Retrieval

It never snows much these Decembers and
Driving without destinations has lost all appeal
Since the Christmas when everything dropped into
A place we can't fit through to retrieve
Ourselves and who we wanted to grow up to be.

But this too is love: retrieval.

- Monday, December Eighteenth, 2006

Gemma Hayes

I'd like to suggest listening (?deeply/?seriously/*strongly) to Gemma Hayes. She has a penetrating voice and sense of placement about herself that must be timed very closely with the human condition - her piece "Work to a Calm" is wrenching. It sets out the soul on edge like the grinding of gears does my teeth. The sound itself, however, is quite lovely.

Her album Night on My Side begins with the words "Oh good God, what has he done / traded a heart for a bullet and mind for a gun" and never fails to match the promise of tragedy and ache.

Gemma Hayes.

Cars

up for too long wasting who i am
windows closed, doors locked,
blankets folded, shutters pulled

everything is fine, everything is safe,
it’s kept tight little rooms in little towns

tiny thoughts that go racing down the street
in gray big blue cars moving faster than anything

up for so long talking about dreams the brain in this head
is sending all these messages:
when she steps out of something it is into something

stupid games to play
shoot and dodge, accuse and defend,
the punches pulled everything is wrong,

but it’s all safe, it’s kept up tight
in a big heart defined by blue eyes

dignities that go racing out in the cold
in white bonnevilles moving away from everything

up for way too long, all soaked thru
with the nighttime blue and plymouth gray
when i step up out of something it is in to nothing

Formulas

Each formula says the same as the last:
this one and that one will never quite match
but a difference in place, where e'er we cross
backwards in attitude to whatever we lost:
every cut left a scar to stand in contrast
to how this one and that one will never quite match.

- Sunday, December Seventeenth, 2006

Estate

a great afternoon for going gently into the good papers: where all the named but ignored quit quietly from the earth. a passing breath that, like all the others, had one before it unique for having none come after. and that is all. just exhalation and leave. no closing curtain, clash of thunder and drama, her last words simply asking for water some few hours before; and any after that go unrecorded.

a great old lady, but hardly grand. her sheets were bought last year and the bedside lamp had been in the house when she moved in. her iconography was all pans and pantries. a two-decade gone husband and a journalist son somewhere in the north of iran. he received notice one month later, but the property had already been settled, he had a few items waiting in storage, but there was certainly no need for him to come home. the grave plot had been arranged and paid for six years beforehand, it was just a few hundred yards from the new highway exchange but the sound of traffic hardly ever invaded; in fact most of the cemetery was quiet and pleasant.

a great mystery indeed. how can a face and a name and a sentence affect me? anyone may be given a backstory and meaning, any word rendered sacred by repeating it in the dark as thoughts of god and heaven and death and sex go parading about, shooting down the inner eye and old radio love songs from 9th grade are chiseling away at the berlin wall we have in our stomach, that keeps us from weeping for days at the barely noticeable death of a great old lady, who died with the same humility that let her slip thru our lives without ever recognizing humankind when we saw her at the grocery store,

loading her own milk into the back of a red mercury

Gold

There will come a year, sweet:
When the hammer is reversed, upwards swung
then your gold shall be pounded to iron

There will come a year, love:
When the loom is upturned, and backwards run
then all the gold to old straw will be spun

There will come a year, child:
When Earth, mortal, shall fall into the Sun
and then your locks of gold shall be undone

But, God, if I could now count and keep
the fistfuls of blue you hold in your eyes

If I could but count and keep...

The Still

So sip your lemonade and touch the straw
around its asymmetrical crack,
perfect falling in-between ice's flaw:

That the sun floats down the amber and black,
like steel-blue trains would if they came up off and lost the track,
but I swear the setting would stop until
you could sip in the quiet and the still
watching sunsets and ice thaw