Crypt

In the early spring of 1963, a B-47 pilot lost his life in an ATO-related fire. My memory is vague on this, but I think the wheels did actually lift from the tarmac...that the jet was in the air, and then crashed....

His name was James Meeks. He was a Major in the Air Force. His crewmen were all able to escape, but he was trapped by his own seatbelt, due to negligence by its manufacturer...

That same spring it seemed almost everyone's basement was flooding. The water table was rising, and the earth under our homes was saturated. I mention this, because the night Major Meeks died, I had a dream about him. I dreamed he did not burn to death, after all.


I dreamed
he survived the fire,
only to be drowned
in a small lake,
a flooded quarry
under the sidewalk.
The lid to his crypt
lay in front of our house.

Bits of his flightsuit
were still on fire
floating in the waves
of blood and grease,
his charred hands
still gripping the belt
that would pull him
into the waiting pool.

Another Ghost

Night slips
into black silk,
and breathing stills.
Lilac floats
on swollen air.

I wait
in full blossom,
my feet warm
in the spreading moss.

A cricket calls, lonely,
from another valley,
in another hollow.
Another shadow,

another pause.

© 2003

If this old poem has posted without an illustration (and/or with this attached note), it is because I'm just not up to editing it before publishing. I have seven or so entries scheduled to post: two for May; one for June; and two more for September, and then some later.

I hope to be up and visiting everyone soon.

talisman

One-Shoe Magoo
slept under a wooden bridge
I crossed every morning
on the way to school.

Hair the colour of blood
whipped wildly about her head,
and tangled in the rosaries
strung around her neck.

She wore colossal pink roses
on a grey sack,
and she covered her shins
with brown-on-browner argyle socks.

There was stuck on her right foot
an oxblood penny loafer.
And written in bold letters
around its heel,

from instep to side step,
in black magic marker,
was the name:
Magoo.

VFW

Sitting with friends
at a long table cluttered
with bowls of oatmeal
and cold stacks of pancakes,
he holds his coffee mug
with both hands.

And recites the memory
of a cold ditch in Korea,
of hot chinese metal
and smoldering wool,
and the certainty
that he would burst into flames.

Tom

Secrets in his mouth,
crayons in his hand,
2 days from now,
6 years ago.

He fell from the earth
into the world,
through gold in the trees,
and the stars below.

continuity

I wrote a hokey poem a few years ago. It wasn't long after my husband had died. I realized that the reason some of us cling to the idea of life after death is not because we're afraid of dying, but that we can't tolerate the notion that we'll never again see loved ones who've passed before us.

Even now, I hope like hell that my husband's spirit is intact. An entity made of his karma, his memories, his energy, his ki 気 . I want like hell to join him when I die. But the intellect in me is doubtful. The intellect in me realizes that we're not a collection of disparate entities, but that we're all parts of a whole. Something I've called 'pudding' when describing it to anyone who'll listen.

When we dip our spoons into a shared bowl of pudding, we don't see its ingredients, let alone the subatomic particles making them. We see one homogenous blend of creamy and sweet.

But if we were small enough…waaaaay smaller than sugar crystals, and moles of lactose, smaller than even the subatomic particles making their carbon and calcium atoms...there’d be miles and miles, millions of miles of space between even the quarks and neutrinos. They would seem like separate entities. Certainly from that size, we wouldn’t even be able to tell that they were connected in any way.

I often wonder what our universe looks like from the perspective of someone much larger. Are we part of a tree? A dog? A teakettle? Something we can’t even name or fathom? To someone much larger than we, there is no separation between galaxies, let alone continents. And species? Or Plants, Animals, and Minerals? No more so than the creamy goodness dished out in our spoons. These are designations important only to us in our wee, tiny universe. (Did you know that if the earth were as small as even an orange its surface would actually be smoother than that of an orange?)

I'm rambling. I know. I guess I'm considering the fact that even if my husband's spirit isn't sitting here with me right now, it doesn't matter. He is still a part of this world, just as we all are, tree or dog, roach or fermented grapes, dead or alive. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Everything changes, and change is everything.

p.s. When I find the hokey poem, I'm going to add it to this entry. There's parts of the poem I still like, even if the others make me groan.

edited 23jul08 - I have found my hokey poem...at least what must be its latest rewrite, dated april of 2004. And of course, as you can read, it's not a poem at all. It's prose...there's poetry in it...in that it might be regarded as poetic, but it's prose nonetheless:

All My Relations

One early morning I was watching clouds floating across the Missoula valley, drifting apart and reforming, and I thought to myself...that's how it all moves.

