StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XLV

Today's seventeen year girl
Was my grandmother's two year
Married woman at the Fin de siècle;
The modern world encourages,
If not demands, our men and women
Remain disengaged and carefree
Well into their middle thirties;
In any other century but this,
They would be substantial members
Of society or be dead by then.

Life is not a movie
That ends in two hours ten;
It's not even a series
Of 3-D sequels, but more like
A month long film festival
With only a single eggress that
Prevents you from re-entering
To see another flick.

You've only one chance
To use your ticket,
And once you lose it,
You're gone
Like a dull cheap trailer
Last seen while everyone
Was waiting for the feature
To begin.

The door opened, the daylight fell,
The sun obscurred by clouds,
The ocean air, the seabirds cry,
Time, once stopped, rolls on;
A ship bellows along the gate,
The oven releases warm sour dough,
Fresh pawns boil, fresh pound bagged,
Wine, hard cheese in Sausilito.

We talk, we speak,
We ramble on endlessly,
Writing thousand page novels
And filling the pipes with a
Many headed multitude of talk shows;

From noun to verb we live noisy lives
Salted with adjectives and adverbs:
Man is an animal who constructs deep grammar,
Growing silent only in the moments before death
When we are trapped in the dark quiet of our souls.

We are flowers caught in a lingering drought,
Shriveling  into inconsequence,
Reduced to arguing about our former beauty
And which of us once were more pleasantly scented
When we all were young and blissfully ignorant
Of how hard this all could be.

I have no minature of my mother in my purse,
She eschewed all images as she aged;
A portrait of her in her wedding dress
Sat on the left side of her vanity,
A headshot of my father in World War officer
Stood equidistant on the right;
Photographs of my infant older brother,
Dead before his first birthday, lined one wall;
All her memories are now left in mine
Until I too become a half-forgotten image
Lingering in some aging collective
Of neurons and synapse.

Seven Fifteen, the sun's not risen
And a sound of wind turbines
Breaking down the would be silence,
Serenading the not yet morning
With the perpetual whine of progress,
Solitude made impractical by the loud,
Pristine demands of green technology:
Birds, fish, be damned as long as we
Feel better about using a technology
That is cleanly renewable if we don't consider
The loud ugly damage to the plains and oceans
And rolling hills of the planet that gave us birth;
Perhaps we should think about asking the remains
Of the great buffalo herds what they might think
Of our energy deficit imperfect turbines
Before this whole thing races out of hand again.

Sirius and Orion, the Sisters and the Dipper,
Separated from each other in the sky
By our galaxy The Milky Way,
Like we are separate from them,
Like we will be separated from each other
When death finally comes
To bump us from our place on the playbill.

The first time ever I tasted you,
I thought you'd eaten too much garlic,
And the smell of your sweat near o'erpowered me,
But I went on because I wanted you,
And I went on until we were done.

The last time I talked to my father,
The morning before the afternoon he died,
I told him he was better than he let himself be,
He didn't need to drink until he was drunk everyday;
I told him I loved him and wanted my children
To grow up knowing their grandfather
And not his shadow who staggered through his days
On cigarettes, cheap wine, and tranquilizers;
Then I took my toddler daughter to see a college friend
And he returned to his ham set in the garage
To have another drink and die in his chair before I returned,
Never having finished our conversation or having a chance
To tell him who his daughter was. The last time I saw my father,
I closed his eyes and kissed his forehead as he lay
On the cold cement beside his chair: his body still warm
But my father was no longer there.