Her words are not for me not about me Her words are not for me not about me Repeat
am i allowed To float Her words aloud To sink them in my mind To lap them from the page
i accidentally swallow, then gulp down Her Salt words/ like when the surf breaks, and surprises the exhilarated, Great Lakes girl with a mouthful of seawater during her very first swim in the Ocean
Her words were not meant for me Her words were not meant for me Repeat
it’s mid evening east of The Lake and the night is dawning like a second morning
the Full Moon’s light in a clearer sky gleams through the generous panes of this blessed, old green house
Moon’s rise / Her Light
February’s Snow Moon is glowing in a familiar dance with her beloved Earth//
Sun, their invisible chaperone, is voyeur to their touchless, perfect tango
a family of four deer mother and children, i think/ are gleaners here tonight while i consume their Moon play
silent and sitting in the dark, i admire: coat, tallow, hooves and warm flow of blood is all that’s between them and this howling wind and frozen ground
let me mimic their resilience, integrity i’ve been so weak, so broken this winter a fractioned shadow, i am disintegrating, disappearing / my light given or grifted away
the man who bought my kindergarten clothes when i was four years old and paid my Lutheran school monthly tuition for eight years; the man who had the rusty 1972 VW Bug, gifted to me by my boyfriend for high school graduation restored over the summer before my freshman year of college; the man who adored both my son aka “monster” and “bam-bam”, and my first dog, Digby aka “hound”; the man who endured both the devastating loss of custody of and subsequent parental abduction of — and then, the tragic death of his only biological child, a son.
the man who never got the chance to properly retire and healthfully and happily collect his 30-year, hard-earned Teamster’s union pension — and just go fishing all day because he became acutely ill with undiagnosed kidney failure, and spent the last years of his life on thrice-weekly, hours-long dialysis treatment — and his last six months on Earth dying from a rare, aggressive and metastatic cancer.
may his spirit know peace eternally.
Willie Mack gingerly cradling his namesake Mack on the first full day of the baby’s life, and who we brought home on Father’s Day, 1994
“This used to be my playground.”
and, our proxy for church on spring, summer and fall sabbaths.
These were the halcyon days.
Load up the International Harvester TravelAll with wooden doors and quarter panels – it has two gas tanks, you know. Bought it used, but pristine on payments – from the showroom on Logan Boulevard and Elston Avenue with zero credit history and all the usury
Have mercy.
Follow me, and I will make you fishers of fish.
He will bait your hook on the bamboo pole he bought you. Later, you will insist on the “Pocket Fisherman” – as seen on TV.
i add my most intentional breaths to the land, to the atmosphere, for the birch sapling, for a man i knew, both, bent over frozen in a forced deference mimicking reverence it won’t, can’t, hold [it never does]
with every exhalation my pink lungs conjure warm winds from red blood cells incanting under my tender palate over my dormant tongue, though my worn enamel beyond my hermit lips:
in my winter cocoon enveloped in sheets and blankets my eyes closed all day
these damned windows, seams of daylight break through fiber, try and force their way through slits and lashes, i resist pink lids, i won’t study and map your capillary streams / birds, please don’t sing / i refuse to perceive anything but my own inlands
i don’t feed i don’t drink i don’t think i don’t move i don’t feel
i only let
let let let
i am not dying though i am working from the inside autonomic, appearing halcyon while transforming all memoir of you – from idealization into unbiased slurry, and, into something, new into something, else of me
– an entire phantom life, not mere limb one i didn’t know i had, to begin with, let alone, lost /out on/ a door to a paralleling universe and no wormhole key
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 