Another Three Poems

I

This is the curse of admiral’s mother
Who watches her son sail away.
He stands with a rock for a face on the prow
And is lashed by the sea’s angry spray
Six missions he’s gone and returned to this port
Where his mother still glares out and hates
She cries salty tears like the ocean he sails on
and waits and she waits and she waits.
Six times she has thought of his death on the waves
His yelling while taking on water
She sees him all riddled with bullets and drowning
While sharks slither in to the slaughter
She knew a young boy who resembles that man
Who cried and who spat and who slept
She changed him and taught him and led him and helped him
while time and his ambition crept
From dark timely shadows to age and promote him
And make the man into a leader
An admiral brilliant and cunning and shrewd
And nowadays he did not need her
He stopped by for tea and he left for his war
She’s watching his ship leave the bay
More than an ocean now keeps them apart
She raised him and he went away.

II

This is the curse of the glass blower’s daughter
A copper-haired freckled young girl
A puff from a pipe with hot glass on the end
Had ended her young father’s world.
The kiln held a liquid hot orange, intense
She’d stick the long pipe in and heave
She’d lean from the heat and turn red and she’d lift
And with each sweaty movement she’d grieve
She’d ‘sight’ down the pipe like a glass-blowing sniper
And feel the pipe’s weight in her glove
Bagpipes would split from her lungful of air
And with all of her strength she blew love
Like playing a trumpet with one silent note
With a skin-searing heat that could kill
It ignites both your lungs, just a whiff of this song
Made of grief, melting rock, and of skill
She lived to look down the long length of the pipe
And shape the red lava with breath
A bubble of air in the glass growing larger
A grandchild’s heart cheating death
She sold all her works ‘cept her first broken piece
that was made on the day her dad died
cold tears for his death had hit the hot glass
and shattered the piece open wide
the lesson was clear and she laughed ever since
and her pain was put into her art
her love was her grief and her grief was her glass
and her glass was her still-beating heart

III

This is curse of the garbageman’s niece
Who was orphaned when young by a crash
And shipped to her distant estranged crazy uncle
Who picked up the whole city’s trash
She found a new life in the alleys of others
And toys in what others threw out.
She danced in the junk and sang songs in the trash
Did puppet shows with rotting trout.
She happily stank like her uncle Ovitna
And never knew sadness or fear
Her immune system rocked but her skin was all smeared
With garbage from both far and near
Beneath the thick crust of fish scales and paste
Made from eggplant and old bits of glue
She REEKED with a smile and flounced with a STINK
Made of cabbages, dead cats and poo
Her curse was that she was thought of as a curse
By her uncle for he did not love her
He did not want her there. He did not like to dance.
Now and then he would hit her and shove her.
But for her every day was utopian glee
With her stink and her trash and her toys
She never had friends or kisses or pets
Or schooling or manners or boys.
Her curse was a curse by our standard, not hers
For she lives her days with a smile
She’s laughing there now in the festering trash
And she’s been laughing all of the while.




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In memory of persistence

I’d like to remember her the way most ex-boyfriends remember their exes. That is to say, when I’m drunk and missing her, I want to remember that space right under her ear, her easy smile, and that way that she’d hiccup if she laughed too much. When I’m angry at her and hurt, I want to remember that time she kissed the bouncer just to piss me off or how she’d constantly complain no matter how awesome our life was.

Instead, all I can remember is her left hand in the sunglight, hanging out the car window on August 22nd.

She slowly turns her hand, her ring catching the light and shining in my eyes for a second before it ends. In the memory, the sun looks like it’s nearing the horizon. The shadows of the bushes are long on the ground outside the window in the fading desert light. We’re parked. She’s splaying her fingers lazily and looking at her ring. A glint, a flash of light in my eyes and the memory is over.

I don’t see her face in the memory. I can feel my ear pressed against her chest.

I think the wipers weren’t top of the line. Maybe their schedule had been just that little bit too tight. That little fragment of her hand in the sun had slipped through their nets. I wondered if there were anymore. It’s hard to search for memories that may have been missed during an erasure solely because they had been misfiled. I mean, where did you accidentally put them?

Was the time you wiped strawberry juice off of her unbuttoned white blouse filed under ‘stain removal’ somewhere in your head? Were her instructions on how to get to that store on fifth that sold the cheap eels filed under ‘maps’ and never looked at again?

I like to just let my mind wander and see if it comes across something that stands out by not standing out. I wouldn’t know it if I found a picture of her face. I wouldn’t know it if I remembered a few seconds of her speaking. The only way I’d know is if I had no idea who that person was.

Not knowing her would be the only clue that she might be the woman that I lost.

Sorry, the woman that was taken from me.

Even if it was a cheap rush job, it was still miles away from a bank account like mine. I figure her daddy must have been rich and didn’t want me following her. His little girl had been slumming with me. I had no idea why he didn’t just take her away and shoot me in the leg or something but maybe he had. Maybe he’d tried to take her away a few times before.

Maybe this was the only option left to him. If he could afford a wipe on a gutter rat like me, well, I must have been tenacious and he must have been obscenely rich.

I think the ring in the memory I keep looking at is an engagement ring. I see its lazy arc up into the sunlight before the flash of light again and it’s over.





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