Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Patron Saint of Missed Opportunities



                                                                                  For my Mother
I        

 

a tall cool beauty all legs and delicate bone structure

luxuriant russet-glinted waves of dark brown pouring over shoulders

and before the gleam in her brilliant hazel eyes died for lack of love

she could have been a movie star

the boys had buzzed around as if she were the Source of all nectar back then

                her era Golden                 

her mind and heart at war

a woman breaking Free and terrified

pristine atmosphere, oxygen shy 



she married her brother’s best friend

devilishly dark and handsome

the features of his unsung Native ancestors

cut through the fog of her virginal awareness

quickened something unimagined even

in those bleak post-Victorian days when young girls bled unknowing

sure they were about to die

generation and its means spoken only in whispers

the language of pain and fear

but Love! o Love! a pure and glowing thing somehow

in an age of Photoplay superimposed over the necessities of blood and fire



the first night did not go well, nor many nights thereafter

he had no time



what was the true effect

coming of age in those black & white days of twin beds

and Hayes Acts and whitewash

it seems as if childhood was a sitcom

where Father’s life was a gyroscope of its own centrifugal force

pulling all into spiraling selflessness around it

the definition of nuclear family fails

when the center of gravity implodes

ashes ashes we all fall down!

like the plague

marriages made in après war sickened and died

blackened and burned

children half orphans

grandparents aunts uncles all far away in the atomized explosion

of a mobile society

 

II         



the river keeps flowing

sweet juicy bodies swell on the vine

peach fuzz cheeks, firm ripe flesh

every generation is the First one

sure no one who knows anything has ever Been here before

arrogance innocence or not so much

we see our age reflected in the eyes of our cohort

this Hot music has never been made in all of time

we are the First

until all interventions inventions and no control

the confidence arrogance withers along with flesh

sliding from beneath the skin

leaving paper coating

fragile wizened sagging

whence that golden sweetness

electric juice of yesterday?

the images I see

those vanished

who will not know this world again

(ah well, there's always reincarnation but you never know)

those beads slipped off the chain into the vast heart of darkness

jitterbug jive dancing on top of the world

everything's new unspoiled faultless

Big Band Big Sound

riffs purloined from people so far down

why would they have anything you need?

but they have Soul

will you steal their souls

refill the tanks with stolen fields and jungles

claim their history for your own

wear their clothes their ornaments

can you pray to their god?

she dances

notes sliding sinuously into her inherited body

her burning spirit bread in a starving land

water in the valley of death



the scales fall from the eyes of the year

in crimson gold profusion

Fall away Fall away

buried beneath winter's mast

like a leaf from an earlier slaughter

the hollow shell of a nut

food for worms



can she step out of eternity to touch the living breath again?


1 comment:

  1. Wow!
    "can she step out of eternity to touch the living breath again?" - I guess this answers the question.

    ReplyDelete