Tag: memory
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Dust Pneumonia, 1937
When my brother died, I stuffed his shoes with newspaper to make them fit I think of him when I wear them His lungs, always weak on the baseball field Couldn’t take it. They filled up like flour sacks OklahomaTexasKansasColorado Topsoil turned turgid all over the plains Invading him We played soldiers…
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Tinghir
You were born in the mellah Made your feet leather on hot rocks made way for boys with donkeys ever the scrambler Your mother didn’t know you much seventh of twelve, always dashing off. While she did someone else’s washing, you and your twin brother switched places on a dare, then back again “Do…
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Homage to H.D.
I pound on the hermetic door. An echo, heavy as lead, rolls away. I knock again and the ghost of your voice floats out from under it, brushing my face, light as a spider web, light as a mother’s hand out of Ancient Greece. —My angels are my angels. I feel this,…
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Flyer Poem #150: Verbal First Draft
Should have said it anyway. Should have traveled the road not yet taken. Should have gone to the spirit of the stairway. Should have had the decency to listen. Now, the pale ice caps have liquefied to the bottom of the river of grandeur. The heat wave has frozen over as a new age hell.…
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Flyer Poem #74
Spirit lady, you are now a mental maybe. Hard to shake off the tribal dance of heartbreak. A hall face, a yearbook picture, forever wandering into the ether that we all fear the most. She is the unknown, but we are unknowing of her next critical move.
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Joy
I showed my student a photograph of you, Dad, and asked, “What do you see?” He studied the old black-and-white: you in a well-cut summer suit, hands on your lap, light socks and polished shoes— and said, “I see a man who wants to have fun”— not the dutiful school principal I knew, but hands…
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Barometer Leaking Brass
I have come to expect rain, torrential downfalls, the great big shrugs of old men who empty buckets into the streets. I have come to the point in a promise where eyes meet, and there is an injustice of silence between us: The part of the curtain that blocks the sky from this angle on…
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Parable of the Absent Mother
“There was a man who had two sons . . “ Luke 15:11 Her not being there was in everything. It was in their dinners together and in their sitting alone. It was in each of their bed times and in their getting up again. The younger boy was rudderless; the older one angry, always…
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Home
Through pensive eyes gazing at the gaping horizon which sings, I permit the sovereignty of nostalgia to saturate. Contemplatively, I stroll a garden in which roses smile all around me, dripping their wet jewelry gifted by the morning. At the top of a mountain resides a remote monastery sat upon by the narcissistic Sun, depicting…
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Grandma’s Closet
The door at the end of the long hall stands open The third bathroom is in there Sent to the room by my mother’s voice busy behind the door of the second common bathroom, the guest bathroom Go use Mimi’s I obey The faint gold light from a bedside lamp whispers as I step twice…
