You're Gorgeous, But What's with the Hair?
Overrated: cupidity, kitsch, sameness as in
balloon animals or Wilton cake decorating moves.
Or how about manikins? Their faces
absorb the centuries, though these days
who needs heads? The human
passes through like a filament-a swath
where the mind was: all gestures
fragmented, forgotten. My father bent,
rubbed his bald head from front to back,
peered up to signal the absurd.
My mother often crossed her eyes
when the ridiculous crossed her path.
Maybe they jilted each other, their divorce
more ruinous than they thought. Who's to assign
blame now that they're both dead?
Yet look how they posed in department store photos
late 50s in matching gingham shirts:
perfect models for who they were or
were meant to believe they could be.
Minimegastructures Are Mostly Ducks
Palpable as the weight of a dream, we eat
sour cherries to show something in the soul
has changed. While our bodies were young,
we'd never choose age. As our minds ripen,
we decline to go back. I say goodbye to my daughter--
off at thirteen to Buffalo. If we're only
on orange alert, why does every passenger bear
the hairline of a terrorist? Her boarding pass
bleeps through the scanner, and we regress
to just plain mother and child, clinging.
Though her face hovers over me, it's the same one
I remember at three stranded in the window
of the preschool, her mouth open
in a wide, perilous cry. It's a rout, a glut--
images crowd us and all the lucid doors
of my childhood shut. Who we are
becomes visible decades away, hovering
as if by plane. From the air, she looks down
at the decadent lovely, the solitary fruit--
the solitary mouth on the fruit.
Bodily Fluid Clean-up Kits
It goes beyond palliatives, such care. You won't see them
perched on shelves at the Pic & Pac. It's never copious at first.
For some it collects in the arteries or in the brainstem:
vengeance,
obsession, or regret moves through channels, ends life
in a shudder. At its core, divorce makes everyone rotten:
even the child, daydreaming in her father's Cutlass
Oldsmobile that Summer of Love, the sky romantic
with possibility. The child crafts a different future,
unmakes a ludicrous past. In the front seat, the father
strokes the hot-pantsed leg of his current paramour,
her hair flat-ironed, winsome. The child feels
the world's skin: porous and tender to the aching.
Haunting Marie Laveau
Three X's and the bones' rubble held aloft
on earth's marred and toxic surface. We lean in
to mark her monument--all three bracing
for different outcomes--a hex on the x,
agape. Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship.
Voodoo happens though we lie awake nights,
undermined, breaking, coiled to our flaws.
I fall into lurid dreams, roam among my wrecked
metaphors: the bruised hippie at the door,
an eyesore, shoving my ancestors' bones
back to make way for more. The past calls--
I crawl into the open maw of Marie Laveau.