If only I could stop remembering

 

From Here to There, and Back Again

I found an antique door to match
The others upstairs and finally got it hung
In my 121 year old home
With some penache
 
Restoring something to its original
A cause celebre, or chasing after the wind
Says King Solomon. Nonetheless
I’m looking up
 
The neck muscles groan a little
And a headache comes on, but the tangles
of the hammock don’t keep me from
Rocking a while
 
With another cup of coffee
Remembering what responsibility was
When the kids were young, when rocking
Was not for me
 
It would all be capacious, this space of life
Except that the man on the internet cautions
To carry a load heavy enough
To hurt a little
 
Even if you’re taking up a burden
From here to there, and back again
To fog the lense, the omniscient lense
Of your pathos
 
And so, I have hung a door
With precision, drilled the latch strike, refurbished
The dusty innards of the mortise lock to click snug
Shut like 1904
 
If only I could stop remembering
The laughter, going back and forth to Minneapolis
And the resolute smile of the woman
I loved

This is us in the future, taken out to lunch by human kin who we will never know.

Lunch With A Cranium

We wander underneath the shivering limbs
Of České Budějovice, hungry in the belly
Overstepping the pits of an archeological dig
 
Or is it plumbing work, unlicensed
Raising our cousins from the raw soils
in heaps, to poke up from their piles?
 
Unholy holes, everywhere we have roamed
Earth’s pregnant past, in the cities,
Depraved villages, fire-scared caves
 
And burial pits filled with taboos
Since the first seeds were strewn
By subjects of crown or headman
 
Along the church wall, in the shadows
We stoop to inspect an adult, by size
Stained ochre in the darkest way
 
I hold you in my hands, precious being
Gone from the memory of mind
Your cranium as empty as ours of you
 
No doubt you have borne the cold
So we bring you to lunch; you sit beside us
Under a warm coat at the wooden bench
 
We talk about times before the nation state
How you would have enjoyed the knedliky and beer
On a more animated day
 
A shame has come about. I carry you across
Samsonova Kašna to drop you off
With a prayer of soul and bone
 
At church, in your conversant pile
With your kinsmen—the beggars, serfs and wenches
To rest in peace
 
Thanks for joining us for lunch
It’s been so long. Let’s get out more
To convive again
 
 
     Although we did return the cranium safely to its
     exact spot in the ramshackle pile of dirt and bones,
     I regret this adolescent-minded misadventure and
     strongly believe that the ethical mores of any
     community should be respected.

When the phone is finally caged, you are free as pulsing jazz at dusk, with all its tentacles.

 

When The Phone Is Finally Caged


When the phone is finally caged
And you are free as pulsing jazz
At dusk, with all its tentacles

You may then be aware
How the room surrenders to poems
Your eyes widening with each

Each better than the last
In an evening collapse of color
As the cicadas go calm

And birds land in your palm
With kisses from Grandma
Caressing pecks, twenty-three

Years later, fresh with onion
But tonight, in New York City
Your friend who has it all

Speaks of pain meds
And anguish, angustía
In Spanish

In Spanish, they say,
We make the dust
Glow if we can

In the disappearing moments
So thank the gods at dusk
And the poems, their birds and kisses

No emoji can explain your face when the cathedral is burning.

 
 

When the Cathedral is Burning

When St. Raphael’s Cathedral burned, it was a homeless man
Camped among pews with his harmless prayers and fire
He couldn’t save the stone walls, but the glorious steeple
Laid for a decade in a parking lot to be re-imagined
 
Before it too was scrapped, and you wonder
How many days until the sun goes down, how many stones
In your own walls will crumble, or pop to dust
From a poor man’s judgement?

The walls of your house are in no rush to age
You have cleared a place to plant cherry or plum this morning
Shopping for a tree, you get the call, wander the parking lot for reception
The maple leaves have finally turned
 
The reddest leaves to be found--beaming--before she tells you
Saving one after another:  Captivated by color smothered in snow
You loved her; it was clear: Years of evolution ahead, dancing in streams
Sabbatical in Spain. The foothills of Kilimanjaro
 
Furniture is dumped to the dark wet street while green lights yield to yellow
And blinks of red. You will not be told everything, for she is kind
There will be no tree, you tell your friends. Searching for words
Yet no emoji can explain your face when the cathedral is burning

Over The Falls. In Memoriam

Over The Falls

              For Hallie Pope Jackson Vavrus. 1925-2021
 
Once upon a time,
A woman, her daughters and son
The telling of stories, reading aloud
And grace soaring from her lips                                 
 
Once upon a time, in Minneapolis,
A man named George Floyd
The burning buildings, disease
The final verdict
 
And yet, the woman said, “Thank you”
“We should always graciously accept
What we are offered,” she said
The children leaned in
 
Grandkids held hands soft and thin
As nothing they had ever known
No one left her bedside
Unchanged
 
Water from a sponge
Until even that seized
Still, on her lips, thank you
When water wet them
 
Not far from her bed, Minnehaha
She is called. Water waterfall in Anishinaabe
As a man named Longfellow didn’t get it right
But water is forgiving
 
Around thinning, skeletal limestone,
Nothing is concrete; nothing set in stone
Her waters pour abundantly down,
Beyond and gracious
 
Until she seizes up
Her pouring turns to shards
And people gather in awe
At a blue mass of memory
 
A woman named Hallie Vavrus
Has gone too, over the falls
Wetted, loved and grateful
Into the freeze, beyond

An urban cemetery, a mummified squirrel and serene deer near a street that riots.

 

Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery

 
I.
Two deer breathe calm inside gates of iron
Among the headstones, underneath trees
Of an urban cemetery, in Minneapolis
On Lake Street, where sirons, where the riots
 
II.
Nearby, a woman finds a squirrel clutching a branch
Teeth bared, mummified. From shovel to bag
Into another bag, into the alleyway trash
And barely aware, like the deer, we lay under trees
 
III.
We talk of cysts in the uterus
Women’s bodies, hysterectomies
Where to be buried, or buried at all
When the earth is full in the belly
 
IV.
We hear there’s an option to mix your ashes
With the free soil from the city compost
And you are planted with trees
In parks with children and lovers
 
V.
But who wouldn’t want a stone
Not cut and polished, nor your name in seriphs
But a rock thrown skyward in time by a trunk
Holding yourself over the Lake Street calm?
 
VI.
Caught in the woody clutch of an oak
To be forgotten within a generation by the internet
With a legacy hanging weighty over the souls
The deer, and bottles of Thunderbird

Coming back from Mexico.

Coming Home From Mexico

I take a bus from O'hare
Where a fight has erupted
And the driver pleads for understanding
Then everything goes asleep
Without tranquility

Walk through the capital city
Past midnight. Not a soul
Playing the guitarron

I find my car

Where I once lived

The morning after, the kitchen
Without cracked tiles, or coffee
Laying down in the street,
The sunflowers are too heavy
To stand

Everything is sterilized at the Coop
I pour coffee from a carafe with immaculate stickers

While twins in red polka dot dresses
Cover their mouths at the produce

Outside, under green striped umbrellas
Everyone pristine, worked-out
And we are all looking up

As the homeless woman
In the parking lot
Asks for alms
While dragging her leg,
Black as barro negro