Jerry Gordon (30.7.06)

Mom's got a new thing
in her lung.
On the phone, she says,
"It's probably lymphoma."
But given her history of surprises,
it could be anything.

So we laugh
across the satellites
that it might be flowers sprouting:
"Marigolds? Daffodils?
Or, maybe a blood red
hybiscus?"

"Nope, it's a rose," she says,
"I can smell it in the chemo."

We hang up and I recall her promise
that her garden would out last her.


--
Mom's Dead

There was a woman
at the end of the mind
in the bronze decor
with assorted bullets
in her teeth.

Silver
Lead
Gold and Steel
forged in Death's little
smelter.

She caught so many
from so many angles
we thought she might never miss,
she might just smile again
with that glitter of circus talent
flashing the spotlight's reflection.

But, there is always one slug
left in the gun
to make all the previous
preparatory.


Bang


And the crowd's faces follow
the imagined trajectory
of what no eye can see
from the distant puff of smoke
at the dim end of the bronze decor
to the woman over there
smiling metallic
but dead.


--
Your Funeral on the Platform

A wild old woman chants some violent magic
at the edge of the platform in Osaka,
her urban hermit hand ticking off invisible boxes
as she shouts into her folded paper--
some racing form or schedule of times
or other tiny-columned text.

I imagine she is conducting a funeral
for you and other ghosts that ride the Loop Line.
She's plucking the pains and hatreds from your flesh
like so many bee-stings in a soul,
extracting the poisons you're to leave here
with us. The stuff we'll grind our teeth to nubs on.
The stuff we'll mix with your ashes
to mold you as our mud-man and prance around
like you are worthy of such dumb reverence.

But you are no longer you.

And, so, in Tennoji, this visitation
by a white-striped moth flapping and flopping
its way to the heel of my left shoe, makes me
love you all anew. To meet you
in these million frazzled edges worth protecting.
I lift my heel off the floor and give you
the chance to climb beneath, giving me the chance
to grind your fragile thorax back to ash
and dusty wings. If I so choose.

I don't.

And all of us here on the train smile
as you flash and crash off towards the light bulb
but lose your way
back out onto the platform.

6.21.06


--
We meet again,
this time on opposite sides of a drum skin,
communicating through the vellum
in the languages of dance and rhythm;
you talk in the ancient tongue
of man moving and becoming bird--
the tradition of transforming
feathers and flight from a business suit--
and I speak in beats,
touching the tensions of flesh
just enough to call you out
of limbo.

7.16.06


--
Dad’s Dance

I start the drum and you appear
standing to my left, dressed
in a grey plaid suit--like all those years
at Sears I have memorized--
black horn-rimmed glasses
and your noble Cherokee nose.
You stand, just listening to the drum
like you have never listened to anything:
with your flesh alive in the blood-loved pulse of rhythm.

And then, slowly, you raise your arms,
stretched out with elbows up.
Your back bends and across your sleeves
a subtle color flashes, a tint of blue
that every set of wings requires.
A scrap of sky so slight it could
put a concrete wall in flight.

And, before a thought can weave a logic,
you dream and your coat of strings
begins its slow transform to feathers.

I keep the beat and build belief with speed
and you ride my release into each finger's tap
and thumping thumb, trusting
mistakes to come from the desert
like the clouds that build behind my eyes
arise of rain-wrought condensation.

You tilt and turn, each pitch and angle
pointed with each touch to skin. Your suit and self
melt inside this choreography of flight.
The 10,000 blue feathers hang,
draping as the lightest gravity.

Turn. Turn bird, man. Turn within your
chalky blues and patterned stripes of black.

I play on, my hands becoming a stronger song.
You dance, becoming bird enough to make me worry
I must somehow sustain you;
worry what I'll fail when I must stop.

Because it's almost time for me to leave.
And, in this glance I take to think that
there's still so far to go, I slow at a mistake.

Looking back to my left, I find you've left.

Needing no time, you've entered the western clouds.
No longer in the feathered blue suit used for dancing.
No longer turning to cues shared with the drum.
You've become a speck on the sky,
moving amidst the outlines of light that ride the clouds.

Now,
each quieting touch merely marks your distances
into the setting sun.

7.15.06


--
Just Dust

To hate, I place my heart up to the mirror
and press it against its depthless double--
flattening one and flattering the other.
The pain is self-inflicted.
The only trace,
some bloody echo of the instant
and all the reasons requiring such violence.

You, I imagine, feel nothing
more than the weight of a forgetful year
as you let ash become a landscape.

I hoped to start a seed
from some 40 years of mud.

But now it is up to me to trust
yet again. So, walking
by a flooded rice field,
I sink my hands into its rich, black thickness,
layered of seasons and frog crap
and 10,000 insect corpses.
Squeezing, the earth sucks,
as though things hidden underground
are gasping for breath.
I can feel my fathers
slipping through my fingers,
unwilling to release me
from a grasping more than gravity.

Standing, the mud starts
to dry on my hands like gloves of earth.
Inside, I feel my pulse
throbbing at my finger tips and palms,
more evident as everything gets a bit constricting.

But, before all the rain evaporates,
I pull out my heart--no different
than a yellow mustard seed-- and plant it
in the garden of my hands.
Between my thumbs, I whisper:
“I vow to abandon you
to the moments.”

7.21.06

--

(For the 92 word challenge)

Burning every word,
the candle is my only companion.
Its tear of light
a stab
through the tiny window of my eye
into night’s long revenge.

In sleep, I watch
the hands of mosquitos
building the humidity
bit by weary bit.

In the house I live
I tell them I’m almost finished with pain
and the night shines
a little more.