Deserted Tuesday
Posted on April 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Ostensible and apparent, abandonment leaps,
spreads into the front wheel
– clips my easy-pedaled haste,
glimpsing a shine in the driveway
of the commonplace.
Before I torment home,
the words are formed,
but float away unspoken, understood.
A tour of momentum is about the words
formed and said –
ineptness of speech
in a vortex of foreboding.
A borderline brain
plagued by rogue thoughts
staggers, swimming,
left down to go.
How plaintive of you to say so!
Dreaded desertion thrives on the hopeless,
the hapless, surged in closeness,
ebbed by paralytic fear:
Don’t leave me all alone –
lonely –
abraded by a thick-cabled sweater
of unhappiness,
reasons in every strand.
Didn’t that only just happen?
The intention is to nod yes,
before the fibers of regret
scratch your neck
in a quick move to respond.
Don’t forget all of us, little one.
Did you think we would?
Shake no –
with threaded indifference.
No, we haven’t forgotten,
sighed and enslaved,
a hopeless quell of paled joy
before the point is taken.
Stumbled laughter is what we knew
all along, its insurgent instability,
a cradled countenance
countered by lability
and uninvolved uniformity.
Somewhat suppressed
by a jumping escalator urge
is this morning of misty, prolific
supernatural thinking –
unenchanted dewy windows,
crisp with opaque cold,
following a gaggle of comically unknown strangers,
otherwise cohorts,
slap-on-the-back old friends –
Let’s take a walk and remember
how we once were,
snapped back by the rank relief
of no one having known us at all –
leafier pavements
than where we’re from
the unspoken reason.
Our toughness
comes from close death,
and waking up groggy, sticky-eyed, trying to remember.
Yawning at the misplaced grief
of what can no longer be fathomed
or conceived,
but was once known
with ready swiftness –
what once bounded off sassy tongues,
uncontained –
are rearranged thoughts of what seemed only a minute or two ago,
urging us to say:
Didn’t that only just happen?
Occurring on a flint
of hazy momentum,
only barely noticed before slinking unforeseen and underhandedly away.
Now I know, and now I remember,
how I could know again.
The words this time are formed,
but unsaid,
in a borderline vortex
of those unimportant split seconds,
which all fly away
just as we realize we must
have them back, each and every one,
to do over –
right, this time.
Some mourn those losses
sight unseen –
even when the sap is fresh,
and still smells like a spring morning.
We are ourselves already dead and buried,
wistfully tearing up at the memories
of what hasn’t even happened yet.
Didn’t that only just happen?
Or did it never happen at all?
It’s a muddled remembrance of abandoned inception.
It happened as it happens –
the way we recall it –
impossibly abandoned,
wryly awry and unbounded,
clarified only by thick air
reflected on recently parked cars,
engines turned off but grunting and still searing with heat.
Instead, I pedal home, panic-driven
to catch them in the azaleas,
knee-deep in weeds
and dogwood twigs –
panting with the recognition
they were here all the while,
once again meditatively mourning future loss in every single moment,
uselessly unexpressed.
It only just happened.
To a Noble Mind O’erthrown
Posted on April 2, 2014 Leave a Comment
You must have been confused
again,
just south of Glenwood,
waving to me last night
from Westinghouse
with its windowless maws.
You rose from parkway pangs
and underground radioactive molybdenum,
spewing yourself
-fluorescent and faded-
before broken remnants of time beneath exit 148.
I know it was you.
I caught you as you glinted
off the dull powder blue Volvo
rolling there in the right lane.
Ground with wheel-well grease
in the muted spring twilight
-windows closed-
I could smell it, and I knew it was you –
all oil and paper
and ink and sawdust
and sadness.
The price was right at 11 a.m.,
so you shuffled past the kitchen chair, dragged it
with your still stubbed toe,
thinking
Who is that dog staring at me?
He is a ghost now, too.
Outside remained the blizzard,
while inside the transistor crackled,
limply hanging from the headboard,
crusted ear bud curled
in the half-open drawer
next to brittle sticks of Juicy Fruit,
orphan keys,
grimy saved half dollars,
and under the ceiling light,
hot with being left on all day.
Is that my dog?
Where did he come from?
Never mind.
A cookie waits
under the Lucite pie plate top.
Maybe I just had one.
Either way,
shrug,
and have another.
Shock
Posted on March 31, 2014 Leave a Comment
Fog-lit halos ignite from darkness,
astonished by persistence,
admonished by perseverance.
