LOVE

That morning she opened her eyes and fell in love,

like Isolde, with the first face she saw.  It was a ghost,

come to tell her she would do much better to love someone

from the land of the living, and please not to fall in love

with him. So it happens. Someone is forever bending over

backwards, weighted down with good intentions, landing

in the wrong place at the wrong time. "I am taking you

to wed my uncle," whispers Tristan, betrayal warming his blood.

And hadn't we better call to say we'll be late,

and do you want to talk about it,

and why don't we just lie down for a few minutes,

you know I can't leave you like this.

So she fell in love with a ghost, with pale skin and red hair,

with black eyes and thick lips, with men who threw themselves

in front of trains to save her from her sadness, men who called her

late at night to say she had ruined their lives and wouldn't she

like to talk about it?  She loved an accordion player, a drug dealer,

a composer, a pianist, an analyst, a singer, a doctor, a poet,

a failure, a madman, a salesman, a waiter, a murderer, a man

who sat down on her doorstep one evening and would not go home.

And it all ended somewhere, the embraces and regrets,

all melted like glass, glass that takes the shape of a coffin

in a dark wood where a dim figure raises his arm in farewell

or greeting and the woman inside lies still as heaven,

perhaps a ghost herself, returned and waiting to be wakened

with a kiss, a bit of poison apple between her teeth.

(published in Another Chicago Magazine)

THE End of the World

Somehow the time arrived

finally for the end of the world.  The date

had slipped my mind in all the chaos—

most of the phones had long since stopped

working, people planning elaborate

farewells saw they had no time left now

for actual farewells.

I wanted to call everyone in my family

and send them love

but somehow — with no

time left out of all the time in the world —

the only person I could reach

was my brother John, who

had mom staying with him.  He kept

complaining about her,

yes I said,

that’s what she’s always like,

always.  Someone else needed the phone

so I gave it over and

a few of us sat there on the brink

of the end of everything and

I explained how my father

had been a woodworker — could

take piles of broken pieces and figure out

how they fit into a beautiful

mended whole, but sometimes years later

he would see a picture

in a book about antiques

and say, so that’s how it really goes,

I had this piece upside-down —

all of us sitting there

thinking that

at the end of the world.

My Women

‍ ‍ for Nancy

I come from a long line of women who did everything.

                       Some taught school. Some farmed,

                        some raised children and some

                        raised flowers, some traveled west

                        in rattling wagons and some

                        stayed East and put up their feet.

                        Some ran the business when their husbands

                        weren’t looking, some walked off down the road

                        and never looked back.

Some sang and some gave birth and some

                        wiped up the blood.

                        One crossed the Rio Grande

                        in a buckboard on the way to Mexico,

                        buried her mother under heavy stones,

                        and men with rifles

                        sat up till dawn to scare hungry jackals away.

                        One smuggled a rebel spy across enemy lines

                        under her hoopskirt and southern smile.

                        Some kept house and some nursed,

                        some went into business when ladies didn’t.

                        Some married the handsomest man in town and some

                        died single and happy.

                        Some sang and some gave birth and some

                        wiped up the blood.

                        One grew hundreds of roses and one

                        pushed rags in the cracks of the house by the creek.

                        One escaped from an English castle

and sailed off to marry her sweetheart in the

                        Virginia wilds. One out-rode a tornado on horseback,

                        one fainted at picnics to make the gentlemen

fan her face and unloose her stays,

                        one made bathtub gin and one had a wicked tongue,

                        and one heard a ghost walk up her stairs at night and told

                        her daughter, "Go see who it is."

                        They wore furs, they went barefoot, they wore

boots to walk through barnyard muck and they

                        high-heeled their way across Grand Central Station.

                        They scalded and scrubbed and knew

the right way to wring a chicken’s neck, they knitted

                        wherever they went, for fear to stop working.

                        They embroidered, tatted, stitched linen and lace,

                        they stood up straight and learned how to

                        keep things going and battened down.

                        They kept the soup pot going and dried up tears.

                        They fed children and tramps and cowboys

                        and the minister come for Sunday supper.

                        They loved preachers and traveling salesmen,

                        statesmen and earls and mountain men, gandy dancers,

                        hardscrabble men, miners, professors, sailors, 

                        newspaper men with black typewriters and fedoras,

                        soldiers with medals and soldiers who never came home.

                        Some sang and some gave birth and some

                        wiped up the blood.

                        They had cooks and maids, they were cooks and maids,

                        they got down to their last tear and their last dollar

                        and found that their hearts kept on beating

all the same. Some got religion, some

                        sang spirituals, some visited spiritualists

                        and some fell down on their knees and felt their bones

                        rocked by the Holy Spirit on the sawdust floor.

                        Some were flirts, some were brains,

                        some were solemn and some were dizzy broads,

                        some went around the bend balmy, some

                        hugged life like a lover and some

                        fell crushed under its hooves.

                        Some wrote, some painted, some played piano

                        past midnight when the children were asleep.

Some sang and some gave birth and some

                        wiped up the blood.

                        They knew magic, they knew medicine

                        and the roots to boil to bring the fever down,

                        they painted children’s chests with mustard plaster

                        and they painted their faces, cut their hair

                        and took up smoking & cursing to shock the neighborhood boys.

                        They drove Conestoga's and red sports cars

and nobody got in their way.  Some loved one man all their lives,

some loved twenty, some took the wanderers back

and some shut the door with a bang and

kicked up their heels.

Their portraits sweep backwards into history,

forward with whispers in the vein, rollicking through

the skeins of their lost names, my quick and my dead —

Some sang and some gave birth and some

                        wiped up the blood.