StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XLVIII

The turkey arrives FEDEX from Kansas,
An American Bronze like the forefathers ate,
As close to a wild bird as free range can provide,
A reclamation project with roots in our colonial heritage.

Two days before Thanksgiving, we are already three days in
Preparing the food and the menu that will celebrate
Our historic democracy:  wild rice, sweet potatoes,
Irish mashed and cabbage, stuffing, pumpkin pie,
Rich gravy with fresh mushroom and the giblets.

Our ancestors have sat on both sides of the table,
Indian and pilgrim, slave and freeman,
Bomb throwing revolutionaries who bled for our freedom,
Until now, there is only us,
One union, one nation, one country,
At last, our America.

Some may shed tears for all their lost girlhoods,
A mythical girly childhood spent skipping rope and braiding hair,
Holiday dinners preparing family favorites
And helping to clean up in the kitchen afterwards;
A life all gone and never was they mourn and hold guilty
For every slight and sorrow they may ever have suffered.

My girlhood was fine, the best it could be,
And certainly mine; and if I could change only one thing,
I would prefer not to have ever gotten polio;
If I had a second chance, I would want my older brother to survive,
Sparing my parents the pain that haunted their lives
When he died before their eyes in infancy.

But that was not to be, the fates made other choices,
And decades later, I am here,
A family raised, a world to be conquered,
A poet, a wife, a woman of some talents,
With many years ahead of me
And a past that is only distant history,
As it should be.

Have you ever seen a dog that don't hunt
Or a cowboy without his shitkickers on?
Sometimes the President of the United States is like that,
Just another lost guy who finds himself in over his head
With the only instructions on how to get himself home
Written in a language he hasn't a clue to ever understanding.

It's our fault, you know, we're the ones who put him there
Based on little more than that trusting, confident smile,
A thousand dollar blue suit with a carefully muted red tie,
And the ability to give the same repetitive stump speech
A thousand times or more without ever once rolling his eyes.

The spectre of Jimmy Carter haunts the White House,
Sits in the Rose Garden building sand castles beneath the swings;
The possibility of complete failure lurks in every corner,
Waiting beneath the executive desk atop the great seal
To swallow up any hope of lasting presidential success.

The blood of thousands of brave Americans stains the floor,
Passed succession to sucession, administration to adminstration,
With few presidents willing to admit culpability or accept responsibility
For their own indecisions, their inactions and personal indiscretions:
Everything is the next election, the next sound bite and photo op,
The grandeur of their Library or where they might rank in history.

In the old west, the one of history not Hollywood,
I would not be a gun man -- I'm obviously no Jane Canary,
Even if if my reflexes were still lightning quick.
I've alwasy been the wife who stands behind her man,
Henry rifle in my hand, a part of the pioneer stock
That escaped the claustrophia of the eastern coast
And settled this westering land, farm by farm, family by family,
Each grave the price we were willing to pay
To sit here comfortably reading poetry, listening to our iPods
As X-Box plays Modern Warfare 2 inside the wire in Baghdad.

Without words, without breath,
I struggle and die,
A slow, self-tormenting death
Punctuated by straight to cable movies,
Midnight to early morning.

I seem to be do-looping, wake,
Go to work, stop, try to sleep coughing:
An endless treadmill on the way
To the next CT scan and bloodwork
On to the new year evermore.

Where'd ya go, baby,
Why'd ya leave?
Was it something we said,
Was it something we did?
One moment you were here,
The next one, you were gone;
An icy, distant lover you left us
To wander this earth alone.

Where are you? 
   What have we done?

On the television there is a golden ring
That the appraiser says comes from the time of Henry the Fifth
-- Saint Crispin's Day and all of that --
A heavy ring, a large dark stone, fully baptized with British blood
That saw the rise of Shakespeare and the fall of Catholicism,
The defeat of The Armada, Napolean and the Nazis,
Existing through time until now it is just another antique
Waiting to be appraised along side the bust of Jenny Lind.

Shrouded in fog,
  Ten message drifting in,
Thanksgiving starts slowly,
  The oven filled
     With low cooking turkey.

Come Friday,
  Mothers and fathers will rise,
Beating the gray sun alive,
  To race their fellow Americans
      For the best and the cheapest,
Winner take all, nothing less will suffice.

The day before, however,
  We gather at our tables,
 Parents, grandparents,
   Aunts, Uncles and Children,
To give thanks for our lives,
   The past year,
       The new morning before us,
The opportunity to stand
   On our own two feet
       And succeed once and for all
          At last.

Asteroid, climate, and nuclear war,
Plague, death stars, and the sun going nova;
These are the methods most likely to eliminate
The small blue dot on which we live.
The planet itself will most likely survive
Scrubbed clean of its carbon infestations;
But us? We're gonna go
One way or t'other.

The world moves much too slowly,
A precession of stars to and from the pole
Measured in lifetimes rather than the months and days
That slip from our new years one after another.

In the scheme of things, and there is always
A scheme or two lurking behind the obvious,
We quickbread across a universe filled with sushimi
And agéd Kobe hung millennia before the forest sketched us
--Without time, the answers escape our genius.

I breath full the galactic air, a child of star and planet
Who conjures poems from an ancient framework
Glimpse poorly from her corners,
A woman silhouetted by the still gray sky,
Wandering through the backstreets of creation.