Stun and sun are hand in hand
in bewilderment,
only half aware of perfunctory alarm.
No surprise,
no shock advised.
In the past are feet up recollections
of diet Cokes fizzing
next to ACLS manuals,
heads up, 5 Hs and Ts,
lingering rescue breaths
and the forceless chest compressions
of the unlearned,
bagging with one hand,
bitching to be let go before lunch is over,
and the cafeteria closes.
There is no crash cart here.
There is a mote-covered
pulse oximeter
and a weak battery
at the bottom of the box of 4 by 4s,
long unneeded and unheeded
in complacency.
All was always well.
Other people’s children arrest,
their backs evolving into dusky countries
of deoxygenated flesh,
to stiffen and gray
before your slumbered eyes.
Not mine.
Frenzied searching
for the Brailled, burnt finger relief
of the coldest surface
is how we stutter forward
forever, now.
Oh please, lungs, don’t deflate-
Oh please, heart, beat-
I can rescue you;
I carry these cards
attesting to such empty promises,
meaningless alleged savior.
You think you’re ready
for anything to arise
in unworriedly blissful daily routines,
never to be interrupted by fate;
controlled by knowledge
and qualifications
and certifications
of skill.
When the moment arrives, though,
there is nothing for you to do.
It is too late for expertise,
proficient ministrations of care.
Now I lay me down to sleep.
It was always out of my hands,
I pray and pray.
The Ride to Ithaca
Posted on March 28, 2014 Leave a Comment
Music box plays
Close to You;
you still hear it on the last tick-
the one where you wait,
and then one last note
jumps out,
leaves the end
hovering,
finished only in your head.
With copious notes
carried around,
scribbled minutiae-
nonsense, really-
Nero fiddling
while Rome burns,
I’m reminded how the
Empire State Building
is designed like a pencil,
and the exact number of licks
required to get to the center
of a Tootsie Roll pop
is billions and billions and billions.
It is the destiny of a dreamer
or Indiana Jones,
to commit such bits of trivia,
important to no one.
In the car on the way,
half asleep in the passenger seat-
always that last bit of sullied snow
hugging the median,
and dim gray skies
brightening to the east,
where home is-
the air is tinted greenish
by all those trees.
They always wanted to jump-
they always did-
because those gorges invited them,
and so I figured one day you would,
too.
Tralfamadorians and non-linear time
so it goes
with a sugar rush of Skittles.
If you said was it enough?
one more time-
even if you could say it-
I’m pretty sure he would have jumped.
Why the hell not.
Hudson Terrace
Posted on March 27, 2014 2 Comments
Meanwhile-
just across the river-
contemplated, anticipated
is always how the folly rings-
abounding, resurrected
and in venturesome darkness.
There is peculiarity
in the unbounded rhythm
so flayed and flawed in its own fragility,
rounding the turn
peeking out from behind the building-
glinted, blazed in sunlight bridge-
adorned as it jumps up each morning from beneath,
constant and deliberate
in its steady hang,
unlike my merry-go-round of plights-
solidified and dendritic-
every new connection
some devil in the details
of vulnerable paranoia.
Just another nerved dose of change
with distempered dissonance
humming.
You hear it
against a gummy smile
of despised bottle-red,
at someone else’s insistence.
Be yourself already.
But it can’t be done.
Casually abided with a heavy sigh,
disparately lovely
in knowing the truth of it,
confronted by the ordinary
deliberate hardness-
halfway under the bridge
is as far as I can go.
Those two massive magnets
repel facing alikeness with aplomb;
antithesis with rejection-
not new,
and nothing bodes unusual
in this way.
All is different and the same-
together the unchanged meets
just as before
with its purpose eroding
diminished confidence
into a purgatory of magical thinking
emerged as absolution
blatantly worn with garish flip-flops,
still warm to the sandy imprints
of glistening toes, now mummified
in bleached blue-white socks
and heavy signs of dejection.
It doesn’t chip away at me-
what is said-
brutal honesty can’t undermine me anymore.
Tin Ceiling
Posted on March 27, 2014 Leave a Comment
I am no storyteller –
yet I tell myself this story
endlessly.
The lights in the evening windows
are truths
gloaming
and tell again of a place,
where underneath the geometry of a tin ceiling
– before over-painting and time
muted its sharp lines –
the smallest is there,
a composite of a coming supernova,
a minute solar flare twisting inside,
waiting
for the right time to show itself.
