SONGS IN THE NIGHT

Chats With Eleanor

Fairy Godmothers with ample laps
and June Cleaver faces slid down the rabbit hole
of old dial-up phones, ten cent colas, Betsy Wetsys,
and scratchy LPs an innocent lifetime ago.

Try strutting about nowadays in tiara and starched skirt,
waving a wand—the madhouse will open its jaws
and swallow you whole, but

my fairy godmother is clever.
She dresses like Eleanor Roosevelt,
talks like Eleanor, looks like Eleanor,
says she is Eleanor, back from the dead.

Each night she brings me hot chocolate, sits,
tell stories about quiet fireside chats,
her husband’s withered legs and how much
she thought he loved her before Lucy.

She reminds me to floss every night
and to be sure to carry an umbrella
should sudden thunderstorms threaten.
She emphasizes that one must learn to
be brave in cold emptied beds
ever so much as on battlefields,
littered with the corpses of those
who once called our name.
___

Among the Missing

Their names came to me
not by pony express
not taped to soft butterfly wings
not scrawled across the sky
by some mad skywriter from hell
They came writ on the back of a church bulletin
sent by a friend’s elderly mom
Folded three times over
Licked and stamped with great care
‘Deceased’ filled the left-hand column
‘Still Alive’ short-stopped the right
Five names lingered there

These town elders…
The men and women who helped raise me
who taught me who discovered America
who sang hymns with my mother
who carried my father’s casket,
sat by my mother’s urn
The heart of my hometown ripped out
Their funerals, for me now
so sudden
Like a shushed whisper in church
or blades of grass trampled
by the fierce afternoon rain
___

Songs In The Night

Nights, when icicles
clattered against the eaves
like ancestral bones,
my parents and I huddled
in our warm den,
pondered crossword puzzles
solved crimes with Nancy Drew
gasped at the man circling plates
on ten sticks (at the same time)
on The Ed Sullivan Show.

By ten, we ran shivering
to icy beds, army blankets
layered like tent tarps
over our waning warmth.

One morning, after such a storm,
cheeks flushed and bellies taut
with homemade sausage and biscuits,
our neighbor’s dog lay frozen
on our doorstep, sides caved in
from his panting struggle to reach home,
not yet knowing his late afternoon
bunny-chase through the woods
would be in synch with the fat lady’s
last song.
___

A Certain Remembrance

Before God decided to burn the place
down–as the good church goers
in my small southern town
claimed, its owner ‘did things’
with the yellow haired lady
ticket taker, nights
when the movie reel got started;
things our thirteen year old minds
could only imagine, but
giggled about, hands over our
mouths, eyes wide with the possibilities.

A retired one-time Major Leaguer;
our townsfolk, his reluctant fans.

Posters of Jane Russell’s cleavage in Outlaw
plastered the front showcase for months
‘A disgrace’, my mother said, but

he appeared in our church not long
after God held his bonfire,
pitching arm lobbed over the
pew, like a lover caressing his mate.
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
could’ve walked straight through without
so much as a second glance.

He never came back.
Stayed home.
Got fat.
Was eventually forgotten by most.

That tilted, charred building wasn’t torn down
for thirty years, at least.

A reminder, I suppose.
A certain kind of Holocaust.
A certain kind of Memorial, too,
for days that have worn out their usefulness
and for dreams splintered and sent down
the river, spinning, for the next
lucky fisherman to catch.

Cora Lee

Rag bound ’round your head,
brown skin dipped in sweat
you washed our dishes
our clothes
ironed starched collars
and fancy blouses
no Cinderella prince
would offer you in your lifetime.

Four years old and precocious,
I corrected your grammar, ran unbidden
down the path to your house,
watched you fry fatback
and flatbread, thought it a feast,
never dreaming, if offered the platter
you might have chosen steak instead;
I never saw you sigh at the unjust breeze
or the angry hawks circling the thick pines
past your house, day’s end, sore feet weeping
on the graying planks of your porch.

