WALKING ON THIN ICE

new Lady poem this morning

(new Lady poem this morning)

Memorial Day

We were recovering, too weak
to mow the lawn, and it rained
and it sunned, and half the lawn
was grass, and half the lawn was
clover. I trampled a path through
the clover to plant the sunflower
rootings that came in the mail,
the lavender before it was
too late, holding my tummy tuck
lest I bust my stitches

I found a garter snake
under the decaying fall leaves.
It moved like water to the
faucet coming from our
foundation stones and
slipped into a gap

Snakes do not have hands
but we do – here is the church
here is the steeple, here’s some cave
carved from an ancient river,
hand prints paint souls
like leaves on trees. Lay back
and watch the innate kindling
of the TV in the mind
passenger’s trip

We hold hands on the holiday,
the morning walk

Our dog stops at the telephone
pole at the end of the street,
looking for sweet new blades
of spring green grass

A neighborhood dog barks.
Somewhere out there
there’s agreement

On Audible we learned
birds recognize each others’ calls.
The robin hears the sparrow
the jay mimics the crow

They feel like we feel
It’s going to be OK
The mirror in the garden
says namaste

Memorial Day –
the Grand River –
sedimentary layers
clay limestone shale
dog shit on the bank

It’s fecund
it smells like rusted blood
it smells like coffee

We’ve canoed the river and
on its banks I’ve picked up rocks
to find salamanders

I carry the memory of days there
like a lotus of a transcendental sobriety

I found a morel
in our yard by the compost gate.
It came up ready, nary any pull
ripping noiselessly from the ground

It wilted as I carried it
I brought it just to show it
I turned around to put it back
I could not find out where it
came from

What can I say
but clay tests the hand
and it makes a pot

Last year I found one too,
a morel, and I expect next one
next year

This year’s bees are cleaning
out last year’s hive beyond
the grand pine you can see from
the bridge on Pearl

The tree’s how we know
where our house is. Smith wants
to paint the other side of the
picket fence white so we can see
it from Pearl

In July as you step off the deck
you can smell honey from the oven
of the hive’s hot hatchery.
They beat their wings,
keep it just right

The bees give warning bops
but rarely sting. We are in
the flight path to the field
they dance and waggle about

Last year they went up and up into
the trees, half the hive, I watched
them, a dark cloud up and over the
pine until they looked like
gnats in the robin’s egg sky

I watched until the view
evaporated

This year
regardless of their tolerance
we will check every frame
until we get to the bottom of it
and wipe out the extra queen cups

We keep them –
we are keeping them regardless
of their consensus

Golden and angry
they’ll stay in their nest
and in the winter you can put your ear
to the hive, hear the beating
whir of the lion’s heart, an engine
powered by honey

You know, birds’ eyes have four cones
where we have three. They can see
kingdoms in an ultraviolet canopy

Thoughts are in the trees –
living books, and mycorrhizal fungi
tap out signals from their feet

Every day I thank the Lord
the shape that’s buoyed me
in its volume of ancient
recorded oxygen

Pick up a leaf with the labyrinth
of your fingerprints –
it drains into a palimpsest
the map on your palm,
the rivers on the leaf

~ Lady

latest Lady

Lady’s latest poem

Visceral as a fresh caught cut perch
yearning as the dog looking hours out the window for the car’s return
I love you, I would say to my family
the gulp in my heart tendered between mortar and pestle
like the unexpected swipe of a burnt cigarette on the arm

With some,
we spend more time together in dream
than real life
expansive surprises of rooms
come out of a flap of shuffling cards
like a rabbit out of a hat
We make a cardboard castle
We sit on the patio and watch the backyard pond
the trees as sweet to sight as
fresh washed salad

I know
the knowledge of what the Cuyahoga
has done to its banks over centuries

The accordion wheeze
the new born spring swallowtail
taking its first steps on my patio
we only know where it folds up its
wings to rest because we see
where it’s been

where we are now, where we
have been
Let’s hold it, let’s keep it here

– Lady

polaroid air pulsing forward like liquid thrushings of an ultrasound’s fetus

“. . . polaroid air pulsing forward like liquid thrushings of an ultrasound’s fetus. . .” — from Lady’s pre-dawn word harvest this morning

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The key things I remember about the aftermath of the mid century are the corduroy of my fingerprints sweeping the gritty velvet of dust off Lemon Pledge polished matte walnut finishes. Always more dust to give Grandma something to manage – her dominion less CBS at night – through she watched it. Grandma had the knowhow of her threadbare cotton rags and dessicated cabinet. Lysol for the floor, vinegar on the window.

The sober face of the black and white kitchen clock – abstract mustachioed visage – faithfully ticking its whiskers onward – polaroid air pulsing forward like liquid thrushings of an ultrasound’s fetus – the quantum messiness of the analog pocketed into digital packets of forward progression.

Grandpa’s tobacco hand drank coffee stained depth from a milk glass mug and read The Plain Dealer on a white formica table. His bifocal’s rectangular reflections studied the steady black and white code of newsprint and levied a kingdom of well-considered judgement. Iron steamed condemnation over liars’ crinkly wrinkles and curated truth’s earnest linen.

Liars know better than to posture what they do light of the Waterford bowl of wax fruit, the New Deal and Boy Scouts, the Greatest Generation’s post-war sepia, the plight of the Jews, and our all-seeing God. The end point of the dialectic is obvious to all like the cauterized stamp of Grandpa’s cigarette butt.

The world in all its Dizzy Gillespie gleaminess had gone to bed into the blacks, browns, yellows, oranges and beiges of settled shag. The origami of Jazz from midnight pianos unfolded into the Rorshach bewilderness of a transcendent Klein painting. The balm I’d fallen into on a whim was somber ceiling plaster rosette watching. More dust, evidence of the real, on waxy patina of a striated ribbons of Better Home and Gardens plants, their assigned placements.

– Lady, 2.21.2022

maybe not finished, she sez

Lady’s new poem (maybe not finished she sez):

And this morning I am the uterus supporting a placenta attached to a castle in the ether in which sets the nodding crown consternating jewels of tildes and asterisks and beating itself with willow branches.
I am ground talking about itself. I used to think I was grown but I was ground up into this fecund habitat like a good virgin burger.
I can’t complain for the dog and the cat shoot over the cultivated hills like two minnows or the commentary of passing clouds and Liberty runs through the garden, Queen of Nature. Grandma sheds golden coruscations through the mirror’s plasma like the insight of a sparkling veil. Grandpa’s thunder rumbles in the distance.
The Goddess is in the poison ivy again; she so loves her garden for isn’t it bedecking of her feet on the plush flock of moss, her taut arm curling its oval finger to smell the hibiscus’s hymn? Her nose is Mona Lisa. Her mouth is Uma Thurman. Her partner documents the copious comings and goings of seasonal crops.