| Kathleen Lynch USA YARDWORK My mother prowled the yard, winding wires around bare stems of rose bushes, attaching Woolworth's plastic roses --- her flowered house dress puffed out full, hair lifting like flames. I watched, embarrassed by how tacky, how pathetic but it had been a bad spring all around what with Dad's drinking and with nothing blooming, and from where I stood I had to admit they looked pretty. The distance between shame and pride is so mutable we use both words for the same thing: She has no shame. She has no pride. Can this be true? By my calculation over forty thousand hours have passed since that moment and still I see her and the bell of that dress, not a scrim in sight, just sheets snapping on the line behind her, weeds shivering at her ankles. And the way she moved, the way she went at it --- a driven thing --- another of the countless gestures she would subsume in silence, a look in the eye we all knew meant: Say nothing. And when she sank away into the heap of mystery books on the couch, a theater of colors in the window behind her --- the strange brilliance and juxtaposition of fake and real --- I began to believe in hope as something that could be invented even under dire skies, even when wind sliced around thorns and we waited for the phone to ring, and for spring to become spring. Published in Peregrine, 1997; included in Times Ten: An Anthology of Northern California Poets (1998) CIRCLE My mother gave me my first science lesson: The sun does not rise and set on you, young lady. Teachers who came later proved her right, as did the major and minor desertions of my life. It is a matter of perception that we see ourselves as central. Fact is, earth circles the sun. Fact is, the sun is a small star burning out. Tongues of hot gas, each larger than earth, burst from the sun's face. When we catch first sight of it, we call it morning. These mornings I pull back curtains, crank up her bed, raise her face to the light. Wake up, Mom, I say, the sun is rising. And I want her to open her eyes, to believe what I tell her is true. Even though I know the sun stands still and burns. Even though I know my science. Published in Poetry Flash 1999; included in chapbook How to Build an Owl and Times Ten: An Anthology of Northern California Poets (1998). Awarded the Ina Coolbrith Society Diamond Jubilee Grand Prize 1995 LOVE: THE BASICS Start with something harmless--- a stone perhaps. Choose one large enough to sit on, one so heavy it cannot get up and hit you of its own accord. After that try loving a leaf--- preferably one lying nearby, preferably a dead one. Do not taste it. Next: something with a rudimentary brain---an insect, or the spider on your shoe. This is where it gets tricky. The most beautiful are often toxic and their interest in you is minimal. When you turn to mammals hunger becomes an issue. You can even open yourself to another of your species, with a brain and body like yours, capable of anything. But if you are afraid, stay with the rock. Remember though--- it will not feed you, or speak, or answer. Published in The Midwest Quarterly Autumn 1995; included in Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1997. DRIFTERS When Monk played Driftin' on a Reed in '44 I was still swaddled & being hauled from base to base. Reed as in oboe, not a river-grass raft like the one Moses rode into history. Holy cow, no. I was just a girl born in America during war, a long way to go, hopscotching across the continent from upstate New York to Sacramento, zigging here zagging there the years slipping up like numbers on those old gas pumps 30 kachunk 40 kachunk 50. I'm still on the go & somehow I got here in front of a store with Zapatos! Zapatos! Zapatos! scrawled on the window in Nogales, Mexico, when I was just trying to get to the Walgreen's in the US of A but slipped into the wrong lane, not paying attention to signs, etc. Blame it on Thelonius and his riffle of honey still trickling through the plastic crackle & wheezy signal from a jazz station who knows where beaming its little heart out to me & me stuck in line at the border trying to get back to my original destination & all these boys want to wash my window. I'm shaking no no, what's the point I've got miles to go & a man with a game leg shoves his cup at me & I shake no no with a smile so he will see it's nothing personal --- he's not the only guy with a cup, and me, I'm just looping along with the song waiting for that guard to wave and let me cross over. Published in Spoon River Poetry Review; included in chapbook How to Build an Owl (1995) and Times Ten: An Anthology of Northern California Poets (1998).
© All Copyright, Kathleen Lynch. |