Grown, I wanted to toss out my sorrys
like a pink veil of flowers–like Judas,
to give back the coins, beg forgiveness,
undo the nails, dig out the thorns, but
you stood in your sister’s door
a statue, already fading in the twilight
eyes vacant as a barn after the cows
have been led out to slaughter.
___

River Roads

It was my first trip back to Boston
after your breathless rush, crammed boxes
stacked like fortresses against my grief,
into the arms of another woman,
the first time I had courage enough
to stand on that steaming sidewalk
outside the yellow and green communal house
we’d years ago called home

Upstairs, in that room, the one I will always
think of as our room, two shadows passed.
Pastel and gray ghosts.
Our ghosts, perhaps, and
I was tugged suddenly up again into the memories.
Your mouth against mine.
The clamor of voices from the communal kitchen.
That strip of lace tacked lopsided
across the crate holding your shirts, my blouses.
My red hat lobbed across the bed, hair
tumbling carelessly down my back.
Drawn back into days we once thought
would merge, one into the other,
carrying us along as easily as a river
runs down to the sea.
___

Dangerous Places

I must take care not to peer back
through that gray slant of time
to when we lay arm against arm,
bodies flushed and moisture still seeping.

People I love march into places
I’m not yet ready to go.
They do not return in this lifetime

My body has grown cautious,
fearful of high curbs and large dogs,
irritated by the squeals of small children,

I avoid mirrors,
magazine articles on aging
and women who dwell on their bladders.

Outside, my husband weeds.
Gray hair sprouts from his cheekbones.
He swats at it, as if a pesky fly.

My heart does not leap when
sweat draws his shirt tight
or his pants slip to show cleavage
I once traced with my forefinger.

He senses I watch,
glances upward, then away,
his gaze falling like autumn rain
onto the waiting weeds.
___

Shrinkbait

He tells me I’m crazy, turns
up the tv, when I say…

Maybe Elvis really is loitering
by the sliced ham and bacon
but we’re too scared to peek
through the fourth dimension to see.

I wonder aloud if spammers are aliens,
trying to make binary contact,
if souls of the dead still can make love,
and if trees ever cry in the dark.

Thoughts unfurl through
my brain nightly, set loose
by the storm of awakening.

He asks me what does it matter-
these endless questions without
answers. He inquires if our
insurance will cover a shrink.

I shrug, use my toes as a rosary,
imagine quarks eating dead skin
and wonder if Copernicus would still
declare my head round after consulting
with Einstein on time, space and pi square.
___

Primroses
…
and so it is
Damien Rice

I still keep that photo you snapped.
Eyes just past childlike; china masked by steel.
The edge of one breast peeks from my half-
zippered jumpsuit. Primroses cluster
beneath the far rail..

Men hustled me then,
hard as street-side gamblers
when the dice were red hot, but
I chose you–you with the Bob Dylan eyes,
wraith-thin legs, white cotton socks
peeking furtively from beneath
your creased jeans. Gold ring,
third finger down.

You loved us both.
You never said it, but I knew.

That day. So heady with sunshine,
bright colored birds swooping down
to the grass for plump lazy worms.
That day, you fell from your straight arrow
ways and finally bedded me.

I settled for a man from Peoria.
Legs thick as an oxen’s.
We lasted eight years.

The birds are slower these days.
Too many worms get away,
The sun swells like a heartbeat.
Sweat runs down my back.
I plant extra primroses along my porch rail,
sometimes imagine a westerly wind rising
to carry their scent back to you.

Last month your name lept from a magazine.
Some obscure article about spiders.
I wrote you.

Your hair has gone gray, you write back.
Work still goes well. Your jeans don’t fit, anymore.
You enclose a photo of your grown daughter.
Your eyes stare at me from her face.

‘I never forgot you’, you add, ‘but isn’t that
how life goes??’
___

Before

Before Big Mama died, before
she forgot her daughter’s name-
my weeping cousin with eyes
dark as caves, before she forgot
her dearest Big Papa, forgot
how to dip her hands deep into
flour and lard to make her
pineapple upside-down pound cake,
before she forgot how kisses fierce
as a cyclone’s roar used to feel
and before her glass angels
flew off with her best lamps,
sofa, four poster bed, and her Bible,
Big Mama had her vision.
Her seventeen year old grandson;
hair fallen out from chemo, leg
taken earlier by cancer, skin
thin as parchment on his dying bed,
tubes now draining his life more
than giving; her Michael, son
of my dark-eyed weeping cousin, rose
from his bed, walked to her house
in the night , whole again, and kissed her.
He kissed her then slid through a space
filled with yellow and gold sparkling lights
to kiss his dark-eyed weeping mother,
and they joined hands together in a circle,
the kind of circle that can never be broken.
Not even when bodies and minds fail.

–Previously published in OCHO, a MiPo print publication