Macaroni Portrait of a Love Affair

There once was a girl. (There's always a girl.)
But this one, she was the why of it.
She laughed at me, tripping over my own shoelaces,
And I left them untied, hoping to make her laugh again.
I whispered heavy secrets to her,
The kind that must be spoken with cupped hands and daring proximity.
She kissed me once. (She probably doesn't remember
Because girls can be so guilelessly affectionate,
But I was over the moon for days.)
When she left, I was certain I would never love again.
I had sworn my heart, eternally, to her.
Luckily for me, the attention span of a kindergartner
Does not often reach eternity, so by summer vacation
There was a new girl, (there's always a girl,)
And she quickly became the why of it.

As You Are

"What is to give light must endure burning."
(Viktor Frankl)


Alright, Sal, here's the truth.
Your left breast is smaller than your right,
And, perhaps aware of
This inequity, it bashfully gazes
Outward like a lazy eye.

And your teeth, like the rest of you,
Have never been what you'd
Call perfectly straight, preferring
Instead to lean upon one another,
Comrades in the downtime of the chewing war.

And if we're dissecting here,
I'll acknowledge that you do in fact
Have a streak of strangely-placed obstinacy
And a tendency to leave
The cap off the toothpaste.

It is possible that you will
Never know how to handle money,
Nor intuit when to stop arguing with your mother
Or how much salt to add.

It is possible that these moth holes
In your fabric will not ever be
Patched, and your birthmark
Will show no matter what you wear.

And to all this, I must tell you, Sal,
I will again and again
Say yes.
Because it is through the
Gaps that the light comes,
And through the tears that
We learn to mend.

And for my part, I will
Smile to tell you easily
From the women who wear
Adult braces and pad their bras
And pay surgeons to fix
What, to be honest,
Was never really wrong in the first place.

Resolution

Holidays make me at once pensive and fanciful.
There are sequins on my dress that flash with sudden color as I walk.
If you were here I would kiss you at midnight.

I am careful with champagne because it goes quickly to my head.
It makes me think that I am much subtler than I actually am.
I would look for too long, and you would know.

That is the hitch: I am nearly always careful.
If you were here, and I weren't careful, I would definitely kiss you.

If you were here, and I weren't careful, or I were someone else-- or perhaps myself but more confident, myself more reckless--and if you weren't married,
If some of those things,
I would kiss you.

So for the sake of principle, it's good you're not here,
because there's a good chance I would ask you to help me ring in the new year with a sin.

In Cases Such As These, a Good Memory Is Unpardonable

Gloria scootches closer to the television to hear Colin Firth,
("He's so handsome,")
For the umpteenth time pronouncing Elizabeth tolerable
But not handsome enough to tempt him.

They tell me she may have to be put away soon.
Put away, like clean dishes into cabinets
Or put away like old toys into the attic?
She can't see anymore,
So she listens to salacious books on tape,
And every week awaits the snarky denunciation
Of the petticoats, six inches deep in mud
("That awful woman, she'll get hers!")

Gloria, in excelsis, must secretly be seething
Because her son and daughter-in-law
Have to clean her up now almost every night.
It is not just.
She was a woman, a Sicilian matriarch,
But now must assent to other people's hands
On her private parts, and cannot be allowed
Her indignity because it reads as ingratitude.

Gloria says a rosary.
She hums something Sinatra sang.
She says only that her bones hurt
And asks again for Colin Firth.
("Oh yes, he's proud. But just you wait.")

This Butterfly Business

"You leave us crying over postcards from Mexico. Baby, you're never far enough away."

"I take a breath. Take a breath with me, blow by blow. I take a break, take a break from you. You are here to stay. I take my heart out of my chest. I just don't need it anymore."


This Butterfly Business

Remember that time I made some discoveries, which were
somewhat painful but resulted in Personal Growth?
Remember those teachable moments
when I got thoroughly teach-ed?

To get through those times
I carried around a tried-and-true sort of metaphor.

I thought, "I will go through this time of Darkness
And emerge colorful,
with byzantine scars like delicate patterns
on my florid wings.
I will manifest with lepidopteran grace."