Even if entirely too much time
was wasted
on the no sense
the nonsense
of unimportance –
when I watch the charcoal smudge of buildings –
outlined in sunlight
outlined in fog
outlined in the grime
of life-
and the yellow-tinged weeds
where the burnt house once stood,
I know it is there,
underneath the tin ceiling.
So the story is never forgotten.
I Used to Be a Special Needs Mommy
Posted on March 26, 2014 Leave a Comment
One of the smartest people I know – now a judge, but first a mother – once told me that you’re only as happy as your least happy child. She told me this when I myself was a new mother of less than a few months, waist high in dirty diapers, developmentally-appropriate crib toys, empty vats of Nutramigen and Mylicon – and one screaming, colicky infant who wouldn’t look at me. I only vaguely grasped her point – possibly because I was pathologically sleep-deprived, but more likely because I was new at mothering. Her children were at that time in their teens, seemingly independent and self-sufficient, and she was far from frazzled. In short, they had it together.
I did not have it together.
I was miserable because my kid was miserable. And while I couldn’t really figure out why he was miserable, I figured it was because I was already a failure as a mother.
Why wouldn’t he stop crying? Why wouldn’t he sleep? Why wouldn’t he laugh? Why didn’t he look like the doughy, cooing Gerber commercial infants? What was wrong with us?
Nothing was wrong with us. Well, let me rephrase that. My infant son was brain damaged which, although certainly not ideal for him, was neither his fault nor my fault, and certainly not wrong. Just reality. What was wrong was that no doctor wanted to commit to telling me this outright, and instead offered me an endless runaround of false hopes, red herrings, rabbit holes to jump into and, worst of all, unrealistic expectations.
We didn’t have to be as miserable as we were.
I wasn’t a young mother. I was 30 years old. I was a college-educated registered nurse. I wanted to know the truth. The truth would have made a lot more sense than a whole lot of gobbledygook and reading between the lines which prevailed in our lives; that is, until I finally took control of how the information we actually did receive was processed and put to use. More importantly, though, the truth would have better served my son had it been imparted much sooner.
He would have been happier, I’m sure, having a mother well-equipped to saddle up and ride confidently into the rocky, maze-like corral of special needs parenting.
Unlike the square and rectangle, every special needs mother is a mother and vice versa. Every mother has special needs parenting potential. If you’re a good mommy, you adapt. Even with my so-called “normally-developing” child, there are moments my special needs experiences have proven invaluable in guiding my parenting. This is why I am now so emphatic in my belief that early and accurate information, appropriate tools to adapt, and the support to get things accomplished for your children are essentials. In the long run, it saves so much time, wasted energy and effort, and can only benefit your child immensely.
Today, over thirteen years later, I look at some of the mothers just out of the gate into special needs mothering – of mothering, in general – and wonder if they will have to reinvent the wheel like I did so often. I hope not. But I bet they will. Because many of the other special needs parents are too overwhelmed, too mired in their own children’s complicated journeys, and frankly too exhausted to lead the way. The internet has certainly helped bridge that gap, for sure. But I know there are still isolated parents out there, blaming themselves, not knowing where to turn, and feeling inadequate. My mommy sense tells me this.
Heartbreakingly, my son died. After that immense loss, I began to half-jokingly (because that’s my way of coping) say, “Hey, I used to be a special needs mommy.” Although I am still blessed with another son whom I adore, admire, and love beyond all words, I am still plagued by many of those same feelings I described earlier. I’m still only as happy as my least happy child – who isn’t here anymore. And so, deep down, I continue to imagine there must be something wrong with us.
What I’ve learned only recently to do is turn it around. Instead, I say to myself he must be overjoyed in heaven, with God, filled with bliss and love, and looking over us – yes, missing us – but so elated to walk, jump, dance, play, and speak that he is, in the truest sense, happy. If I can only be as happy as that “least” happy of children, things aren’t so bad, are they? All special needs parents – given the right tools – can raise the happiest of children, whatever the circumstances.
Yes, I used to be a special needs mommy. And I hope I still am.
Factory of the Elite
Posted on March 25, 2014 Leave a Comment
Fatal lip gloss girls pucker
self-conscious memories
in a deep twisted taste
of twinkling blush.
Sinking that tooth in my bottom lip,
fighting those tears of
exhausting expectations
harbored for mere mortals
like myself,
in the hollow trench
sloshes astringent acceptance
of standards inhumanely high
-too high indeed-
even unattainable,
for the awkward and ill at ease,
those unable to allow
a deserving drop
of off-handed affection
to descend like oil in water –
not for one second
to surrender haughtiness
and prove human –
well, maybe for one second.
