The Poetry Marathon

This is where he hit me with
a Sunday School slate,
punishment for playing a hot game
of Tic-Tac-Toe on the back of a pew
with a pocket knife. I was winning.

These freckles came
from years of forced labor
in his gardens, upper and lower.
Down below, we grew tomatoes, beans, onions.
Above, bushels of potatoes, corn, and melons.

I’m glad you can’t see inside
this face, where it is wired together,
after it cracked from the force of a blow,
in 1974. You don’t want to know.

Equal pay for women NOW
and full reproductive rights.

We need a Congress that won’t fight
President Obama about every damn thing.

We need doctors and dentists who can
treat people for what ails them.

Men who are not afraid to cry
and share power.

Kids who have never been hit,
or cursed, or lied to.

We need light in darkness
and a sober use of weapons.

A life in boxes and crates: 30 years.
Thirty years of research in archives
and no thought of giving it away.
Libraries say they’ll take good care
and grant access any time, within
reason, 9 to 4, five days a week.
What about midnight on Christmas Eve,
when I need to read the diary notes
of Rose Wilder Lane or Elizabeth Bishop,
Edna St. Vincent Millay or Mrs. Lindbergh?
Most people relocate furniture, photos, appliances,
and clothes. Here is scholarly detritus enough to
fill a garage, a walk-in closet, and then some.
Dividing myself between four abodes – an apartment,
two houses, and a condo – none of them mine, I grow
unsettled and wistful to visit my things.
My books, especially, I miss with great longing,
although a well-stocked Kindle helps. But some
will never be scanned, digitalized, online at my
command. These are the books I swear to protect.
And my own diaries and manuscripts – they will not
be carted off to the bowels of an institution. For as
long as I can, I will keep them with me, and safe.

You stopped at every corner,
off leash, and waited for a
voice command to cross the street.
Once, you taught a novice named
Kali to do the same, in only five days
of walking together.

Always tolerant of cats, you had
no patience for men who meant me ill.
Once, you reared up like your namesake,
Ursa Minor, Little Bear, only you were
Big Bear by then, and fearsome as a grizzly.

I live and breathe today because of you,
long gone to ashes on the bookcase.
I look at your urn and salute,
and yearn for the feel of your fur again. Shalom.

Adobe, pitched roof, Ranchos de Taos.
Sage and hollyhocks, hummingbirds galore.
At night you could hear pueblo drums,
sometimes, and imagine the dancing.
A sculptor had built the house, and her
daughter did pottery and textiles. The whole place
was a work of art, rented out as a studio through
Poets & Writers. Ordinary enough from the outside,
the magpies used it as their temple, as if they knew:
on the inside it soared, and became a sacrament. If you
couldn’t write there, you couldn’t write anywhere.

Kind sir: I feel as if I know you, having
met your boy Kim, and your daughters
Kit and Barbara. I missed Bret, sad to say.
I know you missed him, too, with that feeling
of grief, as you put it, like snow in Wyoming.

Your Dorothy cheered me more than I could ever
tell you, but I know you could close your eyes
and see her smile. Helen, too, gave Kim such
encouragement to go on, without you and Bret.

Ah, what a group, what a tribe. And your poems,
so familiar to me now, but always fresh. I lean forward,
straining to hear what the river says, no matter how
often I read, “Sometime when the river is ice, ask me.”

Your elephants holding tails, your purification of the
language, the call you made to Kansas, years after
your folks were dead. Kim gives me your jacket
to wear, to cut the chill of Colorado Springs at 3 am.

We walk and talk about you, so recently dead, the
glass of milk you were drinking when the heart attack
hit. It might still be sitting on the counter, except there
was no time for that. You let it go. You let it all go

I am Persona Non Grata,
seeing as how I don’t really exist,
except in the pages of your novel
trilogy, twenty years in the making,
twenty five if you are honest.

Why so long keeping me dead
in order to bring me to life?
Are you afraid people will think
I’m you, and your cover will be blown?
It is something to think about, you know.

If I survive, and you don’t, it will be like
something out of Beckett, and you’ll be pissed
at least for a little while, until you recall
you all die anyway, mere mortals on the earth,
while my life is eternal, if you ever dig me up.

My mother’s clothes
always smelled of yeast and flour,
cinnamon sugar and vanilla.
For years I thought her apron
was sewn onto her dress.
She never took it off, except on
Sundays, when church was mandatory.
Daddy, her husband, had been ordained
although he secretly drank in the woods
and molested her daughters, the neighbors’
daughters, too, if he could lure them to revival.

Like Steinbeck’s Casy, always fingering his buttons,
most preachers can’t be trusted with daughters.
I can see mama donning her apron dress, returning
to the oil cloth table, the rolling pin, the gas oven
that might explode in all our faces,
if we ever told.

Staple of the Cherokee, one of three
sisters, along with beans and squash.
Corn is all you need
for tacos, for liquor, for punch lines,
syrup and grits.
As corny as it gets,
you can’t keep it down on the farm.
Eat it in Paris, in Peoria, next week
in Kearney, Nebraska. Corn on the
cob, corn dog, muffin, chowder.

If you don’t watch out, corns on
your toes, from all those kernels
up your nose.

We called it Joe Pond
for the neighbor who owned it.
Never laid eyes on him
but his pond was full of bass,
carp, and catfish big as Siamese.

I have photos of three generations –
mama, little brother, his little girl –
each perched on the edge of nowhere,
disappearing, thrown back into the universe.