But then it so happened that
I cocooned and when I finished cocooning
I emerged, and yes, I was stronger and more
composed and might have been called a butterfly.
But I screwed up again. In almost no time
I was back in Darkness.
I have to say, in none of my elementary school
life science classes did my teacher say, "And then
the butterfly goes back into her cocoon."

At this juncture, there are only two options.

Either I am still a caterpillar, with no
idea about the true magnitude of the trials
I have thus far faced on account of caterpillars
have poor eyesight so maybe I just really
over-dramatized whatever I was going through, and
the real time of darkness is yet to come and
it is probably going to blow my mind when it does,

Or I need to find a new metaphor.

Orzo and Equanimity

Tell me things
Like why there are so many different kinds of rice.

Coax me out of these foxholes I've made,
Crumb by crumb,
And laugh at me in the helpful way.

Always, part of me does not consent.
Bring me back some Riesling
And have it with strawberries.

We can dance when you come here.
We can revel in food and in iambs.
We can pretend and pretend and pretend.

Tell me I am beautiful and absurd.
Tell me Plato. Tell me we are
Philosopher kings, you and I.
Tell me you and I.

A Mutt's Petition

"In darkness when all cats are equally black, I move as gracefully as anyone."
-from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

My foray into storytelling has led me to the
rather disconcerting conclusion that I have
no tradition. My father's heritage is all Sicilian,
which might have meant more more had I been raised
with a cannoli in my moth or a coppola on my head.
And my mother knows only that because of the lay
of our rears and our thighs, we must have some black ancestry
in us somewhere. I lived for seventeen years
to the east of Cajun heartland and to the
west of New Orleans, close enough to be teased
by the streaming smells of file and andouille,
but not quite close enough to change the alkalinity
of my blood. My speech, besides
being peppered with the occasional "y'all,"
is not heavily accented. I cannot
claim Brer Rabbit, any more than I can claim
Marie Leveau, any more than I can claim
zydeco, any more than I can dare someone
to go in against me when death is on the line.
These things are not mine, not in the way I want them to be.
I may learn them, but they are not native to my soul.
My petition is this: my blood does run so it
must run with something. I have bones so there
must be something in them. I hereby request permission
from my ancestors to invite any bits of
someone else's heritage to run in my veins.
Let me welcome Coyote and Loki and
Puck and Anansi. Let me make it known
that Erzulie Dantor and Sita and Nasreddin
and Sedna may always have a place in my pocket.

Don't Think About Elephants

I stare and I stare and I unfocus
my eyes, and maybe if I squint, I can
imagine being in the foreground of a painting
wherein a naked woman gazes longingly out of
her frame, and behind her is painted the life
she wants
and it’s hers

and she can have it

but she doesn’t know
how to take it so
she keeps staring.

Maybe she’s watching for elephants.

Post-Ridinghood Red

My mother will not let me catch fireflies;
I am not allowed outside past dusk.

My days have turned relentlessly predictable.
Which is not to say that I am not grateful
To the Woodsman. But what happens now?

I learned to skirt peril by sticking to the path
And not talking to strangers. I traded in the
Crushed cherry velvet cloak for burlap.

Grandmother died, but she was bound that way.
And I didn't die, despite the efforts of
Crashing teeth and stomach acid. I kicked and squirmed,
And did not die, but for what?

For a chance to die by something other than a predator?
My, what high hopes you have.

Let me tell you this: wolves are everywhere.
Behind the door of every cottage and
In all flowers there are wolves.

In the winsome smiles of chatty
Neighbors are rows of moving teeth,
The better to eat you with.

Moses

From my catechism class
I have inferred that the right way of doing things
Is to set what you most value
Adrift in a basket and hope that
It grows to several times its original consequence
And one day comes back to save you.

Bless the reeds, bless the river,
Bless the crocodiles.

And if it grows up
And doesn't thank you
Because it feels betrayed or abandoned
Instead of precious,
Or if it drowns
And never reaches the hands of sympathetic royalty,
Then you've done all you could.

Sing in the morning, sing to your daughters,
Sing for the crocodiles.