Uno
I’m about as proud as a husband can be about the well deserved and hard-earned kudos my wife has been getting of late for a wonderful book she’s recently published about a long-time banking family in Iowa. Now, before you roll your eyes, know this: more human drama is contained between the covers of this book (beautifully laid out and illustrated, I might add, by a wonderful local artist and friend of ours by the name of Shannon) than you’re likely to find in your library’s Mystery and Suspense Section: bank robberies; meetings with such famous personages as Daniel Boone, Carl Sandburg and most of the 20th century’s U.S. presidents; tense encounters with Indians; Civil War battles with narrow escapes; bank heists; family tragedy and triumph; anguishing financial struggles that pitted farmers against bankers. There’s lots of humor, too, including a great anecdote about a traveling circus. And that’s just the first couple chapters.
They say that behind every great man stands a great woman. As the husband of a truly brilliant and successful wife, I can’t say that the reverse is true. But I can say this: I’m sure glad Melinda picked me to be her running mate.
Dos
It rained yesterday. No. It didn’t just rain. The skies wrung every last drop of moisture from the clouds until water flooded the streets, sweeping into the gaping storm drains torrents of leaves, trash and one or two small children. OK, I made that last bit up. But basically it started raining in the morning and continued, unabated, until well into the evening.
It rained in some pretty peculiar places, too, or so I learned this morning. Like, in my friend Blaze’s house – through light fixtures, door frames, ceiling vents. Along the walls. Down into the basement.
Well, you might say, astute reader that you are: Clearly this fella needs to get a new roof. And you would be correct. Which is precisely what Blaze was in the midst of doing when the heavens decided to unleash a few hundred thousand gallons of rain. The problem is, the roofing crew had left the job unfinished yesterday afternoon before calling it a day. They’d taken off half the old shingles and laid down fresh tarpaper, but that was it. I guess the rain scared them off. Got in their ears, too, and soaked their brains. Because they didn’t bother to put up tarp before leaving.
So when Blaze, his wife and their little boy arrived home at the end of the day, ready to fix some dinner, relax, maybe watch a little TV, they noticed water dripping in surprising places. Then in more places. Then, pretty much throughout the house. Fortunately, after quickly deploying buckets and garbage cans, they protected their furniture. But the big concern now is mold, so men with large fans are arriving today to try to air-dry the house. And the roofing company promises it’ll cover all repair costs.
Still, I gotta give Blaze credit for not going postal. Probably doesn’t help matters that it’s raining again this morning.
Tres
Finally got to yank the Holter heart monitor electrodes off my chest this morning. And was it really necessary for them to tape over my chest hairs? I’ll drop off the monitor later today and hear back from the doctor a week or two from now. Unless, the technician who hooked me up said, they find something really bad.
I hate honesty.
Quatro
Got another rejection today for some poems I submitted to an online poetry e-zine. Second rejection from them in a row. Yeah, it sucks. On the other hand, I probably don’t put in the time it would require to elevate the kind of writing I do to truly publishable quality. My ability to put together coherent sentences has gotten me by many, many times, especially in college. Got me through a newspaper career and is now buttering my bread as I write press releases for a living. But writing as art? Seems to be another animal altogether. And I’m learning, in painful, want-to-crawl-under-the-bed-and-hide kinds of ways, that coherent sentences alone do not constitute art – no matter how flowery the language.
So, as a kind of poultice on my struggling artist’s soul, I’m going to post a couple of my poems here. Publish them my own damn self. At least until I get up the nerve to send another batch of my babies off to the slaughter.
------
ENTOMOLOGY
Afternoon, and the insects
Seem drunk on summer’s
Distillation:
Ladybugs shell the
Western wall. Box elders
Braille the golden mailbox.
A moth, sulfur-winged and
Freckled, careens with
Ornithoptic grace into the
Window.
We, too, grow uneasy at
Night’s prevail. Wrapped
In ribbons and revelry we pray
For a child against a chill that catches
Our breath and turns our words
Against us.
In the woods we gathered
Pine cones, caressed rough scales where
Fetal forests dream of mountaintops, and
Brought them home in cradled arms
With winter on our tongues.
On the gray counter by the sink they began
To bleed black beetles that
Sizzled to the shadows. We seized them
And threw them out onto the porch, shuddering
At their dry scatter.
Even the moth has dusted itself off and
Rises into the quivering air and by sharp
Degrees resumes its travels south along a
Thousand fresh trajectories.
UNDONE
The cold has come too early again, creeping
Like clematis along earth’s tilted axis, filing
The edges of days down to copper.
How can we help, we ask the neighbor whose
Wife has left to find herself. My wife places her
Palm against his shoulder and
He leans into it, like falling, like release.
Say nothing to the children, the wife whispers
Before driving away in her car, waving;
We want this to be a positive change.
In their yard by the creek winter has already
Begun putting down roots. On the
Limb of a tree a crow scowls
Like heavy fruit grown too ripe to eat.
STAINED GLASS, CIRCA 1967
Lightning was best though headlights would do,
Illumination rising like a fever—sill skyward—
The seeded glass bursting into glossy blooms of
Daffodil, pomegranate and plum.
Sometimes my mother would wake to find my
Bed empty, wander up to the loft and
Lie silent beside me on the narrow couch,
Her hair like feathers against my cheek.
I might have disappeared then, floated
To the ceiling and through the angular
Smear of vermillion there. But her presence
Held me fast to her, tethered:
Her steady breath. The lift and settle of her chest
Like a pink shell moving through currents at high tide.
Her heat, her scent--cigarettes and cold cream. And
My knowledge, even then, that this could never last.
VISITATION
Outside the rooftops
Have dropped their white
Skirts to the gutter, exposed
Their rough skin to the pearl sky.
All that moderates this immodesty
Is a gray bramble of arteries and
Soft swaying synapses that
Now and then spark blue
Smoke and cardinal and
Cold, cold, cold.
It is the last morning.
The furnace heaves its
Heat and dry lightning, and still the chill
Presses up through foundation and floor,
Blossoming like an orchid in flesh and
Flexed bone –
It is a familiar ache. Even the
Water in the walls groans
At the thought of more winter,
Elbowing thin sleeves as
It seeks its own best path.
Above the stove a boy in a sailor
Suit leans in to kiss an inclined
Head. The girl’s hands are tucked
Deep into gloves big
And white as cats. They sit on a
Swing just like the one outside
The window and there as
Here the wind has bleached the
Landscape, piled dune upon dune along
The inland shore and propped up
The golden dead. At
Such a moment anything
Seems possible; even resurrection.
In the living room where the
Girls sleep and now are beginning to
Shed sighs and dreams like lanugo
My mother sits in the
Thinning darkness and watches
Over them and drinks her coffee
Practicing goodbye.
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