Glittered glaze pats gathered lips,
smudged for that one split second,
smearing beneath truth –
and the realization
not even you
can live up to you.
Momentarily grasp
that imperfection and gaucheness
you will never suffer
and breathe your heavy sigh of relief
as you turn away in satisfaction,
convinced the elite gaze sliding
down my nose
is more aloof ignorance
and less confused gloss
spread so slight.
How can we, of all people, be fooled?
Wisdom
Posted on March 24, 2014 2 Comments
Le Terrace Club was a private pool where I spent a bunch of summers growing up. For those of you who are wondering, yes, it’s THAT Le Terrace Club. I mention the true name only because I’m not going to hide the fact that we were members, and it’s relevant to the extent that it exemplifies something important. Lots of other people were members, too. It was a place to get wet in the summer. Whatever its policies were, neither my family nor I had any part in them. In fact, at the time, we didn’t really notice altogether what was going on. Complacent? Maybe. Wrong? Probably. Lacking wisdom? Definitely.
But I was just trying to get a tan by the diving board.
After reading The Science of Older and Wiser in the New York Times last week, I am forced to admit I’m still not wise. Yet. I’m getting there. I mean, my wisdom does tell me that Everybody Wang Chung Tonight isn’t the great song I once thought. Oh, and cutting your own bangs? Bad idea. There are absolutely some nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way. I realize it when my son says, “How did you know that, Mommy?”
I know because it isn’t my first rodeo.
Actually, the pool club was itself a rodeo of sorts. There was a perfectly tanned and coifed group of forty-ish women in one-piece leopard bathing suits. They were sophisticated. They were savvy. They did not get their hair or made-up faces wet. I listened carefully to all of their conversations. In fact, I learned a lot of important stuff from their poolside banter. But they were not like my mom, who, although friendly with them, read all day in the shade covered in titanium strength sun block, until it was time to slap on her bathing cap and swim a thousand laps when the sun went down.
I thought the pool ladies were wise. They probably were. My mom was wiser, though. Because she actually went into the water and swam. She might have been afraid of the sun – which turned out to be pretty wise, in and of itself – but she wasn’t afraid to get her hair or face wet. And that’s what counted.
After all, what was the point of paying all that money to go to a pool club if you weren’t ever going to swim?
Wisdom.
Wisdom is certainly difficult to define, isn’t it? Perhaps older and wiser go hand in hand, but perhaps not. In my opinion, wisdom is situational, fluid, and variable. I like to think of it as similar to waves in the ocean. It can be dependent upon experience, and that’s probably why many older people are wiser, but not exclusively so. I can name quite a few shamefully ignorant older people. People whose example would best be followed into a ditch. Covered with dirt. And heavy boulders on top for good measure.
Like the television commercial says, one minute we’re discovering the Theory of Relativity, the next minute, not so much. It applies to the young and old alike.
And wisdom is like that, too.
No, just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re necessarily wiser. You probably are. But not in every situation. Wisdom exists on an individual continuum. By definition, it has to be different for each person, condition, and level of comprehension.
The wisest people are not the oldest, but the ones who are able to process what goes on around them in the most prudent way possible, then go on to make the best decisions they can for each circumstance. It doesn’t always mean being right. Not by a long shot. It DOES mean, however, knowing that to sit by a pool means you’re probably getting wet. The wisest people embrace this; they jump in the pool and swim.
Most importantly, though, the wisest people realize they’re not always the wisest. They admit when they’re wrong. They have sense. They move on. They grow. Not staying the same – that’s wisdom, in my eyes.
Nonna
Posted on March 21, 2014 9 Comments
After The Edge of Night,
but before Mike Douglas –
the black and white snowy antenna leans sideways
out the sunlit kitchen window,
trailing dust motes above the sink –
the lunch dishes are almost dried.
Your grainy skin, with its lost turgor,
its ropy, blue-green veins –
our family tree traced lovingly
on the backs of your hands –
and a soft, mothball-scented housedress
stippled with fading yellow sunflowers
fill half-opened eyes, sniffling nostrils.
I rest my head in your lap
and you sing to me,
raisin bread crumbs and drops
of milky Postum inches from my mouth.
The gravy is just now bubbling on the stove –
a tisket, a tasket
I lost my yellow basket –
and this little piggy cries
all the way home.
A Girl by the Bridge 
Recent Comments