Tuesday Poem: From The Grove in the Eye of Light Poem Series

Cherry

Jean Scalvino covered her round breasts
with an apron and swept the sidewalk every day.
But the store she owned with her brother
stayed dark and murky, its hardware
hung from the ceiling: coffee pots and ladles,
scrub boards and galvanized buckets, ivory cups
and dish mops, all the tools, the apparatus of housework,
waiting to be adopted and wrapped in newspaper.

I watched her hands as she smoothed it over.
Her fingers had bulbs on the ends, big as cherries
her fingers, her whole body curling this way and that,
her bones like old branches, sagging,
though the fruit had fallen away long ago.

How she lovingly criss-crossed
the whole thing with string,
and finished it off with a bow,
as if she were diapering
a newborn she’d just delivered,
so she could give it into your care.

Tuesday Poem: From The Grove in the Eye of Light poem series

Crabapple

Squinting over purple
Koolaid in a gallon jug,
we climbed Sandy Hill for picnics
under what we called the monkey tree,
small bites from its hard sour fruit
for make-believe dessert.

Jeffrey Bud hung by his knees
from the best gnarled branch,
his freckled face upside down,
eyes blue and soft
as the curtain descending
on each summer day.

He never knew how the rest of us felt
about him, how when he wasn’t there
we swore that God must’ve known
how much we needed someone new,
God must’ve sent him to play with us
because we’d been so good.

Tuesday Poem: From "The Grove In The Eye Of Light" poem cycle

Sycamore

the only other Irish girl
at St. Anthony’s was Mary Coates.

I remember her porcelain
freckled skin, like a forest floor
dappled with leaf shadows,
and eyes as blue and clear
as the sky the day she told me
what the f-word meant,
sending me out of my garden of bliss
with an earthquake of vulgar words
that spun me reeling away from her.

I wandered across the open playground
no longer at ease, groaned down dark corridors,
stood against brick walls, riddled
by that terrible knowledge.
Mary Coates, her grin a mile wide,
stalking me, a flasher
in a trench coat, detective cool.

She was out of my league.
I stayed as far away
from her as I could.

Tuesday Poem: From "The Grove In The Eye Of Light" poem cycle

Hazel

In senior year
I followed
Sister Marietta
down into
the well
of myself
to feast on the glistening
salmon of poetry.

She held the divining rod.

So what if I wrote about riding the bus to nowhere,
or chewed away at my own thumbs
insisting they tasted good ?

Sister Marietta helped me
weave a wishing cap
out of strings of words,
and blessed it with
with the quickening of comets:
her “A’s” crossing
the night sky of the page,
trailing little plusses
along behind them.

Tuesday Poem: Another Wild Ride

Image taken
from Updownacross
Christopher Saunders'Blog





Step Outside Time

Come spit flowers out,
so petals ring everyone’s eyes.
Be the blueprint of your future self
though you can’t see beyond the horizon.

Come paint yourself
the red of arterial coursings,
oxygen rich. Then swoon into
deepest violet down acres of slaloming veins.

Come wrap the wind round your shoulders tight.
Send it flying again, a squall fanning out
as you throw up your hands to the coming night.

Stir a hurricane up to collar your face,
your face, the place that harbors
its own kind of stillness,
so your eye, your eye
is the center point,
silent lynch pin,
round which spins
the cog of the world.

Tuesday Poem: Point of View

Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Primitives
after the 15th C. Rooms in the Rijksmuseum

The whole story is contained in the paintings.

In one, your eye is drawn upward,
past the God/baby,
being recognized by three exotic men,
past their robes and gifts,
to His mother looking on,
and then beyond her
to the routes taken,
the dangers in them.

Call them kings, wise men, magi --
it makes no difference.
Their journey is what matters.
Prophecy at its center: a precious jewel.

Call it the deconstruction of junction.

It says, be mindful of the crossroads,
how pregnant they are
with the possibility of miscarriage.

