Thursday, September 26, 2024

Music Box Women

This poem was inspired by Grammy and by all the women who came after her, and even by the ones who came before. Most especially, though, it's Georgia on my mind. This poem doesn't say everything that could be said. In fact, it doesn't say nearly enough. I guess that's why we have music: for the times we don't have words, and for the people for whom we'd run out of them.

Music Box Women

Women with straight backs and beautiful smiles

Who live like mountains

Who love their children

Who never stop singing

You can see them scintillating from a mile away

Lighting up kitchens and classrooms and boardrooms and stages

With hair softly curled around diamond-hard minds

With skirt pleats pressed and seasonal sweater vests

They tower over our decades remaining

In sequins and aphorisms and Broadway lyricism

They dance the steps that taught us grace and groove

The ones we'll teach our daughters


They click their heels and go nowhere

Because they landed long ago on a place called home

And even when they move house 

Change tack

Or venture far from hearths well known 

They bring with them their

Circle-'round-the-campfire charisma

Their arms and hearts so strong and wide

And bellies stretched to cradle their babies

They warm the Arctic places

And build foundations in granite and steel

Carrying a tune so lightly and lovely

You sometimes don't notice they also carry the world


These music box women might unwind more slowly 

But are never broken

Even after they leave a final note ringing

Because they stand on our dressers and hang on our walls

And whenever we see them 

We still hear their song

And on good days and hard days and certainly Sundays

We find ourselves humming along


When our credits roll

Their names appear

In places like producer and director and volunteer of the year

And if you stay ‘til the end and listen

You’ll find that the lovely and true tune that they carried

Was there in the background carrying you


Thursday, May 2, 2024

The Burning

The burning soul stretches out to the sky

Air thinner up here but so clear

Breathe in ice gasps and stars

A silent flame unseen from below

Devouring oxygen feathers uncertainty

Sun black weightless coal

In sheer blue silk underthings

White lace clouds peripheral vision

Unbothersome matter from this height

Overinflated -- perhaps

But how else to let go


Origin Story

Sometime before you and I were born
Before our continental ancestors were even conceived of

By their mother’s mothers

Who at the time were just little girls in prehistoric pinafores

Way back then

Someone fell in love for the first time

And they learned that that love means down is up

And dark is sharp

And sunrise means the end


In between the scramble of inventing crop rotation

Avoiding the plague

Minding the flock

And skinning rabbits for stew

One pair of eyes kept meeting another over an open fire

And since no one yet worried about particulate matter inhalation

Or the rising cost of premium daycare facilities

The human heart still had time to leap and swoon and twist itself into knots

Over that other pair of eyes

That were watching and waiting and seducing

Fixed on nothing but her

Nothing to click on

Nothing pending a reply


Back then people were just starting to understand the confusion of senses,

That meeting someone, not just anyone

can make you feel like you just breathed for the first time

Like you just sloughed off the amniotic fluid of singledom

You cry out in a gasp of inarticulate virility

And suddenly know

The definition of paradox

The agony of joy
The intimacy of separation 


I knew I was falling in love with you when I didn’t look at my phone
Or even remember I owned one
From the minute I entered your apartment

until the minute I needed Google to get me home

Thoroughly captivated by our interaction

Utterly disinterested in the typically addictive fleeting digital stream

Realizing time after time

you were the only reality I wanted to be mine


In my bones’ marrow

where the secrets of romance are engraved by time into my matter

I felt my myself grow strong in your hands

And I saw all the contraptions and distractions of today grow small

In the presence of something undying and unyielding 

Nothing was ever as beautiful

Not as the way you made me feel

But as the way I wanted to make you feel

Safe like my flock

Hot like my fire

Confused like the body in love

Like down is up

And dark is sharp

Like sundown is a wake-up call

And sunrise means the end

Until next time

And I prayed for a next time

In a time when I had forgotten how to pray


Somewhere awakened in my reptilian brain or in my genetic codex

A woman with strong shoulders and rough hands

was teaching me to feel you like she had felt him

Her love story lurching across millenia to tell me

that this distraction with you is called fate

That seeing the night as the brightest part of day is called passion

That wanting to follow you without knowing your destination is called loyalty

That wanting to give you myself until the bank of my life had a negative balance

Wasn’t just a sign of intense but passing infatuation

It was a rite of passage into the ranks of our progenitors

Who had also forgotten to keep a watch on their phone

Or flock

Or fire

And instead kept watch on each other

Inventing words for new sensations

Whispering prayers about forever into the silence

Writing into their bones the origin story of love


(2018)