The Poetry Marathon

What do you do when you wake and learn

you’re a deer, the tips of your racks

scabbed, your tan hide nothing like

the crow’s sheen? You can’t pinch

your hide and wake — your hooves can’t pinch.

Smells glow in your nose like they

live their own lives. The air is a gray veil

with one small thread you pull to

help you find your way back to your fawn

you left in the woods all alone.

My daughter texted me last night to say the supermoon

stole her breath when she saw it. I wanted to rise

and bear witness too, but I had already trekked to the edge

of slumber, my body a willful slave to bed.

Still, when the moon calls, I obey

and move my legs, pink and meaty as hams,

outside where I crane my neck to see only her glow

growing above the neighbor’s house

that blocks her. I wait for her to rise. She takes

my breath too when I see her round gold face.

I’ve never seen her so gold. She can never dart

in the sky but plods like that old unsinkable submarine

of someone else’s dream. I am a lumbering bear

who won’t sleep until yardsticks break underfoot

on my way to my den. In the morning,

I creep out of my cave into the yard to see

with my red eyes the bright now-white high-hanging moon

among the branches of white pine and cedar.

This morning cup of coffee steams with the sweet pond

of sleep still dripping from me as I stand and praise

the morning and my daughter for this moon.

I did the Half Poetry Marathon two years ago and had a great time! Wrote some “keepers” that made it into my new book. I’m hoping this time to write more poems to complement the new manuscript I’m working on. I’m ready to play and write!

An Oasis

Cool Water played on our living room stereo like a distant

desert breeze while we roughhoused and did acrobatics

with Dad. He lifted us up into the air one at a time, our bellies

pressed into his feet while he lay on the carpet on his back.

We held our arms and legs out stiff as we flew. I wondered

how it would feel to go a whole day without the taste of water,

cool water. My brother and I take turns soaring my dad’s legs

above that dry barren land. I know the album by heart.

It’s one of only four or five we had, and it warned us

there’s a devil not a man who wants to hurt us and a desert

where men in white shirts and khakis crawl in their own sweat

toward the minty promise of water. My father lifts me

out of harm’s way, the cells in our mouths bulky with moisture.

I am seven and am learning how to pencil my wants

in a diary. I didn’t know one day I’d have to learn

how to let go of this man who taught me how to fly.

To Look at Flowers That Are Blue,

and not pink or red, is one of the only ways

to peer into sky’s own eye. To breathe song

into lungs, skip the forecast and the night

show, skip the fear of memory, and why not?

Don’t pet the old man to death

by thinking only of mercy and balm

on the answering machine, and

if you do anyway, think about what the nurse told you

about death: that’s a long song he holds in his mouth.

Sacred Heart 

We wake to the songbirds painting their warbles and trills

on the morning canvas, we listen to their fluted songs

from our bed, or after breakfast when we take our coffee

like a salvation ritual on the deck. You say you’re glad

the chicken hawks have gone away at last, you’d been considering

buying a pellet gun to pick them off one by one, like a kid

with a bb gun shoots bullfrogs at a summer pond. We’ve

never owned a gun, but when I picked up the binoculars that last time

my dad was here to see if it was a squirrel calling from a nearest tree

I saw a chicken hawk close up ripping the chest out of a little brown bird,

and I wanted the hawk dead. The hawks eat the bird’s heart

and chest and lets the head and feathers fall to the ground.

Before that, I thought a heap of feathers on the path

in the wild wooded part of our yard spelled a cat. I tell you

the songbirds’ return feels like a fairy tale, the village mice

have come out of hiding, they’re celebrating the bad wolf’s death.

What I don’t tell you is I’m relieved each morning your body is warm

and you’re breathing. I’m glad you can roll out of bed and head

for the kitchen. I’m glad when I reached for you this morning

I did not touch a cold clay shell of a man. I know how that feels.

I don’t remember my dreams, but I’ll bet I dream of the morning

ten years ago, your chest gripped by thistles robbing your breath,

my 911 call, the six men with heavy gear rushing in minutes later,

carrying you from the top of the split entry stairs where you waited

like a schoolboy to the living room then out the door

to Sacred Heart. You carried my sacred heart to the ER.

