt figures of mythology
circle the stage
and the chandelier broods over us all.
I picture it spiraling down,
a celestial catastrophe.

Below in the pit
the orchestra attacks
a passionate score,
an explosion of sound in
a treacherous tempo.
The curtain rises to reveal
a stately rectangle of light in
pure deep jewel tones,
vast and bewildering.

The brilliant geometry backgrounds human
bodies—superhuman—
leopards, gazelles, fast and fluid—leap
turn, spin.  Arms and wrists and fingertips
grasping.  Deep purple infuses the towering wall,
now suddenly green, the pattern shifts
again, gyrating dancers form
and reform intricate patterns, labyrinthine designs
scatter and combine, though one constant remains
one link
man and woman.

He approaches her.
In a beat she is in his arms—
a spring uncoiling.
He wraps her body around him as if to arrange an elegant shawl.
Four couples enter triumphantly, in deep purple, forest green, regal purple and emerald.
Men reach out to women and pose for a moment,  human sculptures
fixed in space for a second and then renewed.

The music is an avalanche tearing down a hill, then
before the crash
transformed as if by magic to an ambiguous cadence dissolving into
the sweet complaint of an oboe—
quietly weaving a melody while the dancers spin off into the wings.

Only a soloist remains—
a woman recounting an unfathomable story with her body
in the near silence.

Backyard Cat

The orange and white striped cat
who uses our backyard for a passage
from one unknowable starting point
to an equally unfathomable destination,
strolling insouciant
has no concept of private property.
I don’t approach him,
he isn’t mine,
but I like
to glance out the window and see him there.

my pet not my pet
my cat not my cat
who is unaware of me
no acknowledgement
lackadaisical
nonchalant
disinterested
unimpressible
like something in a shop that pleases me
but not striped, orange and supple and
so alive
a blue Chinese vase
for example
cold and glossy
the vase doesn’t care about me
anymore than the cat
but it decorates
embellishes
enhances
adorns
I smile when I see it
I don’t need to dust it

Could I be obsessed with cats—
a cat fixation?
But the cat has no interest in me.

I think you are like the orange cat.
You stroll by in my life
my love not my love
like the cat through a backyard
nearly unaware of me watching
oblivious
unconscious
but there on the fringe
on the perimeter
nodding marginally
to me as I gaze fondly
out the window at you.

Ocean Visions

Pirates dance in the moonlight,
planets glow like beacons in the sea and
distant stars tremble in the night.

Shivering harp strings invite
me repeating,  you are not free.
Pirates dance in the moonlight.

Elves are leaping in delight
in a pale fierce ecstasy.
Distant stars tremble in the night.

Crabs shuttle and weave in fright.
Seagulls, startled, quickly flee.
Pirates dance in the moonlight.

An old ship,  all its bones bleached white
whispers a mystery to me—
distant stars tremble in the night.

Sky and ocean—calm and bright—
as they once were meant to be.
The pirates are dancing in the moonlight
and the distant stars tremble in the night.