Are we ghosts
boxed in eyes and ears
waiting for gods
to cut the tape? Maybe
we're the odd stones
collected and stacked,
till we tumble
back into the path;
or the rain
rushing crimson
through the legs of buffalo,
falling back to the earth
when sparrows weep;
or the spirits who
pass the caterpillar's lips
to whisper into the mouths
of waiting trees;
or the grasses and the deer
who lend us their grace, till we pass it on
to hungry beasts
and shiny beetles.

Like clouds in a small valley,
we touch one way
and then another,
never separated.

Never lost.

...2004 ~~~~

---

Still editing...I have decided to try this in first-person. I have given it a new entry, and its own illustration: here

What's in YOUR navel?

In the middle of the center
of the circle of his wiggle,
was the button of his belly
and the reason for his giggle.

When the tippit of his tickle
of his finger with a squiggle,
touched his tummy full of jelly,
just enough to make it wiggle.

But the jiggle woke a lintle
from the fuzzy of its nestle.
Peeking out, it shook its woolies,
at the keeper of its vessel.

"Have you no consideration
for the nappers in your nichle?
Cut it out, or do it lestle.
Else I'll make your middle itchle!"
...


© catnapping

Head over Heels

Circular Joe took a spin in the round
ice skating rink on the cold side of town.
He zipped, and he whipped,
then he slipped, and he flipped.
And he soared through the air with his up-sides, down!

Leaping Lunatics

Tipsy on moonlight,
we leap from the edge, and kiss
summer on the mouth.

Ghost

Osphelus' Moongoddess

He is in love with the moon
and she with him,
his pale hair
gently reflecting
her quiet light.

In a dark world
she holds him.
His blue eyes
follow her gleaming hands,
as she smoothes away his day.

She bathes him
She kisses him
He sleeps,
shimmering.
lovingly cradled,
in her tender radiance.


© 2003 catnapping

For the Murdered Children of Qana

In a three-story coffin,
hope spills
from black wounds
in the front wall.

And tiny souls slip
through the floorboards, escaping
the rub
of chalk and ash.

Cleaning out the drawers...

Today I made ashes
of his last morning.

I put a flame
to the clothes
I'd bundled in red wool,
and tucked away
in the bottom drawer of his dresser.

In a black drum
I set fire to blood
and betadine,
and cotton jersey, scarred
from hurried scissors.

I added fresh sage and tobacco.
And I stood in the smoke.

Geometry

on one center
the totality of points
equally focused

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/locus

Night

A velvet bowl
settles, and with the stars,
I am captured.

[click on image for full size]

Featuring - Ted Burke

When it comes to the fine arts, like poetry and literature, I have very little in the way of a formal education. But as a reader, I know what I like, and I like reading Ted Burke.

Lessons from the Seventies

It’s love that breaks
against the rocks

and not foam nor water of any kind,
it’s a baptism of irrigated contempt

that makes the horizon
burn in black static p1umes.

Stained cotton from
every beach front window.


We smoked joints
in the guts of the canyons,

the mired trails
to the sea kissed shale.

All the blues from
Chicago knife fights
and gunshot histories
are folklore all the kids destroy
with their breathing.


Even at dinner time,
forks are next to plates whose owners
wonder what’s eating their neighbors
with all the strange phone calls
about what’s going on the beach.


The armies of the night
couldn’t scare up a quarter
of something to decent for all
the beaches America has landed on
in search of someone to talk down to..

© Ted Burke

Escape

In physics we learn
(in the nick of time) that gravity's force
is weak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction

The Properties of Ether

(CH₃ CH₂)₂O – hydrolyzed ethanol
colourless; aromatic;
highly flammable

Aristotle said ether
was inalterable,
having no beginning
and no end.

I thought
it would be safe,
-life in the ether-

You were ribbons of thought,
recipes for rye bread,
formulas for finding
the circumference of a circle.

Your existence
was a theory.
I didn't know you'd bleed.

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