I followed dumbly behind you down Grand in the dark

early morning, thinking I might not ever see you again.

Another Breath Poem

First breath takes in spring winds blowing down slopes

of the Rockies over lilies of the valley and lilacs to new me.

My first mingled breath with a brown-haired boy named Darrel

as we stood nervous in a shack with a Black Widow near.

Summer breath mingled with wild clover and mustard,

freshly mowed hay, dank aromas of rich earth in the air.

New breath of yucca blossoms tinged with hot sands

from winds blowing across a desert I did not yet love.

Later, when I breathed in the cloven leaves of creosote

after a rain, my lungs grow fingers to stroke the air’s hair.

New breath now mingles grass and maple leaves and pine

that becomes a pool I want lie in, suspended, and gaze at the sky.

Self-Portrait as a Flip Flop

I’m poised and ready for this confession:

I prefer to be barefoot. In summers, I’m often

searching the house for my sandals, like some do for keys –

I kick them off the second I come to a standstill. That’s why

I am a flip flop. I’m as close to being a barefoot gypsy

dancing circles on the grass around a campfire as can

legally be done in the 48 contiguous states.

I remember being turned away from a night club

in Western Australia because I lacked a back strap. This

from the folk who go barefoot in grocery stores and pharmacies

(where my cousins can be purchased in a variety of colors

and styles for a reasonable price). I don’t want to be separated

from the earth beyond one slim layer of suede or a cushiony

ethylene vinyl acetate yoga mat insole with arch support. Truth is,

I wanted to be dolphin, to feel water cascading off my slick back

the way air slides off us when breaking a wave into air.

I got the short end of that stick and was designated

to be footwear. No worries. I make the most of what comes my way.

Or I make the least, in my case. I want to be the least encumbered

shoe I can be. I provide the largest area of the feet I protect

to be caressed by sun and air, even puddles, if we’re lucky

and get rain. When I was in grade school, we kids learned

a bunch of new songs each year that we sang in a program

for our folks, all lined up in bleachers on the stage. One year

for the grand finale, we sang “Don’t Fence Me In,” and

boy howdy did all seventy of us kids belt that one out

from the soles of our feet straight out through our lungs.

That’s me. I can’t stand to be fenced in. I let my dogs

be as close to unshod as can be and still technically be “shoes.”

Ruminations on Breath

Breath is a shoe lined with moleskin

holding my foot in its soft hand.

Breath carries liquid crystals to my blood

filling my head with full spectrum light.

Breath wants to be a fighting beta from the pet store

with more colors than any one eye can contain.

Breath dreams of a cabin in the woods filled with the

casings of pine smoke and musty old cots.

Breath wants to be held like a baby cocooned

in flannel blankets and carried through the snow.

Breath thirsts for a muddled mojito

to wear with pink fuzzy house slippers.

Breath grows into a sequined jazz singer

in a smoky nightclub who wants all eyes on her.

Breath has a packed suitcase by the front door

ready to blow out of here first chance she gets.

Misfits

          Researchers Examining Medieval Skeletons Find Really Bad Bunions

          –NPR, June 11, 2021

I look to my sandals basket and choose a pair to wear.

It’s summer, my feet won’t know socks or shoes until fall.

I want my feet to be like coyotes – free and roaming fields

colored by wildflower crayons. That’s why I won’t

buy shoes unless they feel like slippers on my feet.

A librarian at the college where I work confessed to me

her fetish for footwear. She loves their stylish looks,

though she never goes barefoot anymore because her feet

are messed up wearing these senseless shoes. That’s

what we can call them, yes? The flipside of “sensible shoes”

that support and don’t harm? Earlier this month, NPR

reported that researchers examined 700-year-old skeletons

to discover gross degeneration of the bones

in their feet – painful bunions they got from wearing

the popular pointy shoes in medieval Britain. Like a foot

can fit properly into a baguette. Come on, people —

wise up! Bones repeatedly abused turn into bruised knobs, some

turn gangrene, damaged from the pressure and scrapes. I want

my pups to thrive like coyotes and bears roaming in fields.