In another, Veronica’s miracle
meeting with Christ at Calvary
isn’t singled out, but ringed instead
by the stations of the cross.
Her pale hands hold
the imprint of His face
across her veil, while behind her
He is scourged, falls, is helped up,
falls again, is crucified, buried,
arises, and staggers His way back up
to the agony in the garden.

Isn’t this how we understand our lives?
When we turn to look back,
don’t events tug and lift each other
like clothes on a line?
Isn’t it in the recounting
that we can finally see
what moves them?

So Eternity was alive once: walking in circles,
eating, and shitting, and falling asleep instantly,
just like a baby; a story telling itself
many times, without beginning or end,
experience accruing like gaps,
or scars and wrinkles
on a body, haphazard
and unpredictable --
playing for keeps.

It’s what we now call primitive:
this riding the wheel of the seasons,
this love for both the ripening and the rot.



















Jan Wellens deCock

Tuesday Poem: Looking Up

Questions Come Spilling Out

Who wields the Milky Way
like a whip of light
across the wide
expanse of night?

Who holds the sun's
fiery belly still
in light-years-long
galactic hands?

What rhythmic
breath comes down
from the moon’s
white face to calm
the waters, and hold
their tides in place?

What great push
birthed this big
blue baby, still
gestating?

What happened to
keeping an eye on us?

We’re fleas, you know,
talking fireflies.
We've multiplied,
scattered everywhere,
a raucous pestilence
driven by pleasure, hell
bent on strife.

Who will stop us
from killing
what gives us life?

Tuesday Poem: A Meditation

Caught Between Fire And Water

That’s what we are.
Minds aflame, bodies aflood.
Am lost, am lost, am lost.

Men swimming through mud, the earth
suddenly liquefied, the sun
a bloody egg in a searing sky.
Against the firmament, they are an absence,
vapor briefly forming and streaming away;
merely streaks of energy at play.

Like the hammer. the anvil, the stirrup
women curling delicate and waxen
in the city’s ear. We must let each other in,
they whisper through the din, despite our fear.
But no one want to hear what they have to say.

Whose fingers are long enough to reach for God?
Whose shoulder is soft enough to invite God’s leaning?
No need for further punishment.
We’re doing it to ourselves.

Better to dance like seaweed,
its rounds of bulby green, pale lettuce fronds,
and straight black bands in solos or in pairs,
long sweeping strands of hair
combed out by mermaids. Each one
playing its part, hiding the fish
from the birds of prey hunting them overhead,
a tapestry of survival.

Divine Geometry lit up like a neon sign
on the walls of our rooms at night,
the bliss of correspondences
everywhere in plain sight.

It’s almost, almost, almost
more than one can bear.

Tuesday Poem: Better Late Than Never

My Mother Loved Rabbits

Their plump
velvety, meekness,
and quiet multiplicity.

She'd bring them home at Easter time,
say it was so peaceful
to watch them nibble away
at time's short cord.

But she could skin them
if she had to, days when
her brother showed up
fresh from the hunt.
Out of love for him,
I guess, respect she felt
for the hands-on life,
the shadow of necessity
and survival. Thankfully,
she refused to cook or eat them.

Their long bodies hung by the feet
from the cabinet knobs.
Torn from their fur
they looked pink and slender
as newborns to me,
or girls before their budding

Tuesday Poem: Spring is Here!

Childe Hassam


Spring Poem

O Tuesday,

in the park old men are climbing

up into the highest branches

as the squirrels sit and watch them.

O Treesday,

the sycamores are suddenly hairy

with leaf buds, the gingkos have thrown

off their winter coats, a lone cherry is shaking

her pink-blossom tresses.

O Tweetsday,

a cloud of old women pulses

and wheels overhead

as cinnamon sparrows

cackle from the hedges .

O Twizzleday,

fat with the bliss of children.

The little ones wave

like kings and queens

from red plastic daycare floats,

the big ones come galloping,

pinwheeling, ping-ponging

out of school.

O Tuesday, everyone is

warming beneath

the saffron sun,

and, like you, full of grace.