Nightly Music

She stands in the yard, points out wisteria
draping the side fence. Even at night
under an open moon we can see
lavender clusters hanging like notes
on a musical scale, nearby rosemary
scenting the night. By the front fence
facing a steep hill where oak trees escape
boundaries, their tops thin in painful memories,
sunflowers tower regally in simplicity.
I am suddenly a bystander as she turns
to the radio on her patio, her arms graceful
as a ballerina as she conducts Bach, courtly flowing
sounds of violins like wind dancing
over open sea answering itself note by note.
There are tears in his music she knows well,
she says, but she tries to dismiss dis-junct melodies.
She still remembers a lover months ago
who stood with her at night, the moon a face
of harmony as they listened to each other,
their breaths in unison, both in awe
of their spirits. She used to question
how the two dissolved, why music
never abandoned her soul.
“I have to forgive the past,”
she tells me as she sways gently
to Bach’s architecture. She faces me,
invites me into her night.

**

Tomboy in the Kitchen

I remember every day how I’d follow
my grandmother around the kitchen
as she cooked to the sound of Brother Hal’s
radio voice, whose country humor, sometimes
advice in mellowed-out vowels blended
with the smell of sausage or salmon croquettes.
I didn’t care about his stories of a country boy
on a farm, how kids got out of school for weeks
to go hunting, how someone almost drowned
in the river getting baptized cause he didn’t hold
his breath or the best way to keep the preacher’s wife
happy with other wimmin folk.
I’d tug on her yellow apron to get her attention.
She would shush me, cocking her head
towards Brother Hal’s voice, talking to him
as if in church, “Amen, brother.”
I didn’t want to listen to the radio
or wash dishes. I wanted to play
soldier with Mike and Ronnie
next door. But to get my grandmother
to smile at me, I’d stick my hands
into raw eggs, salmon, and bread crumbs
then mold it into balls and pretend
they were grenades for the enemy.

**

Waiting For the Postman

I walk the neighborhood past the old woman’s
house, gleaming white, recently painted.
She’s often behind sheer curtains like a woman
expecting a lover. Sometimes I see her
by her rose bushes in her yard pretending
to examine them, but everyone knows
she’s waiting for the postman. She’s the one
who reads junk mail, considers their dubious offers.
A thin woman with white hair, red lips,
she’s leftover from another era when her heart
and soul were one, when memories were meant
to swallow the future. Married to George Braynor,
she wears his faded picture in a locket.
She’s the kind who offers tea and cookies
to her minister and tells him how George always admired
strong women. His spirit fills rooms locked
in tatting, yellowed lampshades, Big Band music
swelling the air while she walks reverently
on hardwood floors as though she might
disturb the past. Today I see her greet
the postman, Mr. Barker, she calls him,
a handsome young man with curly hair
who stops to talk, admires her roses,
the nodding pansies in her flower boxes.
He touches her wrinkled hand as he hands her
the mail.

**

I Have Seen

I have seen them in institutions cut bananas
with a spoon, their eyes like windows glazed
with the past, some with a depression
so deep they have become black holes
in their own space, some with mantras
so beautiful I call it poetry:
“I fear nomads in my heart. I am
wise as a pomegranate in my mouth.
Words grow like weeds
and bury themselves in my blood.”
I have heard growls of schizophrenics,
admissions of witches, gods, kings, grave robbers
and their lust for the dead, the hiss of body cutters
as they carve on themselves.
I have seen them walk out that brick building,
sleep on beds of cardboard, pee
on grates, their past covered
in a grocery cart, passing their days walking
past business men and women in pin-striped suits
surrounded by buildings of glass and steel.
One picks up cigarette butts, chews them. Another
snarls at a man in a Fedora who crosses himself
upon seeing her. I have seen another stomp
on imaginary flames that engulf her feet,
talk to herself in her words:
“I am the female pulse of God,
the fruit of your fears. Bury yourself
in my rituals, my womb of altars.
I offer you the cup of salvation.
I can chant a chopstick song.
I know joy and sorrow are as equal
as word and deed.”
They are never far from me.